About a month ago I was at
CeDEM, the Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government, in Krems, Austria. Several projects were focused on communication between local municipalities and the citizenry, with a focus on communication and knowledge sharing that could go either way (such as, a municipality learning what local citizens don't know, and getting that information to them). So a lot of it concerned data collection and analysis.
That should sound familiar, given recent events. I pointed out how there were two sectors that already had the three needed factors:
- Data collection capability,
- Data (have been collecting),
- Data analysis capability.
These two sectors are, of course, intelligence agencies for at least the US and perhaps Britain (and other governments on a smaller scale, most likely), as well as the information companies themselves (in this case I mean information conduit providers, like Google, AT&T, and Verizon, to name a few).
Sure we could pass laws forcing these two sectors to help out local governments provide better services (one eternal promise of not just the internet, but of the information future -- it's always a day away), but I doubt that will happen. That's rather sad, and falls short of the "
of the people, by the people, for the people" ideal from US President Lincoln.