Open-source tools for government

More of our existing, offline social mechanisms are being reflected in software, some open-source.  That has some relevance for this blog as well.  Madison is a collaborative document-preparation tool that can be used to agree on a statement or law in a decentralized fashion; it remains to be seen how helpful it will be in fomenting democracy, but I've long thought this was a good place to start.

Open-source governance tools are another overlap with the programming blog, of course, under open government (but the tag is relatively new).  The recent SOPA episode galvanized a lot of people in the open-source community to pay attention to government.