Lawrence Lessig is an American law professor who gave an excellent podcast through IT Conversations on political reform in the United States.  Lessig is known largely for his work on open source legal issues and has been very influential in making open source main stream. 

It is always useful to learn more about the US political system since their country has such a huge effect on ours.  Looking at ways to create reform, even when the whole system is all about supporting the status quo. 

The most inspiring part of the podcast for me though was the idea of using technology to help leverage social change.  In particular looking at the successful models of creative commons and open source.  The peer production of knowledge and tools has created tools which are now an essential part of modern life (what would the Internet be without Apache). Coordinating the cognitive surplus of thousands of people through the Internet into large meaningful projects is becoming normal.  People passionate about issues are actively involved in enhancing definitions in wikipedia or organizing launch parties for Firefox. 

Peer production is based around the Internet, but not everyone is a programmer.  It requires for large projects broken down into manageable chunks of work that can involve lots of people in some larger end.  In Lessig's case he's looking at political reform and is highlighting organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and Maplight as organizations that are working to leading the charge for this reform. 

In Canada the organizations that seem to be pushing for the greatest political reform are Democracy Watch and Fair Vote Canada.  Both of these could benefit from involving more social activists to promote their platforms.  Electoral reform is difficult to achieve here in Canada and like in our neighbor to the south our system is impeding our ability to address other critical issues like climate change. 

There are other huge projects that could benefit from peer production too.  A huge reason why OpenConcept set up prax.ca was to be a test bed for campaigns and allow for debate, discussion and evolution of campaigns, particularly here in Canada.  Collaboration is really the only way we as a society are going to be able to react quickly enough to address the issues of climate change and global conflict. 

Another interesting approach is mirroring what was done with Creative Commons in getting agents of reform (candidates running for election) to make simple pledges for institutional reform so that it is easy to track commitments.  If it were done in a machine readable format it would also be easier to channel $$ to reformers. 

There was another interesting podcast I was listening to a while back talking about how versioning tools like Subversion could be useful in tracking the evolution of policies and laws just like it is being used to track the evolution of software.  Who made what change when and why.  It would be great to force our governments to have the level of transparency that exists in most open source projects.