Social innovation legitimizes governance.
Because Ethereum is open source, anyone who wants to can “fork,” meaning, use it to pursue a different vision. This kind of social innovation legitimates governance, but in a way that is free of the legitimacy provided by representative elections. This way, people can see when social innovations work better. --- Audrey Tang
"Social innovation legitimizes governance, but in the process it is independent of the legitimacy of current governance."
Open source can be forked by anyone, allowing a wide variety of experiments.
In terms of "legitimating governance," the author is suggesting that the ability to fork, or create a new direction for the project, provides a form of democratic governance. However, this legitimacy does not come from the traditional representative elections as in political systems. Instead, it is achieved through the consensus of the community and their collective decisions about the direction of the project.
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