Americans idolize democracy. It is, as Winston Churchill observed, the worst political system possible, except for all others.

In a democracy forging a majority gives you power. The system is stable because majorities shift. People change their minds over time and give power to other leaders. Coalitions are flexible.

But democracy is not the only way to run a free system. Consensus is the alternative.

With consensus a mere majority won't create action. Minority groups must agree to accept a solution as well.

The United Nations runs based on consensus. To Americans this explains its general inaction and irrelevance. But the UN actually does a lot of good work. Blue-helmeted UN troops are familiar scenes in world trouble spots, once both sides in a conflict agree to their appearance. UN agencies do a lot of good work in health and global development. It's not "world government" -- far from it -- but it's not irrelevant.

The Internet also runs based on consensus. The "governing entity" -- ICANN -- is nearly powerless. Every country agrees to use the same DNS, the same IP addressing systems (IPv6 is backward-compatible with IPv4), and the same economic model. The "threat" of WSIS is that the consensus may be broken leaving us, in time, with multiple Internets that don't communicate.

Open source is also driven by consensus. You don't have majority rule in an open source project, that's a recipe for a fork. What you have is either a dictatorship, in which one company or developer group exercises control of the whole, or true consensus, in which developers get together (usually online) and agree on priorities, and on how to divvy up the work.

This is at the heart of a great deal of misunderstanding. Some Americans confuse consensus with Communism. Some of that confusion comes from proprietary software FUD, some from a raw ideology that rivals Leninism (in my view). Some is simply honest head-scratching.

Tim O'Reilly has spent much of his career fighting the misunderstanding. He's fighting it today in a BBC interview. He describes it in terms of the evolution of capital, of value moving from hardware (the IBM era) to software (the Microsoft era) to services (the Google era).

What really separates open source from proprietary models, however, lies in how it harnesses altruism. "I believe that the human motive to share is very powerful," O'Reilly told the BBC's Bill Thompson. "The human motive to profit is also very powerful and I think that the profit motive and the sharing motive are not exclusive." The idea that they are is the FUD O'Reilly fights every day.

The battles over open source, and the lessons from that battle, are now spilling into the common political sphere.

The acceptance, and use, of consensus is becoming the chief political divide in this country. You can see it in Iraq. The Bush Administration claims it is "bringing democracy to Iraq," meaning majority rule. But a very large group -- the Sunni Muslims -- lie outside that majority. And the result is violence. The violence will continue until Sunnis accept the results of some process, until, in other words, they're made a part of the consensus. The same lessons are becoming apparent in France. The Muslim community is a minority, but unless it is brought into the governing consensus the society will explode.

In this way, I feel, the consensual model is being brought back home. Majority rules but minority can veto, as opposed to majority rules with minority rights.

I believe it's vital that consensus win this coming debate, because without it 21st century civilization is impossible. How many must opt-out of a law, or a system of laws, before that law becomes unenforceable? The answer to that is unknown. But I suspect, as technology increases, the number goes down. Democracy itself is becoming unstable. Consensus is becoming necessary.