Citizen-owned software.
I explicitly said FOSS. Any one can fork. How can I better make that point?
My motivation: my county invests in its own election management system (GIS, VRDB, ballot production, tabulation, report generation, etc). I demand that this entire stack is available to everyone for any purpose. Especially other counties that want an alternative to proprietary stacks hidden behind trade secrets, copyrights, and onerous EULAs.
Is this not what you want too?
> ...it sounds like you're suggesting that "we" would be limited to a specific group and centralized control.
"We" the citizens implies "everyone".
But more to your point, what are some examples of FOSS which are not de facto centralized?
I refer you to RMS' Four Freedoms. https://openedreader.org/chapter/stallmans-four-freedom/
A good start. I reiterate that FOSS is necessary but insufficient for citizen-owned software.
Bryan Cantrill's "Power to Fork" thesis is relevant. http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/08/03/opensolaris-and-the-p...
Sadly, I lived that experience on another FOSS project. Wish I had heard Cantrill before I committed to that effort.
I'm also deeply influenced by Pieter Hintjens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens#Bibliography Ditto Clay Shirky, eg Here Comes Everyone.
Nadia Eghbal's research is on my reading list. https://nadiaeghbal.com/oss/ Having just skim read, it looks very insightful, cogent.
Who is "we"? That's the point of FOSS: "we", as "we control the repo, builds, distros, etc" is defined basically as anyone who wants to do it. The idea of forking is an incredibly important part of that, but it sounds like you're suggesting that "we" would be limited to a specific group and centralized control.