David Cole is treating his congressional campaign like a piece of software.

That's only what you'd expect. The 28-year-old Cole spent years as a software developer before announcing this spring that he was running for Congress from his home district in New Jersey. When we spoke to him last week about his campaign, he downplayed his experience in the coding world, but today, that experience came shining through when Cole released his political platform on the popular software development site GitHub.

GitHub is a place where coders can easily collaborate on a piece of software, and Cole hopes that his constituents will collaborate on his political policies in similar ways. On GitHub, they can readily comment on and even edit his policies. But that's only a start. Cole's bigger vision is that all sorts of political work – from campaigns to the bills proposed by elected officials – will be handled in a similar fashion.

This has already begun to happen. Last week, the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee – the first city in the nation to roll-out ultra-high-speed gigabit internet connections to its citizens – posted its data policy draft to GitHub, and last year, the city of Philadelphia posted its Open Government Plan to the site. Even the federal government is experimenting with the idea. President Barack Obama recently signed an executive order directing government agencies to release their data in open, machine-readable formats, and he went so far as to put the order itself on GitHub.

>Cole's bigger vision is that all sorts of political work – from campaigns to the bills proposed by elected officials – will be handled on sites like GitHub

Of course, citizens have long had ways of communicating with candidates and politicians. They could write or call or send emails. But the technology that underpins sites like GitHub provides a new way to actually evaluate, track, and integrate public suggestions into policy documents. It's not just that anyone can instantly suggest changes to Cole's platform. Each suggestion can also be discussed, in much the same way you can discuss a Facebook status update. Cole can then sift through the suggestions and discussions, automatically incorporating any change he and his staff think is beneficial. GitHub also makes it easy to navigate old versions of documents, making all changes transparent and making it easy to revert to old versions if necessary.

One big difference between something like GitHub and a Word document or even a wiki-based system like Wikipedia is that anyone can easily make their own copy of what's being discussed. This is called a fork. You can then modify your forked version without worrying about having your changes approved by the original author. Another candidate could use Cole's platform as the starting point for their own, and decide which changes – if any – to suggest to Cole. Likewise, other cities could use the proposals posted by Cattanooga or Philadelphia to craft their own documents.

One downside is that GitHub may seem to geeky to non-coders, though you don't need to be able to program to suggest changes to text documents on the site. Cole says people without GitHub accounts can still submit comments through a form on the campaign site, and he's looking into other ways to get people involved.

There's really no reason policy collaboration has to happen on GitHub. The OpenGov Foundation, a non-profit organization co-founded by California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, designed the Madison Project, an open source software application specifically designed for writing, publishing, and annotating legislation.

And Ward Cunningham — creator of the very first wiki — has incorporated forking and other core concepts from GitHub into his World's Smallest Federated Wiki project. It still requires some technical know-how to get up and running, but it could someday provide a general purpose document collaboration tool. It's also quite possible to combine GitHub with other systems. Madison, for example, will eventually connect with GitHub.

Cole is no stranger to using technology to gather feedback from the voting public. Before working in the private sector at the open source mapping startup Mapbox, he was a senior adviser for technology at the White House, where he helped build the White House website. So don't be surprised if he ends up rolling his own tools eventually. But regardless of the technology used, the Cole campaign feels like a glimpse into the future of politics.