Change Sicily, change the way politics work.
What would happen if a Software Engineer had to write a political programme? It would probably start with an empty repository and a README file.
So, here we are.
Politics are complex activities. They involve endless discussions and debate between parties. They aim at solving problems and improving lives. They are not perfect. In fact, even if they often start with some good intent, sometimes they are poorely implemented and they need to be iterated upon.
If we think in these terms, politics are not very different from software. Software also aims at solving complex problems and it is not perfect. Imperfections in software are commonly known as bugs.
There is a huge difference between politics and software, though. In the past 50 years we dramatically changed the way we produce software. We did not do the same for politics.
It always surprises me how in politics people still trust individuals or groups who pretend to have the solution to their problems, like if they were some mythological dei ex machina. Complex problems require thinking, experimentation and compromises. The more this thinking is made public and transparent, the more chances to succeed it has. In software, the price of finding a bug in the design phase of a product is much, much smaller than finding it after the product is live and used by millions of users. The same applies to politics.
Politicians tend to be vague and to blame each other. This does not (well, most of the time) happen in the software world because engineers can always point to a superior source of truth behind their software: the source code. The concept of source code does not exist for politics, at least in their current form.
But what if we could apply the lessons learnt in 50 years of writing software to politics and start using the same technology and tools? We could have an open source political programme, accessible by everyone, where it is easy to contribute with new ideas, either by reporting issues or by submitting a pull request. It would be possible to track the evolution of the programme in a non-ambiguous way and it would be easy to blame or give credit the correct contributor. It would be a great way to share knowledge, formalize problems, learn from the past. In case of contrasting opinions, a fork of the programme would still be an option.
Surely there would be a steep learning curve for contributors who are not familiar with the IT world, but would it be a bad thing to expose them to concepts such as version control, pull requests and forks? Would it be too hard of a challenge?
There is only way to discover how things would go. I have to write a Manifesto for Sicily.