We have been talking about using civic technology to make government data more open, more transparent and more clear. But that is like only improving the bandwidth of the downloading speed of your Internet connection. So it is now 10 Mb per second. But you can still only upload two bits every four years. That’s voting. It is very asymmetrical, right?!

So the other part is about making citizens voices heard in a much more scalable way. Academically the problem was not that the government doesn’t provide sufficient information. It is that it only provides it to - I don’t want to say it - the lobbyists in the private sector. They are linked together, they have a natural synergy. They have their own industry chain. So any information that is valuable to them is also available to its vendors and its customers. It is very natural, that is how the private sector works. Then the civil society joins this kind of committee with individuals, scholars, committee members and so on.

Keyboard shortcuts

j previous speech k next speech