Translator: Dawn Theresa Suffling Reviewer: Omar Estaitih Ávila
In the next few minutes we'll talk about Open Government,
a novel idea.
In recent years I have worked on the design and implementation
of various government projects and open innovation.
And I can assure you that all of them have been very inspiring,
and in some ways, exciting.
We're going to talk about the history of Open Government.
Many experts point out that the start of Open Government
was 2009, during Barack Obama's first presidency in the United States,
where the need for government transparency was set out
and citizen participation was encouraged
through networks such as the Internet.
But, we can go back several centuries.
The idea of democracy is closely linked with the idea of ​​an Open Government.
Every democratic movement at different times in the world
talks about government that is open,
transparent, participative and collaborative.
Let's go to ancient Greece, more precisely to Athens.
There, we have the origin of democracy: demos, people, and kratos, power.
In Athens, the elite who were considered citizens
met in the Agora, the public square,
to decide and debate public issues.
A direct democracy, a face-to-face democracy.
But moving closer to today.
The current existing democracies that we can name,
are very different than Athenian democracy.
Democracies that arise in response to monarchic order,
or authoritarian regimes,
are democracies that require a complex structure
that we can call institutional engineering.
It's laid out in regulatory frameworks, modern constitutions.
It's not a face to face democracy now, it's not a direct democracy.
It's a representative democracy, as stated in our constitution:
"The people neither deliberate nor govern, except through their representatives."
Also, in this democracy,
which emerged in the nineteenth century,
inspired by the values of political liberalism and contractualism,
we also see hints of what we now know as Open Government.
What is it that fundamentally changes
to constitue what I call this new wave of democratization?
It's what experts, philosophers, have called the social network.
A society that questions the hierarchical order across the board.
In the public sector, but also at work, in society, in the economy.
And what allows this online community to exist
is the Internet.
The Internet is a distributed network that practically bypasses borders.
With increasingly affordable access, it accompanies us more and more in life.
Not only in the office, or at home,
but through mobile devices that get us online permanently.
So we have the network society and the Internet,
which allow us to explain this new paradigm of government.
Many people talk about new values,
but I dare say we should rather talk about the old and the new democratic values.
What is the fundamental pillar
on which this idea of Open Government sits?
On the one hand, it's transparency.
What is transparency?
It's the idea that all the data generated by the government is public,
and therefore it must be accessible, and therefore it can be reused
by any citizen or group of citizens,
by foundations, civic associations, etc.
Another part is collaboration,
something that's not very common.
Collaboration within governments, between different levels of government,
sharing their problems, experience and the solutions they have come up with.
Also, the collaboration between the government and the citizens.
Which sounds beautiful, but in practice, we don't see it often.
And the third part is citizen participation.
Remember, the Internet, we are in a network.
An Open Government must encourage the ongoing consultation of the citizens.
It can organize permanent public debates.
It can ask for collaboration, reach out to experts, citizens
and groups of citizens, about how to solve the government's problems.
I want to stress that an Open Government isn't an electronic government.
It makes life easier at a public office if they don't ask us for identification,
which the State itself generated.
Or if we use a technological service and set up an appointment
from the public health or education system, via the Internet.
This makes the actual processes more effective and efficient.
But when we talk about Open Government, we are talking about a new paradigm
based on the ideas of collaboration, participation and transparency,
from a modern perspective, from a twentieth century perspective.
From the perspective of a networked and connected society.
Where do we find the people who apply these principles on a permanent basis,
in modern societies?
It's the community of open-source software programmers.
I don't want to elaborate on this but there are tools such as GitHub, etc.,
that allow a large group of programmers to work collaboratively,
without hierarchical coordination, and to do something very difficult,
to create programs that will then be used for computing,
and which require precise instructions, to act in an inflexible way.
And they have succeeded.
The community of open-source software programmers
doesn't care where they are in the world, or what the time is,
they have complete access to the code,
they are free people.
And they can create something as complex as a program to run on a computer.
Now, we have the online society, the Internet, a tool programmers use.
Aren't the citizens programmers, what do they have to do with this?
Recently, in mid-October, this tool GitHub
launched a platform for the Open Government.
We have the online society, the programmers, a platform,
but we also have experience.
A year ago, the German Parliament used GitHub.
It's not coding the software, it's coding the legislation.
Any new legislation introduced in the German Parliament appears online.
All of the processing that's done on a bill is permanently online.
All of the citizens, or organized groups of citizens,
can comment and even propose modifications to the bill.
They use GitHub not to program the software, but to codify laws.
In a collaborative way, open and accessible to every citizen,
as long as they have an Internet connection.
And this idea that some pin down to 2009,
has succeeded in almost 40 national states, as of 2011,
in boosting what is known as the Open Government Partnership.
I'm not going to elaborate on the degree of consistency or depth,
that this idea has in each one of these States.
But I can assure you there are thousands of examples
of transparency and citizen participation,
which at a municipal, provincial or national level,
are related to Open Government.
Coming nearer to home, in 2010, the University of Buenos Aires
set up a public information access office,
with a person in charge in each one of the academic units.
All accessible via the Internet.
Fulfilling one of the principles of an Open Government, transparency.
But let's be honest about it.
When we go to a public institution, to a government agency,
we often find a closed door.
And it's a closed door
that, on many occasions, it is difficult to open.
The Spanish expert César Claderón,
a friend that knows a lot about the topic of Open Government,
says that these governments, these administrations,
are under the Gollum or Smeagol effect,
the character from "The Lord of the Rings."
As if the government were a ring, wanting the benefit and power for itself.
This Gollum or Smeagol effect is like the adage "Information is power."
Therefore, I won't share it with anybody, it's mine, it's just for me.
It's true that many administrations labor under this paradigm.
Now, what can happen with this way of governing?
I think it's ironic, others might say almost cynical,
the way Borges explains it perfectly in "The Book of Sand,"
when two characters engage in the following dialogue:
"What happened to the governments?"
"According to tradition, they gradually fell into disuse."
This idea that closed governments, where they don't share anything,
they don't work collaboratively, there isn't any citizen participation,
they're going to fall into disuse.
But we should also remember that the public and the collective exist,
and things outside our private sphere,
that are beyond us,
that we can't solve ourselves, that's why governments exist.
I think that one can generate a new wave of democratization
under the precepts of collaboration, transparency and participation.
There is a network society, the Internet,
there are open-source programmers,
there are very significant, specific examples
of important institutions in the world
that apply these principles of Open Government.
And almost all of us use social networks.
We are in constant contact.
Look at all the tools we have.
We have an increasingly affordable, amazing distributed network,
where we can organize ourselves by nodes, where we can organize by interests,
where we can participate, where we can collaborate.
There is a whole generation
that is aware that these mechanisms, these tools, do work.
They work well. That they're collaborative.
They know that to share doesn't mean to lose power,
but to enrich the power of the whole.
Therefore, I think that we have to make our own.
Political leadership is needed for the changes.
But citizen leadership is needed as well.
I think we can find a better democracy,
and implement the principles of Open Government.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)