March 7, 2004, 7.58pm • 74 comments » • 765 Views

Democracy 2.0?

Interesting discussion over at plasticbag.org, where Tom suggests policymakers should adopt the geek community’s iterative, test-and-improve model for lawmaking:

I’d love there to be some kind of concept political beta law. There is no conceptual test-bed into which multiple competing laws can be thrown to see which ones will inspire further work on.

On the contrary, I would argue policymaking is highly iterative. Published to competing ideologies and opinions, a bill will be subject to several revisions before eventually being passed to the upper chamber, which may also propose revisions or seek to block the proposal entirely before it has a chance of becoming legislation.

It could be argued that the geek model’s propensity to release products which work “to an extent [but] encourage immediate feedback” would be irresponsible in the public sphere.

All kinds of policies are subject to pilots (perhaps analogous to your “political beta”?), and these, too, serve the basis for concrete policies and best practice.

But such heavy reliance on developing policy in the wild as you go along, as with software rewrites, might not wash in, say, the health service.