Shaping Network Society

As history unfolds it is often hard to distinguish the truly historical from the incidental. As someone who has lived through German reunification 20 years ago these days, I can attest to that. But the absence of political theorists following the debate about open source in general and open voting systems in specific seems reckless. On Tuesday Sequoia, one of the major providers of electronic voting systems, announced the publication of the source code of its forthcoming e-voting product. This potentially can be a turning point in a battle fought almost single-handedly by Ed Felten:

The trend toward publishing election system source code has been building over the last few years. Security experts have long argued that public scrutiny tends to increase security, and is one of the best ways to justify public trust in a system. Independent studies of major voting vendors’ source code have found code quality to be disappointing at best, and vendors’ all-out resistance to any disclosure has eroded confidence further. Add to this an increasing number of independent open-source voting systems, and secret voting technologies start to look less and less viable, as the public starts insisting that longstanding principles of election transparency be extended to election technology. In short, the time had come for this step.

As members of network societies, we need to become attuned to the politics of such technical arcana and wrap our minds around these issues. We need to have positions on what we expect from a voting system and we need to reflect on what our general stance is towards the openness principle. And that needs our (and our political theorists) attention.