Government can't ignore open source any longer
Published: 08 Mar 2007 14:17 GMT
The shadow chancellor's speech was delivered at the Royal Society of Arts on Thursday 8 March.
We are all here this morning because we share a common belief: we believe in the power of technology — in its ability to help transform society for the better by giving individuals more freedom, more choice and ultimately more power. At heart we are technology optimists.
Of course, technological change isn't always easy to deal with, because it so often disrupts the established way of doing things. Just look at how digital networks have completely rewritten the rules of production and distribution. Shelf space, airtime, room on the pages of a newspaper — these used to determine which artists got their records played, what TV shows we watched and which elite opinions appeared in print.
Today anyone can record songs and put them online; shoot home movies, edit them, add special effects and broadcast them to millions worldwide; or start a blog, sharing opinions and comments with readers in different countries and on different continents.
In fact the internet is like the child pushing at boundaries of authority and challenging the established way of doing things — the business models from the last century, traditional media, long accepted notions of national jurisdiction and concepts of governmental control.
The challenge is for the "pushed" — probably most of us here in this room — to resist the urge to push back; to regulate and legislate; to try to tame and to control. Instead we need to harness the internet to help us become more accountable, more transparent and more accessible — and so bridge the growing gap between government and governed.
Our willingness to change needs to match the scale of the technological revolution taking place all around us. Just as companies all over the world are changing the way that they do business, so too must we evolve.
Our ambition must be no less than this: to recast the political settlement for the digital age.
Last November, in a talk on politics in the internet age, I identified some of the key social changes that have been unleashed by this technological revolution.
Today I want to go further and set out the three pillars on which I believe this new political settlement should be built. The first of these pillars is about equality — equality of information — or what Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, called "the democratisation of access to information" when he spoke to our Party Conference.
For centuries, access to the world's information — and the ability to communicate it — was controlled by a few: the powerful, the wealthy and the well educated.
Today, by typing just a few key words into a computer, the individual at home not only has access to more information than whole governments had access to, just a generation ago — just as importantly, she has the power to search through it more quickly than any government clerk.
This is rapidly eroding traditional power and informational imbalances. No longer is there an asymmetry of information between the individual and the state, or between the layperson and the expert. This shift is changing the world.
It is empowering individuals; raising expectations of government services; and increasing accountability for all of us who work in the public sector and in politics.
But sadly, government thinking is still a long way behind ideas like this. Take my area of responsibility: the Treasury. In the US, the federal government is creating a website that allows people to see how and where their money is spent by searching through all its contracts, grants and programmes. They call it "googling your tax dollars".
My Treasury team has introduced legislation in the House of Lords that would introduce...
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