Some Thoughts on Our Open Data/Open Government Event Today, Noon

I'm excited to be hosting a special event today, one which will take a very in-depth, expert look at how the British and American governments are embracing the open government movement.   We will be hearing from two old friends – Andrew McLaughlin, now Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House, and James Crabtree, formerly of NDN, now managing editor of the UK based magazine, Prospect, who is visiting us from London.

Behind this movement toward open data and open government is a clear sense that in the 21st century the world’s rising middle class, with higher levels of education, affluence, and connectedness, armed with greater access to information than ever before, will demand more openness, transparency, honesty and accountability from all their institutions, but particularly from government and their elected leaders.

These simple and reasonable demands of the world's rising middle class make it possible that the great ideological struggle of the 21st century will not be the same left-right struggle we saw play out in the 20th century, but one increasingly about open governments and societies versus ones more closed, more authoritarian, more statist.  Open, accessible governments, leaders and political parties will prosper in this new world of the 21st century.  Closed ones - China and Iran for example - will find the repression of their own people increasingly difficult as their people become more wired, connected and expectant of basic freedoms.  The transition of global politics from a more top-down broadcast model of societal communications to one that is more bottom up, and where people themselves increasingly have power, is one of the great global events of this new century. 

So while this conversation today may sound a bit geeky – and it probably will be – it is really about something much bigger, more profound, and at the very center of the most important discussions just beginning to break out across the world today. 

So join us if you can, live online, or in the NDN offices at noon.  It is going to be a good one.