RE: Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government

"Is it really clear ... what their agenda really is?"

Pardon me for sounding like a broken record but, to me, that is yet another
statement of the need for an open, standard, machine-readable format like
StratML for the expression of plans and reporting of results.
http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm

Shirky may sound like a visionary to some but to me he is talking about
paving the tired, old cow path of trying to gain the upper hand, politically
speaking, to enforce the will of the majority upon the minority (by
crowdsourcing the drafting of legislation) ... even if the "minority"
constitutes as much as 49.9% of the electorate (or even 100% of those who
will be required to provide the money).  

In a more mature (business-quality) stage of "social" networking, it seems
to me that we should be able to do far better than that -- by joining more
efficiently together with those who share our values to apply *our own time,
effort, and resources* to more effectively accomplish objectives we hold in
common.

It seems to me that we already have far too many laws and regulations and
far too little performance and results... and that Einstein's definition of
insanity applies.

Owen Ambur
Co-Chair, AIIM StratML Committee
Co-Chair Emeritus, xml.gov CoP
Communications/Membership Director, FIRM
Former Project Manager, ET.gov
Invited Expert, W3C eGov IG



-----Original Message-----
From: Sandro Hawke [mailto:sandro@w3.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2012 8:35 PM
To: public-egov-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform
government

[deleted]

Is it really clear in an Open Source project who is motivating a particular
patch, or funding it, or what their agenda really is?  I don't think so.

(Yes, it's clear who is putting it forward, but that's about it. There
aren't a lot of cases where the person who puts it forward has a non-obvious
motivation, but I'm pretty sure it's happened a few times.)

I do think it's important that drafts of legislation be circulated in
machine readable form so people can compute diffs and more easily review the
changes, but that seems pretty trivial compared to what Shirky is proposing,
and perhaps is already done.

Frankly, working in the sphere of W3C spec writing, which is vastly smaller
in all ways than legislation, I don't even know how to make git 
or github that useful.    I have some ideas for how to make the concentric
circles of review easier to manage, but they're kind of novel and people
don't seem very interested.

     -- Sandro

[deleted]

Received on Thursday, 11 October 2012 03:12:39 UTC