You don't get to just do it all at once. In the case of permits, for example, you could work towards something that documents agreements between groups of neighbors. My suggestion is that open source can be used to develop alternative governance structures, not that it is a free pass to get out of legal obligations.
The point is that legal obligations shouldn't mandate the use of proprietary software. There shouldn't be a government filing process that requires a proprietary application to fill in fields in a PDF or only accepts documents in Microsoft formats. Tax dollars should never go to Oracle.
