“Science creates vast power rapidly … [but] to invest in advancing power without investing in stewardship is folly”

As Wikipedia says,

“Switzerland is a federal republic, and perhaps the closest state in the world to a direct democracy. For any change in the constitution, a referendum is mandatory; for any change in a law, a referendum can be requested. In practice, the people have the last word in every change of law some interest group disagrees with.”

So in the canton of St Gallen, any citizen receives a pamphlet every three months or so. This pamphlet includes one or two country-wide laws, and three or four canton-wide laws that are being proposed. Again, should you wish to propose a law yourself, as long as you have a requisite amount of names on a petition, the government needs to propose this law to the nation.

So far so good. And there seem to be some wonderful “emergent behaviours” out of all of this, certainly if the conversations I had are anything to go by.

1. Politicians do not parade their egos.
   Because control is basically in the hand of the people, politicians are increasingly involved in the little decisions, but less so in the larger ones. Perhaps this is just a biased view given the current UK elections, but less ego sounds very healthy
2. Citizens are politically engaged.
   Because they are given some measure of control, they apparently talk through many of the issues amongst themselves in a much more practical way. Giving them responsibility seems to have worked.

There are some “but’s”, though.

1. Isolation.
   Newcomers and residents pay taxes for a long time before they are allowed the vote (or citizenship). While this is in some measure to protect the constitution, if wages weren’t so good, then it would seem to be a strong disincentive to join.
2. Innovation.
   It’s easy and slightly trite to say that innovation is stifled (a la Orson Welles, cuckoo clocks and peace). That said, lack of citizen ‘churn’ might well concern me if I was wanting to apply the system to an open source initiative

Anyway, certainly at first glance it seemed like a great possible model from which to learn how to run an open source initiative. And interestingly, in a recent interview at OpenEnterpriseTrends.com, Jack O’Brien (Sun’s Group Manager: x86 and Operating Systems) was asked about plans for the Open Source Solaris project. He said that

“All these Open Source communities have a governance process. So [when we announce Open Source Solaris], we�ll begin with an initial governance process, just to get started. But, we want the community, not Sun the company, to take ownership for what that governance process looks like.”

Very Swiss.

.. but see Lee’s comment and the Committee response.

In fact, the whole thread is worth reading. There was also this great comment by someone called vb working for the UN Working Group for Internet Governance who knows some of the Iranians involved:

It’s a principle of the Internet – if you connect with other people, both of you gain, and both of you start to listen to each other. If you break connections, on the other hand, both of you lose and nothing happens.

That clinched it for me, though I think Lee’s general point about focus, and being able also to focus inwards (on Western countries) with these campaigns holds true.

[Update: BBC article on it here]