Hi I’m Jason Dobry. And Pseudobry.com is my blog.

I recently wrote about Clay Shirky’s ideas about reforming government with open-source ideas. He claims that the open-source movement will help government to become more transparent while at the same time expanding the possibilities for citizens and voters to contribute to legislation. This is awesome.

I myself spend a lot of time around online open-source communities, and I appreciate the transparency of the open-source development process. If I choose to become involved in a project my proposed changes will be presented where everyone can see. Other contributors can discuss the merits of my contribution and come to a decision on whether to include it. These same ideas can help our government.

In Iceland a crowd-sourced draft constitution was just approved to go before parliament. Through social media Icelanders were able to contribute to and offer feedback on the new constitution. If that same transparency can be applied to the legislative process in America, then it will be easier for us to find the bugs in our laws, so to speak.

My position is that we as citizens should do everything we can to contribute to legislation, and to embrace open-source ideas to increase government transparency, resulting in higher quality laws.

Crowd-sourced constitution in Iceland

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