Last week, I attended Yahoo’s Digital Democracy conference with an impressive group of political figures, journalists and a room full of enthusiastic students. The event explored how technology can and is shaping the future of our democracy. It was an honor to be involved in such important discussions and experience the energy around the topic.
I joined the ‘Rebooting Government‘ panel with Haley van Dyck from the United States Digital Service and Catherine Bracy from Code for America that was moderated by Yahoo News Columnist Matt Bai.
Much of the discussion revolved around identifying the issues that technology can address, which my fellow panelists did a great job of framing. Catherine Bracy pointed out that “The gap between our expectations as consumers and as citizens is growing and that’s a problem.” Haley van Dyck also brought up the important concern that “Many of the challenges are not so much on the engineering side but on the cultural side.”
Despite the difficulties that were discussed we agreed there is significant room for improvement of government through new technology. During the panel I mentioned the OpenGov Foundation’s work on ChicagoCode.org and our ongoing partnership with the Office of the City Clerk of Chicago. The future is bright and there are many opportunities for contributions in the open government space!
While all of us on the panel have different backgrounds and are approaching the challenge of improving our government in different ways, there is broad agreement around some core principles. We all agreed on the need to make government more responsive to its citizens, how we need to approach problems and solutions with input from citizens and that we need to commit to long term investments in those solutions.
We heartily agree with what Matt Bai said in closing, “You guys are terrific and this is a topic that we need to keep watching!” Check out the 42 minute video of the entire panel here:
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