User:Ed Pastore

From Metagovernment - Government of, by, and for all the people

Hello. My name is Ed Pastore. I was born in the United States, and I currently reside near Washington, DC in the United States.

My background is in philosophy, information technology, and web development. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. Since getting that degree, I have worked for fifteen years in information technology, where I managed every aspect of a company's I.T. needs, and where I worked extensively in developing, publishing, and maintaining several websites.

My interest in open, web-based governance started when I discovered and became an active editor of Wikipedia. The success of Wikipedia was surprising to me, given that it was an open system: I had not realized that pure openness could avoid degrading into complete anarchy. In fact, it seemed like such a success that I naturally began to wonder why similar principles couldn't be applied to human governance.

I have long felt that representative democracy is hardly democratic, especially here in the United States. Here, true enfranchisement is reserved for the well-connected, and the average citizen gets a practically meaningless say in government. Why not, I thought, allow every person to contribute to every part of government as much as they please? All we would need is a way to moderate that participation. When I poked around on Wikipedia, I found there was already an article on open source governance, yet there did not seem to be any organization actively working to create it. Now there is.

I am a founder and spokesperson for this project; my primary contributions are in the fields of philosophy, web development, web promotion, and (perhaps poorly) project administration.