Below are a few of the key ideas that I heard from Beth:
– Open Government is not something nice to do; it’s something we MUST do.
– Open Government is not about technology, it’s about improving our schools and our communities.
– Everyone is an expert in something…when we only ask citizens to vote every four years, we are essentially wasting our greatest resource.
– We need to leverage some variation of what Clay Shirky calls “cognitive surplus,” a ‘Civic Surplus’ so that we don’t miss or waste opportunities for people to get involved in their communities.
– Citizens have a few minutes each week that they can give to improve their
neighborhoods – how do we empower them to do so?
neighborhoods – how do we empower them to do so?
– We don’t have a choice about this now: economic times, war, threats at home and abroad.
– In many ways, the Open Government Directive could have been a lot shorter if it would have said: ”Be more like Manor,” because it’s that kind of innovation that will lead us to the future we envision.