Case Studies of Online Deliberation: The Debian Project and Wikipedia

Gunnar Ristroph
Caltech

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     Last modified: March 15, 2005

Abstract
The experience of groups that have been deliberating online for years should be well studied when developing software and strategies to advance online democracy.

One the best example of online democratic deliberation is the proceedings of the Debian Project, a group of people across the globe that manage the Debian Linux distribution. Debian began as a tightly knit group of hacker hippies coordinated over the Internet. By 1998 the undertaking was large enough to be formalized and the Debian Constitution was written. The Constitution proscribes how the project will be democratically lead through a hierarchy of developers and votes conducted over email. The Constitution has lead the project through seven years with only two minor changes stewarding Debian to be possibly the most trusted Linux distribution. Deciding technical issues, selecting managers, writing guidelines, and just about all the business of the project is decided through email.

An equally successfully and more recent example is the Wikimedia foundation. Wiki is a technology that allows anyone to edit the content of a website. Wikis take many shapes based on the people who contribute to them and often end up looking half-way between a static page and a discussion board with content evolving over time. The Wikimedia Foundation develops their own wiki software and oversees the Wikipedia, an ambitious and tremendously popular project to create a user-written encyclopedia. The Board of Trustees of the Foundation use wiki software in combination with email and online chat to conduct business as well as nominate and elect trustees.

Because of the open nature of the product and the technical prowess of the members, these two groups continue to be staging grounds for new approaches to deliberating online and offer a wealth of experience for online deliberation in general.