Governance of Online Communities
Internet communities are a fascinating thing. They are born in all sorts of online environments, whether they be bulletin boards, IRC, newsgroups, virtual worlds and more. All of these communities are self governed. Rules of the medium usually written out by some benevolent person expressing the sentiments of those that frequent the medium, for example how to conduct one's self and treat the medium, whether it be the chat room or some online forum.
The leaders of these communities are not elected, they just are simply recognized and followed by those who see them as fit. You will know who the leaders are in an online community, they are the ones doing the charitable acts of good deeds for the community to help it flourish. They are the ones posting up FAQ lists or selflessly taking the responsibility to manage the community.
We see this everywhere, whether it be in an online virtual world like World of Warcraft with a guild leader and members or even an online photo sharing site like flickr where people share wonderful photos and tips on how to take great shots. We see the same thing even in software where the likes of Linus Trovalds is the undisputed leader of the Linux project, though he was never elected into that position.
You can't declare yourself a leader
As much as many people would like to become a leader, you just can't declare that you are a leader and expect people to follow you. Leadership doesn't work like that. Image a person that waltzes into some community, declaring that he wants to be the new administrator and institute all sorts of "improvements" and that everyone should support him. A scenario like that will usually end up with everyone flaming (which is internet speak for "insulting") him and finally ignoring him. To have someone simply walk in and declare themself a leader is absurd as a random person declaring himself as the King of France. How would you know that this person will do their best for the community? It would be like some politician deciding to run against Linus Trovalds to manage the Linux operating system project. Linus pretty much embodies the Linux project.
Quite the contrary to the above process, determination of leadership is done in exactly the opposite manner-- it is the people that choose to follow you. The most common reasons for people to follow someone's leadership is a combination of vision, ability and altruism that defines the best leaders. I am quite certain that nobody that would want to follow a leader that is visionless, incompetent and selfish. The simple act of trying to declare yourself a leader is already selfish, if not egotistical.
The best leaders of online communities have and always been the people that spent their time helping others and the community at large. If you can think of online games with virtual worlds and clans, the people that are at the top of such an organization are the ones that helps the community the most, whether it be though player training, game play coordination, developing a webpage for the team or whatever. The same can be said for online discussion forums, where the most recognized people are the ones that provide the most insightful discussions and those that do their best to answer or direct people with questions to sources where they can find the answers they seek. You don't have to be elected into some position of power to do acts of good will, every person has the tools to do so. Yet, when in terms of our offline communities, our reality is quite the opposite.
Tyrants and the Governance of Offline Communities
When it comes to leadership in real world communities, things take a very different turn, especially when it comes to governance of largest community of all, the country. I have always found it strange that most politicians are usually well off individuals with the financial capital to run an election campaign to collect votes to become leader and represent a community in a governmental position. Yet they lack evidence in what they have done in the past to the benefit of the community before running for this position.
If you were simply to listen to the advertisements of these people, all that you will hear are the things that they want to do for you; their promises, agendas and vision. Perhaps the only characteristic of a leader these people have is vision. But a person that has vision but lacks ability in only a dreamer, a person with both vision and ability but lacks altruism may end up being a tyrant. And unfortunately, the history of politics has been often dominated by tyrants.
The Openness of Web 2.0: The Collaborative Effort
The defining difference between online communities and real world communities is the openness in which the online communities operate. Projects such as wikipedia operate on this basis where the entire database of encyclopedic information is open to public edits and additions which has allowed the online encyclopedia to flourish and be one of the first stops on the internet for people wanting to get a good summary of nearly any topic.
It would be impossible for Wikipedia to be as successful as it is today as an encyclopedic source without its open collaborative nature. It was at first proposed that people submit articles to Wikipedia and the contents would be reviewed by designated experts. Wikipedia never did start to take off until it was a fully open system, generally governed by the users that add content to the encyclopedia.
Such an open system is, of course, open to abuse. But the beauty of such a self-governing system is self-correcting, with the users of the wikipedia taking the responsibility to keep the entries as truthful as possible. Wikipedia users have found US politicians editing their own and the profiles of others for politically motivated reasons by tracking the editor IP addresses to government institutions. At first edit wars occurred trying to prevent malicious users from corrupting the entries (these entries usually have to cite sources to be credible). Finally, the Wikipedia community and administrators responded by restricting edits of political entries to more credible members that have contributed to the project over a longer period of time, after much discussion on the message boards. Without this kind of openness such behavior could not be caught, nor could the community be as well organized to come up with a viable solution.
Bringing the Collaborative Effort to Government
Democracy has origins dating back to 500 BC in Greece and possibly earlier to 2500 BC in Mesopotamia. The selection of representatives in a Democratic government was done because it was too impractical to have the general public involved in policy decision. It was more efficient to have a smaller number of people involved to set policies with checks on representatives to prevent abuse of executive powers for personal gain. Instead of having everyone vote on every issue, you now have a smaller number of representatives voting on issues for the people they represent. Interestingly, this is the same collaborative efforts that Web 2.0 strives to attain in a more primitive form.
But now with the internet and our ability to quickly communicate, the limitations of a traditional democratic government by elected representatives can now be alleviated. Instead of representatives acting on our behalf, the general public can now be involved in a collaborative effort to set policies and enact laws. The expertise of everyone can be leveraged in a wider variety of fields, compared to the limited knowledge base of a single politician. For example, public domain government funding and statistical data could be quickly analyzed and leveraged by experts through prudent open review with important discussions held in online forums. The discussions can also be referenced back to in the future. Finally, a policy can be set and a person or an organization can be selected to carry out the task.
Having everyone active in every aspect of government management is not necessary as seen in the Wikipedia example. Participation should be optional. We will find that altruistic people with sufficient knowledge and expertise will be the ones making the best decisions for the public at large. Decision making related information and analysis can all be posted online and referenced, giving people a far better understanding of a whole issue. Should a person have an interest in a specific bill, they have the option of voting on it, else abstaining from the vote, as voting on every bill would be very tedious.
A web 2.0 style of collaborative government management by the general public would be beneficial in increasing government efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Most importantly of all, the system is even more democratic by allowing everyone direct input into the governing process.
Of course, by allowing everyone to participate in the governing process, the amount of white noise ideas from the sheer number of people involved could be cumbersome, however, techniques of filtering white noise from good ideas/information is already well developed as seen on the internet. Google as one example being able to sift through billions of webpages to return relevant search results in a fraction of a second and information aggregate sites such as Digg and Reddit, where submitted links are ranked by users voting up or down on these links. The most interesting links will generally filter up to the top of the list.
With the current state of technology as it is now, implementing a form of government like this is a very feasible concept. I do believe that this concept could mark a new era of governance, the concept of a collaborative government.
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