Clay Shirky’s recent TED talk, “How the Internet will (one day) transform government,” is a powerful assessment of how governments can utilize the power of the Internet to lower the costs of doing things. He investigates the government’s role in the coordination of collective effort, and how the intrinsic features of the web can mean the dramatic lowering of costs facilitating big changes.
Via TED:
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.
