User:Ed Pastore
From Metagovernment - Government of, by, and for all the people
My name is Ed Pastore. 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.
Contact
I can be reached at epastore at metagovernment dot org. However, I am not "in charge" of this project (nor is anyone else), so if you need to speak with "the management," you may be better served by joining the Startup committee and posting to that list server. If you do not wish to join the list, then contact me and I may forward your message onward.
Also, sometimes I am active on Twitter at @epastore, however I do not guarantee I will always monitor that account.
Conferences & Presentations
Along with other members of this project, I present the Metagovernment project and its ideas at various conferences. Some past presentations include:
- 2009-06-28 - Participation Camp, New York, NY. Virtual presenter: "Making Direct Democracy Practical."
- 2009-04-20 - 16th Annual Politics Online Conference, Washington, DC. Panel participant: "Social Media Platforms and Directing Traffic to your Real Campaign."
- 2009-04-19 - eDemocracy Camp, Washington, DC. Gave a 5-minute "lightning round" presentation on direct democracy and Metagovernment.
- 2009-02-28 - Transparency Camp, Washington, DC. Roundtable: "Crowdsourcing governance decisions." And Presentation: "Beyond transparency: Crowdsourcing governance without any individual authorities."
- 2008-10-18 - Web 2.0 Expo 2008, Prague, Czech Republic. Keynote: "Web 2.0 for Governance" - Video still forthcoming, eventually…
