Political progress in the World has not kept up with the pace at which technology and scientific knowledge have evolved. Government’s handfuls of Twitter accounts and a mostly-ignored e-petition websites do not take full advantage of the ability of the Internet to act as a global communication tool. In an age where Government is run like Business, it seems foolish that it has not tried to evolve past the paradigm of locked doors and secrecy showered in media sensationalism. Meta-government software has evolved from this thought and is attempting to construct a system that could one day replace traditional government.

This software has the potential to turn MPs into moderators, and voters into decision makers on policies. It would be able to place power into the fingertips of the people, enabling them to raise issues, suggest ideas and write their own laws that govern us, without having to use the current, far from effective, channels. This system would prize truth, openness and direct participation as the foundation for the law.

The transition from representative democracy to direct democracy will be a gradual one. Websites that have started “Democracy 2.0” have opted for a mix between the two. This gives people the power to decide on policies that they are actually interested in, instead of voting for an entire party every so often, when they are only interested in a specific change. It would enable those that speak of bigger change to push for them in public, and bring politics to the “real time”; an instant flow of conversation between everybody who is interested, no matter who they are.

One such site is liquidfeedback.org – an open source project that aims to merge both ideas behind democracy together. The basic premise is that citizens design the earth’s policies from the ground up. Each proposed law can be debated, created, amended and drafted by any member of the community. Voters can delegate their vote to a transitive proxy – somebody who the voter trusts to speak for them on certain issues. The user is free to meanwhile vote on whatever else they please, or change their proxy whenever they see fit. This system is being used by the German branch of the Pirate Party, so that all members have a fair way of influencing its decision making process.

Verification processes could ensure specific voting privileges based on the physical location of the voter. For example, a New Yorker would have no say on London’s policies, but would have a vote on polices that have global ramifications. The finished system would be made of many different implementations of the idea that could communicate and so hold the same posts, votes, and users as each other. Parallels to codesharing sites like GitHub can be drawn and used for visualisations of what a finished system could look like, with each edit made on a software identifiable through a unique hexadecimal string imprinted with user details and a time stamp.

Communities are encouraged to employ this software IRL as soon as possible.

This platform and its community support gives power back to grassroots activists, school teachers, drug dealers, butchers, those people that sit on scaffolding all day… if enough people use it then perhaps a town hall will accept it; and so on and so on. Nobody is suggesting turning the Houses of Parliament into a sever farm. There is no one-website way of introducing metagovernment. The idea has been born, the basic code released, and it will continue to grow and evolve with the passing of time, like all natural systems on the planet. Many commentators predict that there will be soon an implementation of a world government. Usually viewed in a negative light, this is has the chance to be a positive step in the evolution of man, if the system that humanity chooses to govern it upholds the same ideals it was founded on. Build and they will come.