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

My colleague John Wonderlich put up a post last week responding to Shirky's
talk:

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/09/27/on-legislative-collaboration-and-version-control/

I find Shirky to be an incredibly sharp observer in general, but I do think
the "let's make X more like Github" argument tends to be most often
deployed by people who don't know very much about X (and often don't write
enough code to understand what Github is good for).  At the very least it's
important to acknowledge that Shirky gets the history and function of
distributed version control systems wrong.

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 5:03 AM, Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com> wrote:

> I imagine most of you have seen this already, but in case you haven't
> Clay Shirky's Ted Talk from earlier this year (recently posted) is
> really inspiring for those that care about the egov space:
>
>   How the Internet will (one day) transform government
>
> http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html
>
> Near the end there's a segment that really sums up the challenge that
> this w3c egov-ig faces:
>
> """
> The people experimenting with participation don't have legislative
> power, and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting
> with participation. They are experimenting with openness. There's no
> democracy worth the name that doesn't have a transparency move, but
> transparency is openness in only one direction, and being given a
> dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a
> democracy makes to its citizens.
> """
>
> I encourage you to give it a listen.
>
> //Ed
>
>