I called this “reverse procurement.” Instead of the professional public servants thinking of an idea and the individuals in the citizenry implementing it, it is the other way around. It is the individual citizens elevating their local hack into such an “ideathon” or “hackathon,” and then the government becomes like a vendor and implements those brilliant social innovations. That is how our mask rationing, our contact tracing system, and our vaccine reservation system came about. It is not my brilliant idea. These are some smaller-scale ideas from some civil society hacker.

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