Tuesday, December 17, 2013

21st century government - the end game

Sometimes it's just easier to start with the end game. When governance finally catches up to the technological/information revolutions unfolding around it, what will it look like?

The operations of government will be known (at least the non-classified ones, which is the vast bulk of money spent and world impact). They will be measurable and measured, and responsibility will be clearly fixed and verified. These performance indicators will be available online for any automated system to pick up in real time and individual citizens will have their own dashboards of the key performance indicators (KPI) that they personally think matter. Some will hand assemble them. Others will just pick the public KPIs of people that they trust. Most will combine both techniques.

Elections will still sometimes devolve into popularity contests but recalls will become more common as incompetence can no longer be hidden so well.

None of this is science fiction. None of this even requires very innovative technical solutions. It's all plain vanilla technology that's been in production use for decades in the private sector.

It's an attractive future, purged of a lot of the inefficiencies and foolishness that happens at present. We can do this. Faster please.

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