Government of the people, by the people, for the people

For all the greatness of Abraham Lincoln, one accomplishment that goes unrecognized is that he invented the Internet. Well, to be honest, as Abe would want us to be, in the 1860s, pre-incandescent light, pre-Model T and pre-Macintosh, he didn’t quite invent it, but he did envision it.

A decade ago, almost-president Al Gore tried to take credit for the Internet. The lanky rail-splitter from Illinois beat him by 150 years

It was Ol’ Abe who first described the Internet in the Gettysburg Address. He spoke these prophetic words, “a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” He described open source and crowdsourcing.

Open source is when programmers write and share code to run computer software. It is open and available to anyone in the world who is connected to the Internet. By having access to the inner workings of the system, scattered, unaffiliated co-workers can improve the function and add new features or tweak the program to get rid of the bugs. Geeks in groups or individuals everywhere contribute to the betterment of the whole.

Crowdsourcing is the phenomenon of putting a problem out to the Internet for a collective solution. It uses the power of the people. It throws a question to the unseen of the World Wide Web for an answer. It is the ultimate vehicle to strength in numbers.

Crowdsourcing uses the power of distributed thinking. The world is too complex to expect any one person to have all the answers or control all the fixes. So the objective is to divide a task into smaller units for many to attack and solve. Everyone is unique with perspectives that could add to the solution. Therefore, unsolvable conundrums to the ordinary may be seen with new eyes for a creative answer.

Combine the human reasoning, shared knowledge, power with electronics of the Internet and you have governmental crowdsourcing. Give the masses the tools and all of a sudden we have a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

For example, think about the complexity of our bureaucracies. The 2012 federal budget is 2,403 pages. The 2010 Federal Registry, which keeps track of all U.S. governmental actions not considered secret, was 75,406 pages. That was a slow year.

Now turn to a situation that is plaguing governments. They don’t have the resources. Deficits, growing demands and shrinking revenues are killing budgets. The cutbacks, hiring freezes, shrinkage by attrition and the general anti-government mood are eliminating the humans to do the job. The workload doesn’t diminish; it increases. The numbers to do the work shrink.