Wiki Government: How open-source technology can make government decision-making more expert and more democratic

Beth Noveck, Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School, has an article in the current issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas on "Wiki Government: How open-source technology can make government decision-making more expert and more democratic." Berkman's Internet & Democracy project, which studies how the Internet influences democratic norms and modes, including its impact on civil society, citizen media, government transparency, and the rule of law, explores many of the issues Beth discusses in the article.

Beth describes how: "Now, however, new technology may be changing the relationship between democracy and expertise, affording an opportunity to improve competence by making good information available for better governance. Large-scale knowledge-sharing projects, such as the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, and volunteer software-programming initiatives, such as the Apache Webserver (which runs two-thirds of the websites in the world), demonstrate the inadequacy of our assumptions about expertise in the twenty-first century. Ordinary people, regardless of institutional affiliation or professional status, possess information–serious, expert, fact-based, scientific information–to enhance decision-making, information not otherwise available to isolated bureaucrats. Partly as a result of the simple tools now available for collaboration and partly as a result of a highly mobile labor market of "knowledge workers," people are ready and willing to share that information across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries."

Be sure to check out the rest of Beth's article at Democracy, and for more information on the Internet & Democracy project, you can read more on their project page or blog.