open source

The word "Open" is appearing all over the marketing sphere these days. It's been leapt upon gleefully the same way that "Low fat," "Organic" and "All natural" were latched onto by the processed food industry once the plausible definitions of those terms were sufficiently stretched and distorted to suit proprietary interests...

This is a story about the sort of "open" that matters to me, and how I got to this point.

Trust issues are key to the rationale for avoiding online voting today. Trust builds slowly over time, but can be squandered in an instant. Democracy is dependent on the citizens' trust in the voting process. The fact that the current voting system (e.g. postal vote) has flaws (e.g. stand-over tactics) doesn't mean that we should introduce an equally or more flawed system online.