This used to have a lot more stuff, but it got embarrassing to keep up here.
People everywhere should really be rethinking the mechanisms used to communicate with our government (i.e. the ballot).
Our elected representitives should be building a consensus among voters about issues, and coming up with solutions that are in society's collective best interests. However, it is in politicians' best interest to build divisions, and then build consensus among slightly over 50% of the electorate, giving them roughly 49% of the electorate to use as a convenient scapegoat. That's the time-proven method of getting elected. Just look at the popular vote of recent presidential elections. Good politicians calibrate their positions to win 50%+1, because that's what is rewarded.
We need a better way of communicating with our elected leaders. Right now, the only officially guaranteed method is by ballot. We elect officials and then hope that:
If either one of those doesn't happen, we don't really get represented.
The folks at The Center for Voting and Democracy explain it far better than I could. We have a local chapter here in the Seattle area, pushing for election reform in the Seattle City Council. The Washington Citizens for Proportional Representation are pushing for proportional representation in the City Council, and hopefully other elections in the future.
I'm hoping some good things will come out of The Political Participation Project at MIT. They are studying how politics work in cyberspace, and attempting to invent new mechanisms for government participation.
The Institute for the Study of Civic Values has some excellent ideas for using the net to change the face of politics, too. Lots of great links out there.
There's a section of my website dedicated to this subject, including a Perl script (condorcet.pl) that tallies the result of a Condorcet-style election. There's also a groovy interactive demo that shows how Condorcet's method works. More details...
Though the company I work for builds closed-source software, I've personally been a longtime believer in free (libre) software and open source practices. I've written a very modest amount of free software myself, and do what I can to nudge RealNetworks in the right direction (see rtsp.org, SMILGen, and the RTSP Proxy Kit for examples of things I've been involved in).
I'm certain that at some point in the future, customers will demand access to source code. There's room for closed-source and hybrid models, but the mix is going to shift substantially. I'm eager for that day to occur, and I would love to be the one who finds that magic business model that makes it possible for software companies to spend the bulk of their R&D budgets on open development.