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So when the White House was built

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in the early 19th century, it was an open house.

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Neighbors came and went. Under President Adams,

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a local dentist happened by.

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He wanted to shake the President's hand.

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The President dismissed the Secretary of State,

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whom he was conferring with, and asked the dentist

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if he would remove a tooth.

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Later, in the 1850s, under President Pierce,

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he was known to have remarked

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— probably the only thing he's known for —

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when a neighbor passed by and said, "I'd love to see

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the beautiful house," and Pierce said to him,

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"Why my dear sir, of course you may come in.

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This isn't my house. It is the people's house."

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Well, when I got to the White House in the beginning

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of 2009, at the start of the Obama Administration,

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the White House was anything but open.

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Bomb blast curtains covered my windows.

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We were running Windows 2000.

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Social media were blocked at the firewall.

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We didn't have a blog, let alone a dozen twitter accounts

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like we have today.

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I came in to become the head of Open Government,

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to take the values and the practices of transparency,

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participation and collaboration, and instill them

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into the way that we work, to open up government,

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to work with people.

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Now one of the things that we know

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is that companies are very good at getting people to work

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together in teams and in networks to make

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very complex products, like cars and computers,

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and the more complex the products are a society creates,

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the more successful the society is over time.

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Companies make goods, but governments,

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they make public goods. They work on the cure for cancer

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and educating our children and making roads,

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but we don't have institutions that are particularly good

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at this kind of complexity. We don't have institutions

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that are good at bringing our talents to bear,

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at working with us in this kind of open and collaborative way.

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So when we wanted to create our Open Government policy,

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what did we do? We wanted, naturally, to ask public sector

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employees how we should open up government.

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Turns out that had never been done before.

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We wanted to ask members of the public to help us

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come up with a policy, not after the fact, commenting

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on a rule after it's written, the way is typically the case,

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but in advance. There was no legal precedent,

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no cultural precedent, no technical way of doing this.

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In fact, many people told us it was illegal.

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Here's the crux of the obstacle.

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Governments exist to channel the flow of two things,

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really, values and expertise to and from government

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and to and from citizens to the end of making decisions.

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But the way that our institutions are designed,

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in our rather 18th-century, centralized model,

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is to channel the flow of values through voting,

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once every four years, once every two years, at best,

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once a year. This is a rather anemic and thin way, in this

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era of social media, for us to actually express our values.

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Today we have technology that lets us express ourselves

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a great deal, perhaps a little too much.

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Then in the 19th century, we layer on

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the concept of bureaucracy and the administrative state

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to help us govern complex and large societies.

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But we've centralized these bureaucracies.

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We've entrenched them. And we know that

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the smartest person always works for someone else.

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We need to only look around this room to know that

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expertise and intelligence is widely distributed in society,

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and not limited simply to our institutions.

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Scientists have been studying in recent years

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the phenomenon that they often describe as flow,

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that the design of our systems, whether natural or social,

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channel the flow of whatever runs through them.

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So a river is designed to channel the flow of water,

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and the lightning bolt that comes out of a cloud channels

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the flow of electricity, and a leaf is designed to channel

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the flow of nutrients to the tree,

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sometimes even having to route around an obstacle,

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but to get that nutrition flowing.

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The same can be said for our social systems, for our

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systems of government, where, at the very least,

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flow offers us a helpful metaphor for understanding

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what the problem is, what's really broken,

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and the urgent need that we have, that we all feel today,

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to redesign the flow of our institutions.

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We live in a Cambrian era of big data, of social networks,

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and we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions

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that are actually quite recent.

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Think about it: What other business do you know,

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what other sector of the economy, and especially one

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as big as the public sector, that doesn't seek to reinvent

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its business model on a regular basis?

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Sure, we invest plenty in innovation. We invest

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in broadband and science education and science grants,

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but we invest far too little in reinventing and redesigning

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the institutions that we have.

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Now, it's very easy to complain, of course, about

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partisan politics and entrenched bureaucracy, and we love

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to complain about government. It's a perennial pastime,

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especially around election time, but

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the world is complex. We soon will have 10 billion people,

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many of whom will lack basic resources.

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So complain as we might, what actually can replace

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what we have today?

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What comes the day after the Arab Spring?

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Well, one attractive alternative that obviously presents itself

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to us is that of networks. Right? Networks

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like Facebook and Twitter. They're lean. They're mean.

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You've got 3,000 employees at Facebook

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governing 900 million inhabitants.

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We might even call them citizens, because they've recently

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risen up to fight against legislative incursion,

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and the citizens of these networks work together

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to serve each other in great ways.

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But private communities, private, corporate,

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privatizing communities, are not bottom-up democracies.

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They cannot replace government.

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Friending someone on Facebook is not complex enough

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to do the hard work of you and I collaborating

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with each other and doing the hard work of governance.

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But social media do teach us something.

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Why is Twitter so successful? Because it opens up its platform.

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It opens up the API to allow hundreds of thousands

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of new applications to be built on top of it, so that we can

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read and process information in new and exciting ways.

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We need to think about how to open up the API

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of government, and the way that we're going to do that,

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the next great superpower is going to be the one

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who can successfully combine the hierarchy of institution --

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because we have to maintain those public values,

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we have to coordinate the flow -- but with the diversity

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and the pulsating life and the chaos and the excitement

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of networks, all of us working together to build

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these new innovations on top of our institutions,

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to engage in the practice of governance.

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We have a precedent for this. Good old Henry II here,

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in the 12th century, invented the jury.

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Powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power

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from government to citizens.

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Today we have the opportunity, and we have

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the imperative, to create thousands of new ways

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of interconnecting between networks and institutions,

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thousands of new kinds of juries: the citizen jury,

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the Carrotmob, the hackathon, we are just beginning

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to invent the models by which we can cocreate

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the process of governance.

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Now, we don't fully have a picture of what this will look like

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yet, but we're seeing pockets of evolution

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emerging all around us -- maybe not even evolution,

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I'd even start to call it a revolution -- in the way that we govern.

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Some of it's very high-tech,

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and some of it is extremely low-tech,

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such as the project that MKSS is running in Rajasthan,

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India, where they take the spending data of the state

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and paint it on 100,000 village walls,

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and then invite the villagers to come and comment

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who is on the government payroll, who's actually died,

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what are the bridges that have been built to nowhere,

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and to work together through civic engagement to save

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real money and participate and have access to that budget.

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But it's not just about policing government.

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It's also about creating government.

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Spacehive in the U.K. is engaging in crowd-funding,

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getting you and me to raise the money to build

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the goalposts and the park benches that will actually

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allow us to deliver better services in our communities.

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No one is better at this activity of actually getting us

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to engage in delivering services,

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sometimes where none exist, than Ushahidi.

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Created after the post-election riots in Kenya in 2008,

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this crisis-mapping website and community is actually able

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to crowdsource and target the delivery of

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better rescue services to people trapped under the rubble,

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whether it's after the earthquakes in Haiti,

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or more recently in Italy.

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And the Red Cross too is training volunteers and Twitter

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is certifying them, not simply to supplement existing

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government institutions, but in many cases, to replace them.

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Now what we're seeing lots of examples of, obviously,

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is the opening up of government data,

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not enough examples of this yet, but we're starting

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to see this practice of people creating and generating

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innovative applications on top of government data.

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There's so many examples I could have picked, and I

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selected this one of Jon Bon Jovi. Some of you

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may or may not know that he runs a soup kitchen

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in New Jersey, where he caters to and serves the homeless

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and particularly homeless veterans.

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In February, he approached the White House, and said,

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"I would like to fund a prize to create scalable national

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applications, apps, that will help not only the homeless

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but those who deliver services [to] them to do so better."

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February 2012 to June of 2012,

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the finalists are announced in the competition.

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Can you imagine, in the bureaucratic world of yesteryear,

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getting anything done in a four-month period of time?

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You can barely fill out the forms in that amount of time,

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let alone generate real, palpable innovations

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that improve people's lives.

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And I want to be clear to mention that this open government

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revolution is not about privatizing government,

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because in many cases what it can do when we have

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the will to do so is to deliver more progressive

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and better policy than the regulations and the legislative

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and litigation-oriented strategies

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by which we make policy today.

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In the State of Texas, they regulate 515 professions,

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from well-driller to florist.

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Now, you can carry a gun into a church in Dallas,

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but do not make a flower arrangement without a license,

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because that will land you in jail.

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So what is Texas doing? They're asking you and me,

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using online policy wikis, to help not simply get rid of

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burdensome regulations that impede entrepreneurship,

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but to replace those regulations with more innovative

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alternatives, sometimes using transparency in the creation

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of new iPhone apps that will allows us

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both to protect consumers and the public

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and to encourage economic development.

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That is a nice sideline of open government.

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It's not only the benefits that we've talked about with regard

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to development. It's the economic benefits and the

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job creation that's coming from this open innovation work.

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Sberbank, the largest and oldest bank in Russia,

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largely owned by the Russian government,

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has started practicing crowdsourcing, engaging

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its employees and citizens in the public in developing innovations.

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Last year they saved a billion dollars, 30 billion rubles,

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from open innovation, and they're pushing radically

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the extension of crowdsourcing, not only from banking,

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but into the public sector.

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And we see lots of examples of these innovators using

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open government data, not simply to make apps,

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but then to make companies and to hire people

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to build them working with the government.

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So a lot of these innovations are local.

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In San Ramon, California, they published an iPhone app

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in which they allow you or me to say we are certified

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CPR-trained, and then when someone has a heart attack,

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a notification goes out so that you

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can rush over to the person over here and deliver CPR.

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The victim who receives bystander CPR

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is more than twice as likely to survive.

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"There is a hero in all of us," is their slogan.

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But it's not limited to the local.

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British Columbia, Canada, is publishing a catalogue

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of all the ways that its residents and citizens can engage

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with the state in the cocreation of governance.

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Let me be very clear,

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and perhaps controversial,

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that open government is not

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about transparent government.

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Simply throwing data over the transom doesn't change

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how government works.

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It doesn't get anybody to do anything with that data

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to change lives, to solve problems, and it doesn't change

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government.

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What it does is it creates an adversarial relationship

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between civil society and government

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over the control and ownership of information.

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And transparency, by itself, is not reducing the flow

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of money into politics, and arguably,

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it's not even producing accountability as well as it might

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if we took the next step of combining participation and

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collaboration with transparency to transform how we work.

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We're going to see this evolution really in two phases,

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I think. The first phase of the open government revolution

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is delivering better information from the crowd

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into the center.

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Starting in 2005, and this is how this open government

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work in the U.S. really got started,

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I was teaching a patent law class to my students and

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explaining to them how a single person in the bureaucracy

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has the power to make a decision

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about which patent application becomes the next patent,

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and therefore monopolizes for 20 years the rights

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over an entire field of inventive activity.

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Well, what did we do? We said, we can make a website,

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we can make an expert network, a social network,

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that would connect the network to the institution

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to allow scientists and technologists to get

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better information to the patent office

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to aid in making those decisions.

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We piloted the work in the U.S. and the U.K. and Japan

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and Australia, and now I'm pleased to report

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that the United States Patent Office will be rolling out

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universal, complete, and total openness,

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so that all patent applications will now be open

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for citizen participation, beginning this year.

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The second phase of this evolution — Yeah. (Applause)

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They deserve a hand. (Applause)

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The first phase is in getting better information in.

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The second phase is in getting decision-making power out.

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Participatory budgeting has long been practiced

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in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

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They're just starting it in the 49th Ward in Chicago.

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Russia is using wikis to get citizens writing law together,

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as is Lithuania. When we start to see

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power over the core functions of government

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— spending, legislation, decision-making —

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then we're well on our way to an open government revolution.

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There are many things that we can do to get us there.

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Obviously opening up the data is one,

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but the important thing is to create lots more --

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create and curate -- lots more participatory opportunities.

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Hackathons and mashathons and working with data

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to build apps is an intelligible way for people to engage

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and participate, like the jury is,

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but we're going to need lots more things like it.

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And that's why we need to start with our youngest people.

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We've heard talk here at TED about people

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biohacking and hacking their plants with Arduino,

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and Mozilla is doing work around the world in getting

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young people to build websites and make videos.

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When we start by teaching young people that we live,

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not in a passive society, a read-only society,

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but in a writable society, where we have the power

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to change our communities, to change our institutions,

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that's when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway

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towards this open government innovation,

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towards this open government movement,

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towards this open government revolution.

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So let me close by saying that I think the important thing

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for us to do is to talk about and demand this revolution.

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We don't have words, really, to describe it yet.

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Words like equality and fairness and the traditional

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elections, democracy, these are not really great terms yet.

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They're not fun enough. They're not exciting enough

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to get us engaged in this tremendous opportunity

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that awaits us. But I would argue that if we want to see

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the kinds of innovations, the hopeful and exciting

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innovations that we hear talked about here at TED,

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in clean energy, in clean education,

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in development, if we want to see those adopted

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and we want to see those scaled,

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we want to see them become the governance of tomorrow,

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then we must all participate,

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then we must get involved.

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We must open up our institutions, and like the leaf,

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we must let the nutrients flow throughout our body politic,

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throughout our culture, to create open institutions

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to create a stronger democracy, a better tomorrow.

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Thank you. (Applause)