Rethinking government

When you're developing a piece of software or starting a business or solving some business challenge, it's often times super helpful to go back to the start and rethink everything from a blank slate.

Instead of thinking about what you have to build on, what you have to live with, what the context is, start over. What would an ideal solution look like, if you could do anything you wanted?

You may not be able to implement it, but it's very likely to give you some valuable insights and ideas that you can implement, and that you wouldn't have gotten to, had you started with only including about things you knew for sure you could get implemented.

This is exactly what I want to do for politics and government: Start over. 

I want to collect a group of the smartest people I know, people who have thought long and deeply about decision-making, monetary systems, group dynamics, democracy, human psychology and evolution, innovation, creativity, leadership, and all of the other aspects that go into creating successful systems and institutions.

Let's collect the best insights and experiences from around the world.

I want to use everything I've learned from software development, open source,  entrepreneurship, art, and human psychology. Computers are great, because they don't care about your beliefs or your superstitions. They're all about what works and what doesn't. The code either runs and does what you intended, or it doesn't. There's no debate about it. We need more of that in government.

Software is also useful in that it's an exercise in keeping things simple. Complexities in software quickly spiral out of control, and you end up with massive budget overruns, delays, and projects that never ship and never get to work. I think we have plenty of that kind of thing in government, and there can be no place for that.

I have a lot of thoughts and ideas, and I'll be sharing them here, and I'm excited to put together a group that can get ever more clarity and detail on it all. I consider it an open source project, and I'm very excited about it.