How the Internet will (one day) transform government
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0:00 - 0:02I want to talk to you today about something
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0:02 - 0:05the open-source programming world can teach democracy,
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0:05 - 0:07but before that, a little preamble.
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0:07 - 0:09Let's start here.
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0:09 - 0:12This is Martha Payne. Martha's a 9-year-old Scot
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0:12 - 0:14who lives in the Council of Argyll and Bute.
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0:14 - 0:17A couple months ago, Payne started a food blog
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0:17 - 0:20called NeverSeconds, and she would take her camera
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0:20 - 0:22with her every day to school to document
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0:22 - 0:24her school lunches.
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0:24 - 0:26Can you spot the vegetable? (Laughter)
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0:26 - 0:30And, as sometimes happens,
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0:30 - 0:32this blog acquired first dozens of readers,
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0:32 - 0:34and then hundreds of readers,
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0:34 - 0:36and then thousands of readers, as people tuned in
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0:36 - 0:38to watch her rate her school lunches,
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0:38 - 0:40including on my favorite category,
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0:40 - 0:43"Pieces of hair found in food." (Laughter)
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0:43 - 0:47This was a zero day. That's good.
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0:47 - 0:50And then two weeks ago yesterday, she posted this.
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0:50 - 0:52A post that read: "Goodbye."
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0:52 - 0:55And she said, "I'm very sorry to tell you this, but
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0:55 - 0:58my head teacher pulled me out of class today and told me
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0:58 - 1:01I'm not allowed to take pictures in the lunch room anymore.
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1:01 - 1:03I really enjoyed doing this.
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1:03 - 1:06Thank you for reading. Goodbye."
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1:06 - 1:11You can guess what happened next, right? (Laughter)
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1:11 - 1:17The outrage was so swift, so voluminous, so unanimous,
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1:17 - 1:20that the Council of Argyll and Bute reversed themselves
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1:20 - 1:21the same day and said, "We would,
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1:21 - 1:23we would never censor a nine-year-old." (Laughter)
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1:23 - 1:26Except, of course, this morning. (Laughter)
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1:26 - 1:30And this brings up the question,
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1:30 - 1:32what made them think they could get away
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1:32 - 1:34with something like that? (Laughter)
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1:34 - 1:39And the answer is, all of human history prior to now.
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1:39 - 1:43(Laughter) So,
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1:43 - 1:47what happens when a medium suddenly puts
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1:47 - 1:50a lot of new ideas into circulation?
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1:50 - 1:52Now, this isn't just a contemporaneous question.
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1:52 - 1:54This is something we've faced several times
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1:54 - 1:56over the last few centuries.
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1:56 - 1:58When the telegraph came along, it was clear
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1:58 - 2:00that it was going to globalize the news industry.
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2:00 - 2:01What would this lead to?
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2:01 - 2:05Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace.
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2:05 - 2:08The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear
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2:08 - 2:11but see, literally see, what was going on
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2:11 - 2:13elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to?
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2:13 - 2:15World peace. (Laughter)
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2:15 - 2:16The telephone?
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2:16 - 2:19You guessed it: world peace.
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2:19 - 2:24Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet.
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2:24 - 2:26Even the printing press, even the printing press
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2:26 - 2:29was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce
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2:29 - 2:33Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe.
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2:33 - 2:35Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses,
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2:35 - 2:37the Protestant Reformation, and, you know,
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2:37 - 2:40the Thirty Years' War. All right,
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2:40 - 2:44so what all of these predictions of world peace got right
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2:44 - 2:47is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly
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2:47 - 2:49come into circulation, it changes society.
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2:49 - 2:53What they got exactly wrong was what happens next.
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2:53 - 2:56The more ideas there are in circulation,
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2:56 - 3:00the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with.
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3:00 - 3:05More media always means more arguing.
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3:05 - 3:08That's what happens when the media's space expands.
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3:08 - 3:11And yet, when we look back on the printing press
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3:11 - 3:14in the early years, we like what happened.
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3:14 - 3:17We are a pro-printing press society.
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3:17 - 3:19So how do we square those two things,
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3:19 - 3:22that it leads to more arguing, but we think it was good?
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3:22 - 3:25And the answer, I think, can be found in things like this.
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3:25 - 3:28This is the cover of "Philosophical Transactions,"
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3:28 - 3:31the first scientific journal ever published in English
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3:31 - 3:33in the middle of the 1600s,
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3:33 - 3:34and it was created by a group of people who had been
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3:34 - 3:36calling themselves "The Invisible College,"
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3:36 - 3:38a group of natural philosophers who only later
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3:38 - 3:41would call themselves scientists,
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3:41 - 3:44and they wanted to improve the way
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3:44 - 3:47natural philosophers argued with each other,
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3:47 - 3:49and they needed to do two things for this.
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3:49 - 3:52They needed openness. They needed to create a norm
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3:52 - 3:53which said, when you do an experiment,
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3:53 - 3:56you have to publish not just your claims,
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3:56 - 3:58but how you did the experiment.
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3:58 - 4:00If you don't tell us how you did it, we won't trust you.
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4:00 - 4:03But the other thing they needed was speed.
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4:03 - 4:05They had to quickly synchronize what
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4:05 - 4:07other natural philosophers knew. Otherwise,
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4:07 - 4:10you couldn't get the right kind of argument going.
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4:10 - 4:13The printing press was clearly the right medium for this,
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4:13 - 4:16but the book was the wrong tool. It was too slow.
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4:16 - 4:19And so they invented the scientific journal
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4:19 - 4:21as a way of synchronizing the argument
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4:21 - 4:24across the community of natural scientists.
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4:24 - 4:28The scientific revolution wasn't created by the printing press.
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4:28 - 4:30It was created by scientists,
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4:30 - 4:32but it couldn't have been created if they didn't have
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4:32 - 4:34a printing press as a tool.
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4:34 - 4:36So what about us? What about our generation,
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4:36 - 4:38and our media revolution, the Internet?
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4:38 - 4:42Well, predictions of world peace? Check. (Laughter)
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4:42 - 4:51More arguing? Gold star on that one. (Laughter)
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4:51 - 4:52(Laughter)
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4:52 - 4:56I mean, YouTube is just a gold mine. (Laughter)
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4:56 - 5:00Better arguing? That's the question.
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5:00 - 5:02So I study social media, which means,
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5:02 - 5:05to a first approximation, I watch people argue.
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5:05 - 5:09And if I had to pick a group that I think is
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5:09 - 5:13our Invisible College, is our generation's collection of people
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5:13 - 5:16trying to take these tools and to press it into service,
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5:16 - 5:19not for more arguments, but for better arguments,
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5:19 - 5:21I'd pick the open-source programmers.
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5:21 - 5:24Programming is a three-way relationship
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5:24 - 5:26between a programmer, some source code,
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5:26 - 5:28and the computer it's meant to run on, but computers
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5:28 - 5:33are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions
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5:33 - 5:37that it's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set
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5:37 - 5:40of instructions that the computer knows how to execute,
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5:40 - 5:42and that's if one person is writing it.
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5:42 - 5:44Once you get more than one person writing it,
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5:44 - 5:47it's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite
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5:47 - 5:50each other's work if they're working on the same file,
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5:50 - 5:52or to send incompatible instructions
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5:52 - 5:55that simply causes the computer to choke,
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5:55 - 5:57and this problem grows larger
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5:57 - 6:00the more programmers are involved.
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6:00 - 6:04To a first approximation, the problem of managing
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6:04 - 6:06a large software project is the problem
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6:06 - 6:10of keeping this social chaos at bay.
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6:10 - 6:12Now, for decades there has been a canonical solution
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6:12 - 6:14to this problem, which is to use something called
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6:14 - 6:16a "version control system,"
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6:16 - 6:18and a version control system does what is says on the tin.
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6:18 - 6:22It provides a canonical copy of the software
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6:22 - 6:23on a server somewhere.
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6:23 - 6:26The only programmers who can change it are people
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6:26 - 6:30who've specifically been given permission to access it,
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6:30 - 6:33and they're only allowed to access the sub-section of it
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6:33 - 6:36that they have permission to change.
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6:36 - 6:39And when people draw diagrams of version control systems,
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6:39 - 6:41the diagrams always look something like this.
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6:41 - 6:44All right. They look like org charts.
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6:44 - 6:46And you don't have to squint very hard
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6:46 - 6:49to see the political ramifications of a system like this.
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6:49 - 6:54This is feudalism: one owner, many workers.
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6:54 - 6:57Now, that's fine for the commercial software industry.
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6:57 - 7:02It really is Microsoft's Office. It's Adobe's Photoshop.
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7:02 - 7:05The corporation owns the software.
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7:05 - 7:08The programmers come and go.
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7:08 - 7:11But there was one programmer who decided
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7:11 - 7:14that this wasn't the way to work.
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7:14 - 7:15This is Linus Torvalds.
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7:15 - 7:17Torvalds is the most famous open-source programmer,
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7:17 - 7:23created Linux, obviously, and Torvalds looked at the way
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7:23 - 7:26the open-source movement had been dealing with this problem.
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7:26 - 7:31Open-source software, the core promise of the open-source license,
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7:31 - 7:34is that everybody should have access to all the source code
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7:34 - 7:38all the time, but of course, this creates
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7:38 - 7:41the very threat of chaos you have to forestall
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7:41 - 7:43in order to get anything working.
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7:43 - 7:45So most open-source projects just held their noses
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7:45 - 7:48and adopted the feudal management systems.
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7:48 - 7:50But Torvalds said, "No, I'm not going to do that."
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7:50 - 7:54His point of view on this was very clear.
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7:54 - 7:56When you adopt a tool, you also adopt
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7:56 - 8:00the management philosophy embedded in that tool,
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8:00 - 8:03and he wasn't going to adopt anything that didn't work
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8:03 - 8:05the way the Linux community worked.
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8:05 - 8:08And to give you a sense of how enormous
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8:08 - 8:12a decision like this was, this is a map
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8:12 - 8:15of the internal dependencies within Linux,
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8:15 - 8:18within the Linux operating system, which sub-parts
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8:18 - 8:22of the program rely on which other sub-parts to get going.
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8:22 - 8:26This is a tremendously complicated process.
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8:26 - 8:29This is a tremendously complicated program,
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8:29 - 8:31and yet, for years, Torvalds ran this
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8:31 - 8:35not with automated tools but out of his email box.
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8:35 - 8:38People would literally mail him changes
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8:38 - 8:42that they'd agreed on, and he would merge them by hand.
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8:42 - 8:46And then, 15 years after looking at Linux and figuring out
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8:46 - 8:49how the community worked, he said, "I think I know
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8:49 - 8:53how to write a version control system for free people."
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8:53 - 8:59And he called it "Git." Git is distributed version control.
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8:59 - 9:02It has two big differences
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9:02 - 9:04with traditional version control systems.
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9:04 - 9:08The first is that it lives up to the philosophical promise
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9:08 - 9:11of open-source. Everybody who works on a project
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9:11 - 9:15has access to all of the source code all of the time.
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9:15 - 9:17And when people draw diagrams of Git workflow,
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9:17 - 9:20they use drawings that look like this.
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9:20 - 9:22And you don't have to understand what the circles
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9:22 - 9:26and boxes and arrows mean to see that this is a far more
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9:26 - 9:29complicated way of working than is supported
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9:29 - 9:32by ordinary version control systems.
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9:32 - 9:36But this is also the thing that brings the chaos back,
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9:36 - 9:39and this is Git's second big innovation.
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9:39 - 9:43This is a screenshot from GitHub, the premier Git hosting service,
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9:43 - 9:47and every time a programmer uses Git
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9:47 - 9:50to make any important change at all,
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9:50 - 9:53creating a new file, modifying an existing one,
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9:53 - 9:58merging two files, Git creates this kind of signature.
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9:58 - 10:01This long string of numbers and letters here
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10:01 - 10:06is a unique identifier tied to every single change,
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10:06 - 10:09but without any central coordination.
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10:09 - 10:13Every Git system generates this number the same way,
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10:13 - 10:17which means this is a signature tied directly
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10:17 - 10:20and unforgeably to a particular change.
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10:20 - 10:22This has the following effect:
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10:22 - 10:25A programmer in Edinburgh and a programmer in Entebbe
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10:25 - 10:29can both get the same -- a copy of the same piece of software.
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10:29 - 10:33Each of them can make changes and they can merge them
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10:33 - 10:36after the fact even if they didn't know
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10:36 - 10:39of each other's existence beforehand.
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10:39 - 10:42This is cooperation without coordination.
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10:42 - 10:45This is the big change.
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10:45 - 10:51Now, I tell you all of this not to convince you that it's great
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10:51 - 10:54that open-source programmers now have a tool
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10:54 - 10:57that supports their philosophical way of working,
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10:57 - 10:59although I think that is great.
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10:59 - 11:02I tell you all of this because of what I think it means
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11:02 - 11:04for the way communities come together.
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11:04 - 11:11Once Git allowed for cooperation without coordination,
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11:11 - 11:14you start to see communities form
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11:14 - 11:18that are enormously large and complex.
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11:18 - 11:20This is a graph of the Ruby community.
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11:20 - 11:22It's an open-source programming language,
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11:22 - 11:25and all of the interconnections between the people --
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11:25 - 11:27this is now not a software graph, but a people graph,
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11:27 - 11:29all of the interconnections among the people
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11:29 - 11:32working on that project —
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11:32 - 11:35and this doesn't look like an org chart.
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11:35 - 11:38This looks like a dis-org chart, and yet,
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11:38 - 11:41out of this community, but using these tools,
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11:41 - 11:43they can now create something together.
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11:43 - 11:47So there are two good reasons to think that
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11:47 - 11:51this kind of technique can be applied
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11:51 - 11:56to democracies in general and in particular to the law.
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11:56 - 11:58When you make the claim, in fact,
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11:58 - 12:01that something on the Internet is going to be good
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12:01 - 12:03for democracy, you often get this reaction.
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12:03 - 12:09(Music) (Laughter)
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12:09 - 12:12Which is, are you talking about the thing
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12:12 - 12:14with the singing cats? Like, is that the thing
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12:14 - 12:17you think is going to be good for society?
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12:17 - 12:19To which I have to say, here's the thing
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12:19 - 12:22with the singing cats. That always happens.
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12:22 - 12:24And I don't just mean that always happens with the Internet,
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12:24 - 12:26I mean that always happens with media, full stop.
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12:26 - 12:29It did not take long after the rise
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12:29 - 12:31of the commercial printing press before someone
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12:31 - 12:34figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. (Laughter)
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12:34 - 12:38You don't have to have an economic incentive to sell books
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12:38 - 12:41very long before someone says, "Hey, you know what I bet
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12:41 - 12:43people would pay for?" (Laughter)
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12:43 - 12:46It took people another 150 years to even think
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12:46 - 12:53of the scientific journal, right? So -- (Laughter) (Applause)
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12:53 - 12:56So the harnessing by the Invisible College
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12:56 - 12:58of the printing press to create the scientific journal
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12:58 - 13:01was phenomenally important, but it didn't happen big,
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13:01 - 13:04and it didn't happen quick, and it didn't happen fast, so
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13:04 - 13:07if you're going to look for where the change is happening,
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13:07 - 13:09you have to look on the margins.
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13:09 - 13:15So, the law is also dependency-related.
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13:15 - 13:18This is a graph of the U.S. Tax Code,
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13:18 - 13:21and the dependencies of one law on other laws
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13:21 - 13:24for the overall effect.
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13:24 - 13:27So there's that as a site for source code management.
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13:27 - 13:29But there's also the fact that law is another place
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13:29 - 13:31where there are many opinions in circulation,
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13:31 - 13:35but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy,
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13:35 - 13:37and when you go onto GitHub, and you look around,
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13:37 - 13:40there are millions and millions of projects,
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13:40 - 13:41almost all of which are source code,
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13:41 - 13:44but if you look around the edges, you can see people
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13:44 - 13:46experimenting with the political ramifications
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13:46 - 13:47of a system like that.
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13:47 - 13:49Someone put up all the Wikileaked cables
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13:49 - 13:51from the State Department, along with software used
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13:51 - 13:55to interpret them, including my favorite use ever
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13:55 - 13:57of the Cablegate cables, which is a tool for detecting
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13:57 - 14:00naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose.
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14:00 - 14:06(Laughter)
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14:06 - 14:09Right. (Laughter)
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14:09 - 14:12The New York Senate has put up something called
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14:12 - 14:14Open Legislation, also hosting it on GitHub,
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14:14 - 14:17again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity.
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14:17 - 14:19You can go and pick your Senator and then you can see
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14:19 - 14:21a list of bills they have sponsored.
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14:21 - 14:25Someone going by Divegeek has put up the Utah code,
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14:25 - 14:28the laws of the state of Utah, and they've put it up there
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14:28 - 14:29not just to distribute the code,
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14:29 - 14:32but with the very interesting possibility that this could
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14:32 - 14:37be used to further the development of legislation.
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14:37 - 14:41Somebody put up a tool during the copyright debate
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14:41 - 14:45last year in the Senate, saying, "It's strange that Hollywood
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14:45 - 14:48has more access to Canadian legislators
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14:48 - 14:52than Canadian citizens do. Why don't we use GitHub
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14:52 - 14:56to show them what a citizen-developed bill might look like?"
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14:56 - 15:00And it includes this very evocative screenshot.
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15:00 - 15:03This is a called a "diff," this thing on the right here.
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15:03 - 15:06This shows you, for text that many people are editing,
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15:06 - 15:08when a change was made, who made it,
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15:08 - 15:09and what the change is.
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15:09 - 15:11The stuff in red is the stuff that got deleted.
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15:11 - 15:13The stuff in green is the stuff that got added.
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15:13 - 15:16Programmers take this capability for granted.
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15:16 - 15:19No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature
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15:19 - 15:23to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets,
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15:23 - 15:25even though those are the things done
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15:25 - 15:29with our consent and with our money.
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15:29 - 15:32Now, I would love to tell you that the fact
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15:32 - 15:35that the open-source programmers have worked out
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15:35 - 15:39a collaborative method that is large scale, distributed,
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15:39 - 15:42cheap, and in sync with the ideals of democracy, I would love
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15:42 - 15:44to tell you that because those tools are in place,
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15:44 - 15:49the innovation is inevitable. But it's not.
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15:49 - 15:52Part of the problem, of course, is just a lack of information.
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15:52 - 15:54Somebody put a question up on Quora saying,
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15:54 - 15:56"Why is it that lawmakers don't use
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15:56 - 15:57distributed version control?"
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15:57 - 16:01This, graphically, was the answer. (Laughter)
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16:01 - 16:03(Laughter) (Applause)
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16:03 - 16:08And that is indeed part of the problem, but only part.
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16:08 - 16:11The bigger problem, of course, is power.
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16:11 - 16:14The people experimenting with participation don't have
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16:14 - 16:17legislative power, and the people who have legislative
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16:17 - 16:21power are not experimenting with participation.
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16:21 - 16:22They are experimenting with openness.
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16:22 - 16:24There's no democracy worth the name that doesn't have
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16:24 - 16:27a transparency move, but transparency is openness
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16:27 - 16:31in only one direction, and being given a dashboard
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16:31 - 16:34without a steering wheel has never been the core promise
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16:34 - 16:37a democracy makes to its citizens.
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16:37 - 16:40So consider this.
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16:40 - 16:42The thing that got Martha Payne's opinions
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16:42 - 16:46out into the public was a piece of technology,
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16:46 - 16:50but the thing that kept them there was political will.
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16:50 - 16:52It was the expectation of the citizens
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16:52 - 16:56that she would not be censored.
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16:56 - 17:01That's now the state we're in with these collaboration tools.
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17:01 - 17:05We have them. We've seen them. They work.
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17:05 - 17:06Can we use them?
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17:06 - 17:11Can we apply the techniques that worked here to this?
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17:11 - 17:15T.S. Eliot once said, "One of the most momentous things
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17:15 - 17:17that can happen to a culture
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17:17 - 17:21is that they acquire a new form of prose."
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17:21 - 17:23I think that's wrong, but -- (Laughter)
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17:23 - 17:26I think it's right for argumentation. Right?
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17:26 - 17:30A momentous thing that can happen to a culture
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17:30 - 17:33is they can acquire a new style of arguing:
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17:33 - 17:39trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. Right?
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17:39 - 17:42A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes,
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17:42 - 17:44in the last decade, in fact.
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17:44 - 17:48It's large, it's distributed, it's low-cost,
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17:48 - 17:52and it's compatible with the ideals of democracy.
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17:52 - 17:54The question for us now is, are we going to let
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17:54 - 17:55the programmers keep it to themselves?
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17:55 - 17:57Or are we going to try and take it and press it into service
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17:57 - 17:59for society at large?
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17:59 - 18:02Thank you for listening. (Applause)
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18:02 - 18:06(Applause)
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18:06 - 18:11Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
- Title:
- How the Internet will (one day) transform government
- Speaker:
- Clay Shirky
- Description:
-
The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can’t governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 18:32
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for How the Internet will (one day) transform government | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for How the Internet will (one day) transform government | ||
Thu-Huong Ha approved English subtitles for How the Internet will (one day) transform government | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for How the Internet will (one day) transform government | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for How the Internet will (one day) transform government | ||
Morton Bast accepted English subtitles for How the Internet will (one day) transform government | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for How the Internet will (one day) transform government | ||
Joseph Geni added a translation |