Tim O'Reilly has an interesting post about applying version control technology to congress to foster more transparency and maintain accountability for personal interest riders tacked onto legislation.  The whole thing is a good read, but what I like most is the thought he ends the post with:

"despite the many successes of our form of government, it's definitely creaking at the seams. The founders, for all their foresight, didn't plan for a nation of 300 million people, most of whom don't care to vote, they didn't foresee the extent to which the bureaucracy would become a fourth seat of power. I don't have any great prescriptions for politics, but I do have prescriptions for technology. We all need to think hard about how the future will not be like the past, focusing our efforts on that future and being willing to change course when faced with discontinuities that render our past thinking obsolete. "

I don't think technology is really rendering past thinking obsolete, but it certainly does provide new means to accomplish old goals.  I would rather rephrase that last sentence something like:  We all need to think hard about how the present is not like the past and how we can change course based on new tools that render past methods obsolete.

I think that it would be prudent for us, the generation who grew up with computers and the Internet, to take a long, hard look at the principles upon which our government was founded and see if there are new tools we should be using to uphold them.  If using some type of version control for legislation advances the principles of the framers of the Constitution then we should by all means start the implementation process.  If we look at the principles our country was founded on and see that the founders would have included the population in the legislative process in some way, if possible at the time, then by all means we should use the Internet to involve the population in the legislative process.  Maybe it's time we upgrade the government.

Perhaps it's time for a new political party, the Technology Party?