Open Source Democracy

Political structures need to change. They will emerge from people acting and communicating in the present, not talking about a fictional future.

Media theorist and cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff has created a document for the British thinktank Demos (an organization closely tied to Tony Blair's Labour Party), entitled Open Source Democracy: How online communication is changing offline politics, which, as the title suggests, deals with the manner in which online communities are affecting the democratic process and what we can learn from it.

Scheduled for release in print sometime next month, the book will be made available under a Creative Commons license, and is a result of research that transpired during Rushkoff's writing of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism (which was originally intended to be subtitled "The Case of Open Source Judaism"). You can gank a PDF version here, and, as it is public domain, feel free to share it with anyone whom you feel may benefit from it.