Keeping the Open in Open Source
The desire to realise democracy is not futile. Rather, the problem is that real democracy, that is, that mode of governance which is characterised by the unmediated participation of all community members in the process of formulating problems and negotiating decisions, is unattainable once a group is split into a fraction that decides and commands and another that obeys. Such structures make a travesty of the notion of democracy. It is from this vantage point that we must gauge how democratic peer production communities are.