Are these the final days of 'closed government'? Democracy 3.0 takes open source shape

Politicians have discussed the need for open government for centuries with questionable results. At OpenUK’s State of Open Conference, Lord Nat Wei of Shoreditch in the UK Government's upper chamber, The House of Lords, took the stage to declare that we are witnessing the final days of what he calls 'closed government'.

He acknowledged that this may seem paradoxical, especially when a significant majority of young people apparently prefer dictatorship. He argued that youth's desire for autocracy is because of the current system, which is too bureaucratic, negative, and often autocratic in disguise. The solution, which he calls Democracy 3.0, lies in greater openness, transparency and participation in an era of uncertainty, risk, and volatility. Wei argues,

If you want a government that serves people rather than power structures, we, the politicians, need to embrace this small, open, adaptive approach appropriately. As a technologist, investor and legislator, I've often asked myself, ‘What if we treated our governments like a system, identified its failure points, and rebuilt it in a way that works?’ Open technologies can provide the foundation, not just to promote economic growth, not just to cut procurement costs and running costs, but to restore the commons, a shared civic space that has been lost. Our government, all governments claim openness, but often operates in a ‘trust us, we or our computer knows best,’ mode. It's time to open up the black box.

Wei argued that we could imagine building on current efforts to simulate government environments to create twin environments that could be forked like open source projects to trial alternative approaches. This vision would allow citizens and civil servants to contribute ideas and code to improve these digital departments and address problems. Citizens might even get a stake in the success of programs, perhaps through pension guarantees or revenues from innovations. Civil servants who propose cost-saving measures might be rewarded with a share of the savings they discover.

Similar ideas might also be applied to assess the merits of legislation, which today is often rushed through with unintended consequences and barely scrutinized. An open tech legislative platform could track policy effectiveness, predict outcomes, and improve transparency.

Democracy 3.0

Wei characterizes Democracy 3.0 as a system where citizens don’t just vote for representatives, but have a direct stake in assessing what policies will actually work, regardless of who is in charge. This riffs on the original Greek system (Democracy 1.0), where landowners had a greater stake and direct input in outcomes, and the current approach (Democracy 2.0), which has widened the voter base to all adults, but with less direct control.  He has been working with a small group of enthusiasts to summarize debates in the UK parliament and how they vote. This is a prelude to seeing which policies and amendments deliver on their promises and which don’t.

So, how would things work out in practice, particularly when results depend on confidential or privacy-sensitive information? Here, Wei argues that new approaches like zero-knowledge proofs and open source verification could allow citizens and organizations to prove claims without revealing unnecessarily personal data.

He suggests we just get on with giving more people a stake in designing a low-cost and higher productivity society in our spare time, much like open source developers do for software. He envisions a big lottery for governance, policy bug bounties, and career pathway advances for those who demonstrate sound judgment.

He concluded:

The dream of open source is in danger of failure unless we measure open source governments as well. I said at the start of my talk that the end of closed government is nigh. I didn't actually say when the end would come, but together, I think we could accelerate it and bring about a different era of open government. Finish the job of the creation of the internet, and open source software itself began. We're going to have to do it beyond the world of technology, we are going to have to do it in the world of politics and government as well.

My take

I like the idea, and yet history is littered with failed efforts of using technology to bring more openness and digital twins to improve governance. Jay Forrester coined the term " systems dynamics in the 1950s to understand and simulate industrial strategy and government policy. Salvador Allende applied some of these ideas in Chile in the 1970s, arguably improving many citizens' outcomes, but was ousted by a US-sponsored coup d'état a few years later. Maybe this was good for US businesses, but it may have also played a role in exacerbating the current US immigration crisis.

Then, the more recent US experience with the Department of Government Efficiency identified numerous creative ways to bring transparency and ‘cut costs’ with some interesting results that may cost even more in the long run.

So, I sat down with Lord Wei to elaborate on some of this vision after his talk. First off, he acknowledges that he is not a political scientist. However, he believes there is a design flaw in the current approach to democracy since politicians often come to us with a vision in which it's hard to understand how it will impact us directly until it's too late. One way to fix this might be to give more of us a stake in betting on policy.

But then, what policies are we going to bet on? Take the immigration challenge, for example. Politicians in most Western Countries are all exploring some creative ways to cut back on illegal immigration, as demonstrated by innovative approaches to solving boat crossings in the UK or Trump’s "beautiful wall" with Mexico that never got built. Wei tells me we need to look at the root cause of this problem, rather than apply patches to a systemic defect. He explains:

I personally think that one of the ways we can deal with the global migration problem is almost like you need a kind of Marshall Plan for Africa, for the global South. You need to work with places to build cities like Hong Kong and Singapore were, and actually create attractive places for people who are looking for economic opportunity to develop their lives, because it's kind of totally rational if you're in a place which is suffering from lots of climate issues, lots of broken governance and so on, that you want to go somewhere else. The question is, where can you go? Right? And if you don't fix that part of the equation and you try and make it very unattractive to go some places, you're not really dealing with the whole systemic problem we're talking about. So, we need more system thinkers, and you can only find system thinkers if you have things like the policy market.

I think he’s right about the need to approach things from a systemic perspective.  It also seems unrealistic to imagine that masses awash in social media fear-mongering will easily reach a consensus in everyone’s long-term interests. In retrospect, Brexit was voted in as a great idea by many people who are now questioning higher prices and more difficult travel.  It seems like getting to this notion will require a cultural and political shift towards more systemic thinking, along with tools like more comprehensive digital twins for better understanding various impacts of new ideas.

It probably would not hurt to regulate social media platforms monetized by divisive engagement algorithms a bit more like other recreational drugs, such as tobacco and nicotine, as well. Come to think of it, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel helped bankroll the satirical 2005 movie Thank You for Smoking, that skewered the moral flexibility of tobacco, alcohol, and gun lobbyists. How times have changed. Maybe it's time to apply some of that systemic thinking to identifying and rectifying the root cause of this social media bug as well. That, more than anything, seems like the real flaw that needs to be addressed in building trust in government and democracy.