I see we’re more or less on the same page.
I also consider moving towards internet-based direct democracy a good thing. We should be moving slowly, though, as there are known unsolved problems with both direct democracy and with internet-based democracy that would need to be solved on the way.
I am referring to unsolved problems such as the lack of transparency of any electronic secret ballot system, and the lack of secrecy of any truly transparent electronic ballot system.
As for direct democracy, the problem is, people aren’t smart enough. If you ask a question that only 5% of the electorate have the intelligence, motivation, and/or time to understand, you might still get 15% voter turnout. Which means, your result will be two-thirds noise at best and two-thirds lobbying and demagogy at worst.
These problems might be unsolvable; luckily, we can probably mitigate them enough so that we get meaningful trade-offs between different approaches.
I fully agreed with that TED talk. I use git myself, and I wouldn’t want to develop a law in any other way. The nice thing is, it’s compatible with existing democracy; if parliament gets to vote on git-generated proposals, then there’s little danger that this attempt to improve things could backfire and make things less democratic.
It wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does for software, of course, because software is, well, less political. But I think it can still work.
Other ideas that I think government should copy from computer programmers:
Unit tests. Those would take the shape of a list of short stories/scenarios written in everyday language, along with an “expected result”. Every time the law is changed, the old “test cases” are checked against the new law, and every resulting change is discussed in parliament.
For Example:
Situation: A child sells home-made lemonade in front of their house. (That seems to be an American tradition; I’ve never actually seen it done in Austria)
Expected Result: The child earns a little pocket money.
If a new law causes the “Actual Result” to become: “The child is put in prison for failing to get a restaurant license”, then the test case is flagged and parliament needs to either confirm “yes, this was actually the intent of this law” or to fix the law.
Having a good set of test cases in software engineering makes refactoring easier, i.e. changing parts of a program so that they end up doing the exact same thing, but are easier to understand and less convoluted. The same thing is never done with laws. Laws are usually horrible “spaghetti code” that are badly in need of refactoring, but legislators don’t like doing that because it’s too easy to accidentally change things.
