Open source is necessary for transparent democratic governance.

Let’s start by just agreeing to assume that transparency is a necessary aspect of a democracy. A democracy whose inner workings are inaccessible to the voter might as well be a black box. There’s no way to really hold it accountable or know it’s working.

Open source in civic orgs is the only way to ultimately insure transparency in government. We have reports that candidate Pete Buttigieg paid money (about 40k) to the company Shadow, funded by superPac ACRONYM (fire the show writer please). Now we don’t have to immediately assume this is corruption, this could be innocent. But it’s kind of hard without being able to see the code ourselves and audit things.

There are ways to do this with open source projects. First the source is directly available so people can just see it. Not only that but you can verify your vote!

The open source blockchain project Hyperledger was used to make the West Virginian experiment in smartphone voting, Voatz.

Helios provides a voting server system that allows voting by email, that uses hashes to confirm your vote and keep your vote anonymous at the same time. Helios is obviously not a good pick, design wise, for national elections but it’s encryption and verification method certainly are.

If transparency is so important to democracy then why isn’t the infrastructure being developed for democracy also being transparently developed in the most transparent way possible?

Open source is extremely common and yet most civic org code is closed source. Why?

It’s simple.

Money

1.

Closed source companies sold fearful portents about the security of open source in order to secure contracts with civic organizations.

Security is not an issue with open source. In fact it is generally speaking more secure than closed source software. The vast majority of online servers are Linux based. Microsoft itself is one of the biggest contributors to Linux and now runs many of their servers on Linux. The preferred OS for hacker and crypto types is a Linux variant called Kali.

The reason why is simple. A team of 3 or even 300 devs are nothing compared to what the eyeballs of 30,000 can spot. Bugs will happen. But like a body with a healthy immune system, the only way to deal with potential problems is exposure and adaption. Open source projects can’t hide behind obfuscation, which is more often a crutch than anything else. Why were we told anything different? As I said, it’s about money. But this isn’t the only way it’s about money.

2.

Leaders at civic orgs have been incentivized to buy from private contractors. This is a problem for a number of reason:

2.1

It strips internal departments of their tribal knowledge, and reduces the investment in improving and training staff.

Let’s say a contractor came in and made a web app. You might do this because it’s more cost effective in the short term to bring in an expensive but short term team, that already knows how to make the web app. They just come in and make the app. Then some of them might stay awhile to train up some internal staff for hand off, but then from then on the web app is largely just being maintained. This is essentially a form of deskilling.

This is a problem because there’s only so much you can document and teach. A lot of experience is gained through the process of building something yourself. And employees are not static, they have growth potential. Dividing out efforts between internal and external teams means losing a substantial part of the people growth and it disincentivizes investing further growth in internal employees because they largely are relegated to a role of keeping the ship on course.

2.2

Private external contracting companies do not have an incentive to open source their work, generally speaking. They are a private company after all.

2.3

Between these first two you get this third issue. Self dealing behavior.

That Pete Buttigieg payment to Shadow? Well it might interest you to learn that the Tara McGowan, the owner of ACRONYM, has a husband named Michael Halle, and he’s a senior strategist for Pete…

We can’t prove anything happened here obviously but the power to award contracts has long been used as a tool of “machine politics” and graft. There is value created in the process of building things (the cultivation of tribal knowledge and the development of libraries and systems to reuse) and that value is externalized from the public space and internalized to the private space. Make profits private, make losses public. The old Bank Bailout strategy.

2. 4

Contracts are a way for politicians to benefit those they like and people who will support them. Often rich people. Often superPacs. Lawerence Lessig makes the argument for how superPacs corrupt the system in his TED talk here. The same basic principle applies.