Clay Shirky’s new TED talk on Opening Government

Clay Shirky – social media theorist – reflecting on applying open source organizing and version-ing control tools like GitHub to further democratic participation or to write parliamentary bills: “I’d love to tell you that the fact that open-source programmers have worked this out means that innovation is inevitable. …It’s not. Part of the problem is lack of information. The bigger problem is power. The people experimenting don’t have legislative power. The people with legislative power are not experimenting with participation. They are experimenting with transparency, but transparency is openness in one direction.”

Check out also Beth Noveck, author of WikiGovernment,  Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, and UK Prime Minister, David Cameron reflecting on Opening Government.