There has been a lot of buzz recently about governments using crowdsourcing to form laws.

Last year, for example, Iceland decided to crowdsource a new constitution to replace the previous iteration, which was based primarily on Danish laws. Egyptians, in the wake of the country’s political upheaval, also created an open document (roughly translated as the Egyptian Document for Political Rights) to discuss how the country’s new constitution should work. More recently, the Finnish government announced a similar crowdsourcing initiative, which is set to go live in a few days.

The Finnish organization that is charged with putting the constitutional proposals together made the project available on GitHub, an open sourced hosting service. How does GitHub work? And can crowdsourcing become the way politics are conducted? These are the sorts of questions internet guru and New York University professor Clay Shirky tackled in a recent TED Talk.

“I would love to tell you that the fact that open source programmers have worked out a collaborative method that is large-scale, distributed, cheap, and in sync with ideas of democracy – I would love to tell you that because the tools are in place, the innovation is inevitable," Shirky says. "But it’s not.”

To find out what he means and to get a better understanding of how crowdsourcing can affect lawmakers, check out the video below.