Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.9.10 | That is the question that David R. Booth explores in his recent report, “Peer Production of Software, Peer Production of Participation: What Mozilla Has to Teach Government,” the eighth report in the MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning.

The Obama administration has created an Open Government Office in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to work with agencies to become more transparent, participatory and collaborative. The administration has also launched an online public consultation process to involve private citizens in developing open-government policies and practices.

At its core, Mozilla’s community of developers who work on the Firefox internet browser is an experiment in participatory culture, and as such, Booth argues, it may offer an example of how to organize citizen participation in government.

Mozilla’s Firefox as a Participatory Culture

Firefox is free and nonproprietary. Like tinkerers in garages of the past, a cadre of volunteers finds solutions to bugs and builds add-ons that improve the browser. Booth estimates that 1,000 individual programmers help to develop and maintain the Firefox browser, which is now used by an estimated 270 million people.

The small ratio of programmers to users is at the crux of this open-source experiment’s success. (As Brook’s Law suggests: adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.) Also contributing to its success is the project’s relevance. Programmers volunteer their time and expertise because the internet is essential to their daily lives. They also participate because they can: Mozilla provides a clear structure (modules) for collaboration.

Mozilla is a hierarchical meritocracy. Not just anyone can submit patches to the code that drives Firefox. A volunteer with a new patch must first become known to Mozilla by becoming active in the community, contributing to online discussions, joining mailing lists, and ultimately nominating peers to vouch for his or her proposed patch. The “vouchers” act as mentors and assume responsibility for the newcomer’s patch. If approved and the patch is effective, the person then becomes a committer. He or she may also ascend to the role of voucher.

Overseeing all this is the owner of the code module that the patch falls under. No change in that piece of code is made without the module owner’s approval. Like profit centers in traditional corporations, each module operates as its own innovation center, and each module has its own hierarchy.

Another important aspect: Mozilla relies on leadership to steer the process. Management may recruit programmers from the community to work on specific, underrepresented projects. In short, Mozilla offers individuals a variety of ways to participate but it does not leave them alone to figure out how to participate. It fosters collaboration in deliberate ways.

Crowdsourcing Democracy

The Mozilla process engenders community, and at the same time creates opportunities for individuals to improve the technology they use in their everyday lives. These characteristics also apply to the goals of open government. Although government is not in the business of product development as Mozilla is, it does manage enterprises and offer services that are relevant to the everyday lives of citizens that may be improved through their feedback.

The characteristics of the Mozilla experience that are applicable to open government include:

Allowing individuals to gravitate toward their own interests and expertise, which creates issue-specific experts in the crowd.

Assigning issues to smaller, ad hoc groups (similar to Mozilla’s modules).

Ensuring the issues addressed are important in people’s everyday lives and narrowly focused. Monolithic calls for feedback dilute the process of identifying issue experts in the crowd.

A reliance on modules, which chunk tasks into manageable and categorical projects.

A reliance an online structure and set of protocols by which volunteer feedback is organized.

A top-down, hierarchical organization in which leadership steers participation and makes final decisions.

A central coordinator at the helm.

Many of these elements are evident in current efforts to make government more transparent, such as the Open Government Initiative at whitehouse.gov/Open.

Another example is the patent process. Faced with a crippling backlog, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has piloted a Peer-to-Patent program that invites the public to examine patents. The public reviewers join teams akin to Mozilla’s modules and evaluate inventions in their areas of expertise..

Team members are also responsible for vetting one another’s contributions. Individuals gain status through the quality of their contributions, as determined by a formal rating system. The final decision nevertheless remains with the official patent examiner. As with Mozilla, this process relies on experts who volunteer their expertise via the internet.

Potential problems of crowdsourcing democracy include the following:

The built-in hierarchy for contributing opinions, content, or ideas may deny some individuals the right to participate, and thus infringe on First Amendment rights to participate.

Those working in relatively esoteric areas of national interest might find their issues are always ranked below headline-grabbing topics.

There is the potential for lawsuits known as SLAPPS, or strategic lawsuits against public participation. A SLAPP is usually a civil complaint filed against someone who is critical of the plaintiff’s enterprise. These suits can effectively silence critics. A real estate developer, for example, might claim a petition against his project was interfering with his contract.

There may be unintended consequences of mobilizing a crowd. In 2008, for example, the state of Texas set up a network of internet cameras for the general public to monitor the border with Mexico of illegal aliens. Such an effort, if successful, could have spurred vigilantism.

For government to be open and transparent, it must engage and collaborate with private citizens. While in the abstract, the internet enables this collaboration around a common cause or interest, infrastructure beyond the internet itself is needed for people to work across a distance and become a community. Mozilla’s organization is one model for how to make this happen.