Folksonomy

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

"Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories."

"In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams."

"Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information."

This got me to thinking...

I've been doing a lot of musing lately with friends about the state of our current government's decay, and about how, personally, I believe that this is not due to widespread conspiracy, but rather due to the natural evolution of human social behavior, combined with a (slightly) flawed system of democracy.

Specifically, I think James Madison overlooked a few things when he came up with the Articles of Confederation, which ultimately made their way (in part) into the Constitution. I believe his idea of representation by a legislature may have worked well in the early days of American history, but as our government has grown in proportion to our population growth, the idea of a "system of representation" has not scaled.

In fact, it is failing.

As individuals, we are no longer a voice within our own government. The legislature is mostly ineffective; a giant bureaucracy buried in red-tape and tired politics; and in the few areas where actual "progress" is made in the legislature, the representation has shifted from citizens to corporate interests -- interests served by a powerful, well-connected system of wealth-peddling lobbyists.

Back to my point about folksonomy...

Folksonomy is this idea of letting the community decide what is important. It's usually done through "tagging" -- that is, assigning an arbitrary label to any object as you see fit. On the sites that have integrated tagging and folksonomy successfully, an interesting phenomenon occurs wherein the community suddenly finds it shares certain interests -- and in turn, these interests often peak around certain hot topics, social issues, world events, fads, and so on.

Examples of successful folksonomy are so far limited to the Internet. Flickr, Delicious, and YouTube are among the stars here.

And I'm finding an almost addictive aspect to each of these sites. It's just so... pardon the cliche... democratic.

Really though, it is democratic. Folksonomy means there is no hierarchy. No oligarchy. No empiricism or aristocracy.

Notice I crossed over from technical terms into terms usually reserved for societies.

This is my point: what if we could apply the lessons and principles of folksonomy to our government? To our society?

Is it possible? Am I dreaming?