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Software eats the Government

Andreessen Horowitz are well known for the theory that "software will eat the world."  I am a big believer in this.  I was recently asked to speak at the Banff Forum, a Canadian think-tank, and talked about this, combined with how "open development" alongside software would challenge everything we do over the next twenty-five to fifty years.  It is fairly easy to point to software eating the world with books (Amazon), travel (Expedia and others), trading, etc.  It was a little bit harder for me to find great examples about how software will eat government, beyond the standard open.gov data initiatives.

Thus, I was quite intrigued with Clay Shirky's TED talk about how git, the software version control system, could apply to law and the democratic process.  In Clay's words, it is a new form of arguing, that is compatible with the democratic process.


(Nice to Mozilla in the top seven links on the site :-)   Git's distributed content management is now being used to manage things other than software.  Git is distributed, collaborative, but also controlled.  Whether git will eat government is yet to be determined, but it is a great example of how this could happen.

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