Media Tools and Democracy

Democracy is, by definition, is a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them. With this being said there really is only one "tool" that I feel fits this category and that would be anything related to open source. I know that this isn't particularly a tool per say but the idea behind open source promotes the closest thing you can have to a democracy. Open source is a way of development that allows the people to change or edit any particular part of code in that specific software to allow for better use, ease of accessibility, etc within a certain set of guidelines which can be found at the line below. Allowing software to be edited by other programmers outside of the particular company that had originally produced it is a way to bring the population as a whole together as everyone can have a say, all assuming that they understand the coding that goes along with it. It is really hard to have democracy when a specific company has total control over something. If they have total control, the "people" do not have a say in what goes in and what should come out of that software. A good example of open source software is Linux. By having open source you are allowing the the consumer to have a better state of mind knowing that if something should be different in a program, it can be edited as opposed to waiting till the next update or next version of the software all together. Don't get me wrong though, there are things where open source is hard to implement, I.E. video games would be very difficult to make open source and have it succeed however it is possible. Even with it being possible you still would be walking a very fine line. The following are some images of open source software affiliates:

http://opensource.org/osd

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/democracy