Open Government: A New Hope

There seems to be a new-found respect for the past, and a humble desire to learn from it, not rewrite it.  

I do love me some metaphor, but this, I think, is an apt one.

Of late, politics has become a bit of a revisionist game, with the people pulling the strings thinking that what they create is what people want, rather than the reverse.  All the latest toys are employed - micro-targeting, social media campaigns, so on and so forth.

But it's all an exercise that comes across as hollow.  As each Party tries to claim ownership of our democratic narrative, we're being messaged rather than engaged.  No community of experience - no community, period.  It's tribes and coalitions.

There's a new hope out there, though, that does reclaim the spirit of what made our various forms of democracy special; a belief in what we contribute to, a desire to engage, to consider, to build for rather than expect from.

This new hope is the Open Government movement.  

It's nascent, still; I don't think the powers that be quite sense the threat it poses to the status quo.  Maybe when they do they'll cry to close their fist even tighter, but by then it'll be too late.

That is, after all, how it goes - first they ignore, then they mock, then they attack.

We know what happens next, don't we?