WEBVTT 00:00:00.795 --> 00:00:02.615 So when the White House was built 00:00:02.615 --> 00:00:05.608 in the early 19th century, it was an open house. 00:00:05.608 --> 00:00:08.744 Neighbors came and went. Under President Adams, 00:00:08.744 --> 00:00:10.113 a local dentist happened by. 00:00:10.113 --> 00:00:12.704 He wanted to shake the President's hand. 00:00:12.704 --> 00:00:14.854 The President dismissed the Secretary of State, 00:00:14.854 --> 00:00:16.772 whom he was conferring with, and asked the dentist 00:00:16.772 --> 00:00:18.582 if he would remove a tooth. 00:00:18.582 --> 00:00:21.640 Later, in the 1850s, under President Pierce, 00:00:21.640 --> 00:00:23.228 he was known to have remarked 00:00:23.228 --> 00:00:25.797 — probably the only thing he's known for — 00:00:25.797 --> 00:00:28.548 when a neighbor passed by and said, "I'd love to see 00:00:28.548 --> 00:00:30.813 the beautiful house," and Pierce said to him, 00:00:30.813 --> 00:00:33.428 "Why my dear sir, of course you may come in. 00:00:33.428 --> 00:00:37.153 This isn't my house. It is the people's house." NOTE Paragraph 00:00:37.153 --> 00:00:39.225 Well, when I got to the White House in the beginning 00:00:39.225 --> 00:00:42.445 of 2009, at the start of the Obama Administration, 00:00:42.445 --> 00:00:45.317 the White House was anything but open. 00:00:45.317 --> 00:00:47.845 Bomb blast curtains covered my windows. 00:00:47.845 --> 00:00:50.024 We were running Windows 2000. 00:00:50.024 --> 00:00:52.207 Social media were blocked at the firewall. 00:00:52.207 --> 00:00:54.747 We didn't have a blog, let alone a dozen twitter accounts 00:00:54.747 --> 00:00:56.770 like we have today. 00:00:56.770 --> 00:00:59.383 I came in to become the head of Open Government, 00:00:59.383 --> 00:01:02.181 to take the values and the practices of transparency, 00:01:02.181 --> 00:01:05.594 participation and collaboration, and instill them 00:01:05.594 --> 00:01:08.420 into the way that we work, to open up government, 00:01:08.420 --> 00:01:09.940 to work with people. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:09.940 --> 00:01:12.634 Now one of the things that we know 00:01:12.634 --> 00:01:15.650 is that companies are very good at getting people to work 00:01:15.650 --> 00:01:17.898 together in teams and in networks to make 00:01:17.898 --> 00:01:21.540 very complex products, like cars and computers, 00:01:21.540 --> 00:01:25.228 and the more complex the products are a society creates, 00:01:25.228 --> 00:01:28.083 the more successful the society is over time. 00:01:28.083 --> 00:01:30.828 Companies make goods, but governments, 00:01:30.828 --> 00:01:33.948 they make public goods. They work on the cure for cancer 00:01:33.948 --> 00:01:36.756 and educating our children and making roads, 00:01:36.756 --> 00:01:40.397 but we don't have institutions that are particularly good 00:01:40.397 --> 00:01:42.933 at this kind of complexity. We don't have institutions 00:01:42.933 --> 00:01:46.050 that are good at bringing our talents to bear, 00:01:46.050 --> 00:01:50.512 at working with us in this kind of open and collaborative way. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:50.512 --> 00:01:52.773 So when we wanted to create our Open Government policy, 00:01:52.773 --> 00:01:55.349 what did we do? We wanted, naturally, to ask public sector 00:01:55.349 --> 00:01:58.293 employees how we should open up government. 00:01:58.293 --> 00:02:01.525 Turns out that had never been done before. 00:02:01.525 --> 00:02:04.144 We wanted to ask members of the public to help us 00:02:04.144 --> 00:02:07.422 come up with a policy, not after the fact, commenting 00:02:07.422 --> 00:02:10.805 on a rule after it's written, the way is typically the case, 00:02:10.805 --> 00:02:14.125 but in advance. There was no legal precedent, 00:02:14.125 --> 00:02:17.267 no cultural precedent, no technical way of doing this. 00:02:17.267 --> 00:02:20.108 In fact, many people told us it was illegal. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:20.108 --> 00:02:23.221 Here's the crux of the obstacle. 00:02:23.221 --> 00:02:25.822 Governments exist to channel the flow of two things, 00:02:25.822 --> 00:02:29.316 really, values and expertise to and from government 00:02:29.316 --> 00:02:33.165 and to and from citizens to the end of making decisions. 00:02:33.165 --> 00:02:35.558 But the way that our institutions are designed, 00:02:35.558 --> 00:02:38.609 in our rather 18th-century, centralized model, 00:02:38.609 --> 00:02:42.293 is to channel the flow of values through voting, 00:02:42.293 --> 00:02:44.493 once every four years, once every two years, at best, 00:02:44.493 --> 00:02:48.054 once a year. This is a rather anemic and thin way, in this 00:02:48.054 --> 00:02:52.059 era of social media, for us to actually express our values. 00:02:52.059 --> 00:02:54.671 Today we have technology that lets us express ourselves 00:02:54.671 --> 00:02:57.675 a great deal, perhaps a little too much. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:57.675 --> 00:02:59.949 Then in the 19th century, we layer on 00:02:59.949 --> 00:03:02.356 the concept of bureaucracy and the administrative state 00:03:02.356 --> 00:03:05.499 to help us govern complex and large societies. 00:03:05.499 --> 00:03:08.731 But we've centralized these bureaucracies. 00:03:08.731 --> 00:03:11.176 We've entrenched them. And we know that 00:03:11.176 --> 00:03:13.888 the smartest person always works for someone else. 00:03:13.888 --> 00:03:16.568 We need to only look around this room to know that 00:03:16.568 --> 00:03:20.165 expertise and intelligence is widely distributed in society, 00:03:20.165 --> 00:03:24.336 and not limited simply to our institutions. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:24.336 --> 00:03:26.602 Scientists have been studying in recent years 00:03:26.602 --> 00:03:29.136 the phenomenon that they often describe as flow, 00:03:29.136 --> 00:03:32.400 that the design of our systems, whether natural or social, 00:03:32.400 --> 00:03:35.083 channel the flow of whatever runs through them. 00:03:35.083 --> 00:03:38.360 So a river is designed to channel the flow of water, 00:03:38.360 --> 00:03:40.830 and the lightning bolt that comes out of a cloud channels 00:03:40.830 --> 00:03:44.334 the flow of electricity, and a leaf is designed to channel 00:03:44.334 --> 00:03:46.354 the flow of nutrients to the tree, 00:03:46.354 --> 00:03:49.358 sometimes even having to route around an obstacle, 00:03:49.358 --> 00:03:52.078 but to get that nutrition flowing. 00:03:52.078 --> 00:03:54.415 The same can be said for our social systems, for our 00:03:54.415 --> 00:03:56.903 systems of government, where, at the very least, 00:03:56.903 --> 00:03:59.918 flow offers us a helpful metaphor for understanding 00:03:59.918 --> 00:04:02.574 what the problem is, what's really broken, 00:04:02.574 --> 00:04:06.259 and the urgent need that we have, that we all feel today, 00:04:06.259 --> 00:04:09.539 to redesign the flow of our institutions. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:09.539 --> 00:04:14.062 We live in a Cambrian era of big data, of social networks, 00:04:14.062 --> 00:04:18.331 and we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions 00:04:18.331 --> 00:04:21.216 that are actually quite recent. 00:04:21.216 --> 00:04:24.456 Think about it: What other business do you know, 00:04:24.456 --> 00:04:26.856 what other sector of the economy, and especially one 00:04:26.856 --> 00:04:30.643 as big as the public sector, that doesn't seek to reinvent 00:04:30.643 --> 00:04:33.547 its business model on a regular basis? 00:04:33.547 --> 00:04:36.638 Sure, we invest plenty in innovation. We invest 00:04:36.638 --> 00:04:40.602 in broadband and science education and science grants, 00:04:40.602 --> 00:04:43.953 but we invest far too little in reinventing and redesigning 00:04:43.953 --> 00:04:46.553 the institutions that we have. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:46.553 --> 00:04:48.889 Now, it's very easy to complain, of course, about 00:04:48.889 --> 00:04:52.353 partisan politics and entrenched bureaucracy, and we love 00:04:52.353 --> 00:04:55.269 to complain about government. It's a perennial pastime, 00:04:55.269 --> 00:04:57.921 especially around election time, but 00:04:57.921 --> 00:05:01.307 the world is complex. We soon will have 10 billion people, 00:05:01.307 --> 00:05:04.180 many of whom will lack basic resources. 00:05:04.180 --> 00:05:07.498 So complain as we might, what actually can replace 00:05:07.498 --> 00:05:09.809 what we have today? 00:05:09.809 --> 00:05:13.916 What comes the day after the Arab Spring? NOTE Paragraph 00:05:13.916 --> 00:05:17.802 Well, one attractive alternative that obviously presents itself 00:05:17.802 --> 00:05:20.562 to us is that of networks. Right? Networks 00:05:20.562 --> 00:05:23.274 like Facebook and Twitter. They're lean. They're mean. 00:05:23.274 --> 00:05:25.778 You've got 3,000 employees at Facebook 00:05:25.778 --> 00:05:28.724 governing 900 million inhabitants. 00:05:28.724 --> 00:05:31.467 We might even call them citizens, because they've recently 00:05:31.467 --> 00:05:34.842 risen up to fight against legislative incursion, 00:05:34.842 --> 00:05:37.377 and the citizens of these networks work together 00:05:37.377 --> 00:05:40.618 to serve each other in great ways. 00:05:40.618 --> 00:05:43.410 But private communities, private, corporate, 00:05:43.410 --> 00:05:46.550 privatizing communities, are not bottom-up democracies. 00:05:46.550 --> 00:05:48.560 They cannot replace government. 00:05:48.560 --> 00:05:51.662 Friending someone on Facebook is not complex enough 00:05:51.662 --> 00:05:54.315 to do the hard work of you and I collaborating 00:05:54.315 --> 00:05:58.207 with each other and doing the hard work of governance. 00:05:58.207 --> 00:06:01.145 But social media do teach us something. 00:06:01.145 --> 00:06:05.619 Why is Twitter so successful? Because it opens up its platform. 00:06:05.619 --> 00:06:08.556 It opens up the API to allow hundreds of thousands 00:06:08.556 --> 00:06:12.027 of new applications to be built on top of it, so that we can 00:06:12.027 --> 00:06:16.361 read and process information in new and exciting ways. 00:06:16.361 --> 00:06:18.698 We need to think about how to open up the API 00:06:18.698 --> 00:06:22.759 of government, and the way that we're going to do that, 00:06:22.759 --> 00:06:26.007 the next great superpower is going to be the one 00:06:26.007 --> 00:06:31.990 who can successfully combine the hierarchy of institution -- 00:06:31.990 --> 00:06:34.343 because we have to maintain those public values, 00:06:34.343 --> 00:06:37.262 we have to coordinate the flow -- but with the diversity 00:06:37.262 --> 00:06:39.927 and the pulsating life and the chaos and the excitement 00:06:39.927 --> 00:06:43.023 of networks, all of us working together to build 00:06:43.023 --> 00:06:46.724 these new innovations on top of our institutions, 00:06:46.724 --> 00:06:48.942 to engage in the practice of governance. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:48.942 --> 00:06:52.075 We have a precedent for this. Good old Henry II here, 00:06:52.075 --> 00:06:55.927 in the 12th century, invented the jury. 00:06:55.927 --> 00:07:00.152 Powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power 00:07:00.152 --> 00:07:02.853 from government to citizens. 00:07:02.853 --> 00:07:06.241 Today we have the opportunity, and we have 00:07:06.241 --> 00:07:09.742 the imperative, to create thousands of new ways 00:07:09.742 --> 00:07:12.981 of interconnecting between networks and institutions, 00:07:12.981 --> 00:07:15.645 thousands of new kinds of juries: the citizen jury, 00:07:15.645 --> 00:07:19.322 the Carrotmob, the hackathon, we are just beginning 00:07:19.322 --> 00:07:22.376 to invent the models by which we can cocreate 00:07:22.376 --> 00:07:24.124 the process of governance. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:24.124 --> 00:07:26.739 Now, we don't fully have a picture of what this will look like 00:07:26.739 --> 00:07:29.361 yet, but we're seeing pockets of evolution 00:07:29.361 --> 00:07:32.343 emerging all around us -- maybe not even evolution, 00:07:32.343 --> 00:07:36.152 I'd even start to call it a revolution -- in the way that we govern. 00:07:36.152 --> 00:07:37.636 Some of it's very high-tech, 00:07:37.636 --> 00:07:39.690 and some of it is extremely low-tech, 00:07:39.690 --> 00:07:43.060 such as the project that MKSS is running in Rajasthan, 00:07:43.060 --> 00:07:46.604 India, where they take the spending data of the state 00:07:46.604 --> 00:07:50.047 and paint it on 100,000 village walls, 00:07:50.047 --> 00:07:52.342 and then invite the villagers to come and comment 00:07:52.342 --> 00:07:54.830 who is on the government payroll, who's actually died, 00:07:54.830 --> 00:07:57.454 what are the bridges that have been built to nowhere, 00:07:57.454 --> 00:07:59.798 and to work together through civic engagement to save 00:07:59.798 --> 00:08:03.561 real money and participate and have access to that budget. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:03.561 --> 00:08:05.959 But it's not just about policing government. 00:08:05.959 --> 00:08:07.686 It's also about creating government. 00:08:07.686 --> 00:08:10.804 Spacehive in the U.K. is engaging in crowd-funding, 00:08:10.804 --> 00:08:13.489 getting you and me to raise the money to build 00:08:13.489 --> 00:08:16.147 the goalposts and the park benches that will actually 00:08:16.147 --> 00:08:19.709 allow us to deliver better services in our communities. 00:08:19.709 --> 00:08:23.347 No one is better at this activity of actually getting us 00:08:23.347 --> 00:08:26.587 to engage in delivering services, 00:08:26.587 --> 00:08:29.738 sometimes where none exist, than Ushahidi. 00:08:29.738 --> 00:08:34.091 Created after the post-election riots in Kenya in 2008, 00:08:34.091 --> 00:08:38.027 this crisis-mapping website and community is actually able 00:08:38.027 --> 00:08:40.672 to crowdsource and target the delivery of 00:08:40.672 --> 00:08:43.763 better rescue services to people trapped under the rubble, 00:08:43.763 --> 00:08:46.219 whether it's after the earthquakes in Haiti, 00:08:46.219 --> 00:08:48.744 or more recently in Italy. 00:08:48.744 --> 00:08:51.875 And the Red Cross too is training volunteers and Twitter 00:08:51.875 --> 00:08:54.743 is certifying them, not simply to supplement existing 00:08:54.743 --> 00:08:58.779 government institutions, but in many cases, to replace them. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:58.779 --> 00:09:01.787 Now what we're seeing lots of examples of, obviously, 00:09:01.787 --> 00:09:03.474 is the opening up of government data, 00:09:03.474 --> 00:09:06.474 not enough examples of this yet, but we're starting 00:09:06.474 --> 00:09:10.003 to see this practice of people creating and generating 00:09:10.003 --> 00:09:13.472 innovative applications on top of government data. 00:09:13.472 --> 00:09:15.803 There's so many examples I could have picked, and I 00:09:15.803 --> 00:09:18.969 selected this one of Jon Bon Jovi. Some of you 00:09:18.969 --> 00:09:21.235 may or may not know that he runs a soup kitchen 00:09:21.235 --> 00:09:23.996 in New Jersey, where he caters to and serves the homeless 00:09:23.996 --> 00:09:25.689 and particularly homeless veterans. 00:09:25.689 --> 00:09:28.467 In February, he approached the White House, and said, 00:09:28.467 --> 00:09:32.312 "I would like to fund a prize to create scalable national 00:09:32.312 --> 00:09:35.839 applications, apps, that will help not only the homeless 00:09:35.839 --> 00:09:39.274 but those who deliver services [to] them to do so better." 00:09:39.274 --> 00:09:42.514 February 2012 to June of 2012, 00:09:42.514 --> 00:09:45.502 the finalists are announced in the competition. 00:09:45.502 --> 00:09:48.491 Can you imagine, in the bureaucratic world of yesteryear, 00:09:48.491 --> 00:09:51.237 getting anything done in a four-month period of time? 00:09:51.237 --> 00:09:53.373 You can barely fill out the forms in that amount of time, 00:09:53.373 --> 00:09:56.237 let alone generate real, palpable innovations 00:09:56.237 --> 00:09:58.128 that improve people's lives. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:58.128 --> 00:10:01.361 And I want to be clear to mention that this open government 00:10:01.361 --> 00:10:05.138 revolution is not about privatizing government, 00:10:05.138 --> 00:10:08.036 because in many cases what it can do when we have 00:10:08.036 --> 00:10:11.132 the will to do so is to deliver more progressive 00:10:11.132 --> 00:10:15.255 and better policy than the regulations and the legislative 00:10:15.255 --> 00:10:18.215 and litigation-oriented strategies 00:10:18.215 --> 00:10:20.815 by which we make policy today. 00:10:20.815 --> 00:10:24.542 In the State of Texas, they regulate 515 professions, 00:10:24.542 --> 00:10:26.606 from well-driller to florist. 00:10:26.606 --> 00:10:29.829 Now, you can carry a gun into a church in Dallas, 00:10:29.829 --> 00:10:32.988 but do not make a flower arrangement without a license, 00:10:32.988 --> 00:10:35.604 because that will land you in jail. 00:10:35.604 --> 00:10:39.621 So what is Texas doing? They're asking you and me, 00:10:39.621 --> 00:10:43.709 using online policy wikis, to help not simply get rid of 00:10:43.709 --> 00:10:47.270 burdensome regulations that impede entrepreneurship, 00:10:47.270 --> 00:10:50.269 but to replace those regulations with more innovative 00:10:50.269 --> 00:10:53.133 alternatives, sometimes using transparency in the creation 00:10:53.133 --> 00:10:55.115 of new iPhone apps that will allows us 00:10:55.115 --> 00:10:57.388 both to protect consumers and the public 00:10:57.388 --> 00:11:00.899 and to encourage economic development. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:00.899 --> 00:11:04.053 That is a nice sideline of open government. 00:11:04.053 --> 00:11:06.764 It's not only the benefits that we've talked about with regard 00:11:06.764 --> 00:11:10.221 to development. It's the economic benefits and the 00:11:10.221 --> 00:11:14.847 job creation that's coming from this open innovation work. 00:11:14.847 --> 00:11:17.667 Sberbank, the largest and oldest bank in Russia, 00:11:17.667 --> 00:11:19.467 largely owned by the Russian government, 00:11:19.467 --> 00:11:22.467 has started practicing crowdsourcing, engaging 00:11:22.467 --> 00:11:25.819 its employees and citizens in the public in developing innovations. 00:11:25.819 --> 00:11:30.239 Last year they saved a billion dollars, 30 billion rubles, 00:11:30.239 --> 00:11:32.996 from open innovation, and they're pushing radically 00:11:32.996 --> 00:11:35.655 the extension of crowdsourcing, not only from banking, 00:11:35.655 --> 00:11:37.698 but into the public sector. 00:11:37.698 --> 00:11:40.439 And we see lots of examples of these innovators using 00:11:40.439 --> 00:11:43.289 open government data, not simply to make apps, 00:11:43.289 --> 00:11:45.351 but then to make companies and to hire people 00:11:45.351 --> 00:11:47.652 to build them working with the government. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:47.652 --> 00:11:49.782 So a lot of these innovations are local. 00:11:49.782 --> 00:11:52.888 In San Ramon, California, they published an iPhone app 00:11:52.888 --> 00:11:56.445 in which they allow you or me to say we are certified 00:11:56.445 --> 00:12:00.012 CPR-trained, and then when someone has a heart attack, 00:12:00.012 --> 00:12:02.252 a notification goes out so that you 00:12:02.252 --> 00:12:06.208 can rush over to the person over here and deliver CPR. 00:12:06.208 --> 00:12:08.512 The victim who receives bystander CPR 00:12:08.512 --> 00:12:10.977 is more than twice as likely to survive. 00:12:10.977 --> 00:12:14.652 "There is a hero in all of us," is their slogan. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:14.652 --> 00:12:17.195 But it's not limited to the local. 00:12:17.195 --> 00:12:19.856 British Columbia, Canada, is publishing a catalogue 00:12:19.856 --> 00:12:22.940 of all the ways that its residents and citizens can engage 00:12:22.940 --> 00:12:26.658 with the state in the cocreation of governance. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:26.658 --> 00:12:29.719 Let me be very clear, 00:12:29.719 --> 00:12:31.188 and perhaps controversial, 00:12:31.188 --> 00:12:33.977 that open government is not 00:12:33.977 --> 00:12:35.950 about transparent government. 00:12:35.950 --> 00:12:38.868 Simply throwing data over the transom doesn't change 00:12:38.868 --> 00:12:40.280 how government works. 00:12:40.280 --> 00:12:42.847 It doesn't get anybody to do anything with that data 00:12:42.847 --> 00:12:46.556 to change lives, to solve problems, and it doesn't change 00:12:46.556 --> 00:12:47.828 government. 00:12:47.828 --> 00:12:50.847 What it does is it creates an adversarial relationship 00:12:50.847 --> 00:12:52.575 between civil society and government 00:12:52.575 --> 00:12:55.618 over the control and ownership of information. 00:12:55.618 --> 00:12:58.202 And transparency, by itself, is not reducing the flow 00:12:58.202 --> 00:13:00.614 of money into politics, and arguably, 00:13:00.614 --> 00:13:03.347 it's not even producing accountability as well as it might 00:13:03.347 --> 00:13:06.810 if we took the next step of combining participation and 00:13:06.810 --> 00:13:10.921 collaboration with transparency to transform how we work. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:10.921 --> 00:13:13.658 We're going to see this evolution really in two phases, 00:13:13.658 --> 00:13:16.947 I think. The first phase of the open government revolution 00:13:16.947 --> 00:13:20.723 is delivering better information from the crowd 00:13:20.723 --> 00:13:22.117 into the center. 00:13:22.117 --> 00:13:25.064 Starting in 2005, and this is how this open government 00:13:25.064 --> 00:13:27.018 work in the U.S. really got started, 00:13:27.018 --> 00:13:29.274 I was teaching a patent law class to my students and 00:13:29.274 --> 00:13:33.045 explaining to them how a single person in the bureaucracy 00:13:33.045 --> 00:13:35.176 has the power to make a decision 00:13:35.176 --> 00:13:39.661 about which patent application becomes the next patent, 00:13:39.661 --> 00:13:42.403 and therefore monopolizes for 20 years the rights 00:13:42.403 --> 00:13:45.410 over an entire field of inventive activity. 00:13:45.410 --> 00:13:48.322 Well, what did we do? We said, we can make a website, 00:13:48.322 --> 00:13:50.715 we can make an expert network, a social network, 00:13:50.715 --> 00:13:52.987 that would connect the network to the institution 00:13:52.987 --> 00:13:55.368 to allow scientists and technologists to get 00:13:55.368 --> 00:13:58.003 better information to the patent office 00:13:58.003 --> 00:14:00.466 to aid in making those decisions. 00:14:00.466 --> 00:14:03.098 We piloted the work in the U.S. and the U.K. and Japan 00:14:03.098 --> 00:14:05.891 and Australia, and now I'm pleased to report 00:14:05.891 --> 00:14:08.147 that the United States Patent Office will be rolling out 00:14:08.147 --> 00:14:12.612 universal, complete, and total openness, 00:14:12.612 --> 00:14:15.658 so that all patent applications will now be open 00:14:15.658 --> 00:14:19.326 for citizen participation, beginning this year. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:19.326 --> 00:14:22.262 The second phase of this evolution — Yeah. (Applause) 00:14:22.262 --> 00:14:25.215 They deserve a hand. (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:14:25.215 --> 00:14:27.750 The first phase is in getting better information in. 00:14:27.750 --> 00:14:31.607 The second phase is in getting decision-making power out. 00:14:31.607 --> 00:14:34.222 Participatory budgeting has long been practiced 00:14:34.222 --> 00:14:35.641 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. 00:14:35.641 --> 00:14:38.623 They're just starting it in the 49th Ward in Chicago. 00:14:38.623 --> 00:14:42.159 Russia is using wikis to get citizens writing law together, 00:14:42.159 --> 00:14:44.511 as is Lithuania. When we start to see 00:14:44.511 --> 00:14:46.815 power over the core functions of government 00:14:46.815 --> 00:14:50.435 — spending, legislation, decision-making — 00:14:50.435 --> 00:14:54.496 then we're well on our way to an open government revolution. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:54.496 --> 00:14:58.327 There are many things that we can do to get us there. 00:14:58.327 --> 00:15:00.990 Obviously opening up the data is one, 00:15:00.990 --> 00:15:03.353 but the important thing is to create lots more -- 00:15:03.353 --> 00:15:07.583 create and curate -- lots more participatory opportunities. 00:15:07.583 --> 00:15:10.281 Hackathons and mashathons and working with data 00:15:10.281 --> 00:15:13.990 to build apps is an intelligible way for people to engage 00:15:13.990 --> 00:15:16.490 and participate, like the jury is, 00:15:16.490 --> 00:15:19.514 but we're going to need lots more things like it. 00:15:19.514 --> 00:15:24.165 And that's why we need to start with our youngest people. 00:15:24.165 --> 00:15:26.781 We've heard talk here at TED about people 00:15:26.781 --> 00:15:30.850 biohacking and hacking their plants with Arduino, 00:15:30.850 --> 00:15:33.894 and Mozilla is doing work around the world in getting 00:15:33.894 --> 00:15:37.253 young people to build websites and make videos. 00:15:37.253 --> 00:15:39.989 When we start by teaching young people that we live, 00:15:39.989 --> 00:15:43.507 not in a passive society, a read-only society, 00:15:43.507 --> 00:15:46.074 but in a writable society, where we have the power 00:15:46.074 --> 00:15:49.698 to change our communities, to change our institutions, 00:15:49.698 --> 00:15:52.834 that's when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway 00:15:52.834 --> 00:15:56.045 towards this open government innovation, 00:15:56.045 --> 00:15:57.754 towards this open government movement, 00:15:57.754 --> 00:16:00.277 towards this open government revolution. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:00.277 --> 00:16:02.523 So let me close by saying that I think the important thing 00:16:02.523 --> 00:16:08.382 for us to do is to talk about and demand this revolution. 00:16:08.382 --> 00:16:11.677 We don't have words, really, to describe it yet. 00:16:11.677 --> 00:16:13.902 Words like equality and fairness and the traditional 00:16:13.902 --> 00:16:18.269 elections, democracy, these are not really great terms yet. 00:16:18.269 --> 00:16:21.017 They're not fun enough. They're not exciting enough 00:16:21.017 --> 00:16:24.336 to get us engaged in this tremendous opportunity 00:16:24.336 --> 00:16:27.744 that awaits us. But I would argue that if we want to see 00:16:27.744 --> 00:16:30.447 the kinds of innovations, the hopeful and exciting 00:16:30.447 --> 00:16:33.111 innovations that we hear talked about here at TED, 00:16:33.111 --> 00:16:35.288 in clean energy, in clean education, 00:16:35.288 --> 00:16:37.879 in development, if we want to see those adopted 00:16:37.879 --> 00:16:40.135 and we want to see those scaled, 00:16:40.135 --> 00:16:42.927 we want to see them become the governance of tomorrow, 00:16:42.927 --> 00:16:44.632 then we must all participate, 00:16:44.632 --> 00:16:46.130 then we must get involved. 00:16:46.130 --> 00:16:49.340 We must open up our institutions, and like the leaf, 00:16:49.340 --> 00:16:53.534 we must let the nutrients flow throughout our body politic, 00:16:53.534 --> 00:16:56.734 throughout our culture, to create open institutions 00:16:56.734 --> 00:16:59.403 to create a stronger democracy, a better tomorrow. 00:16:59.403 --> 00:17:02.306 Thank you. (Applause)