Data Abort

Found an interesting article, from which I'll pull two excerpts for comparison:

"White House officials now want to make government data sets available for citizens to use however they see fit."

"The problem is figuring out how to organize and display the data in a useful and informative way, instead of forcing people to sift through heaps of mind-numbing spreadsheets."

The first is a visionary statement. It amounts to crowdsourcing data analysis, something that (if applied correctly) could rescue our governments from the technophobic morass they have so willingly plunged into. At the same time, it would provide a spectacular resource for future machine learning research.

The second, if taken at face value, is facepalm-worthy. Why? If you want a gesture like this to be effective, you have to supply the raw data. Standard graphs and charts aren't enough; let us decide how we want to visualize your data. Let us rip your datasets apart with state-of-the-art statistical analyses and classification algorithms. Better yet - allow us to upload our homebrew visualizations, hold an online voting process, and host the best examples.

Imagine this simple gesture taken to its logical conclusion: complete data transparency of government actions. There would be no room for nepotism, pork-barrel spending, and other forms of shady backroom politics. We would finally have the power to inspect the inner workings of our government, much as our intelligence agencies now monitor us. After all, it is extremely improbable that the likes of CSIS and NSA will give up the incredible power offered by telecommunications, much as it is laughable to expect the world's nuclear powers to spontaneously and permanently renounce their missile stocks; the technology is there, the knowledge is there, and nothing short of the complete destruction of mankind will change that. The best we can do is to level the playing field.

This sort of talk immediately raises national security concerns. Should it? What if every citizen had the ability to assess national security threats, much as every Wikipedia user has the ability to stop malicious edits in their tracks? Which model, in the end, is more robust - the cathedral of centralized government, or the bazaar of direct democracy?

Enough ranting from me; I've got some projective geometry to tackle.

Public Service Announcement

The concept of an academy for public service is solid, but the public sector needs more than manpower - it desperately needs brainpower, and top brainpower at that. We need judges and patent officers who grok current technologies, and qualified IT specialists who will apply that technology to reforming paper-form bureaucracy. We need urban planners who understand green design principles, and legislators who will update our building and zoning codes to accept those principles. We need ministers and advisors with expertise in addressing environmental and economic issues. We need math teachers who know math. We need education advisors who believe in the value of music, of art, of physical education. The list is endless.

Bottom line: the public sector is bloated and rife with nepotism, so much so that the very people who could reform it avoid it like the plague. After all, why spend years banging your head against red tape when Company X will put your skills to use immediately and pay you more for the privilege?

I'm going to make a controversial assertion: we need "braintrust conscription." We need to force our world's most knowledgeable and respected experts to spend two years using their skills in the service of the public good. We need to force our most experienced workers to become teachers. Conversely, we need to force our public servants to hold relevant qualifications.

I'm slowly becoming convinced that this is the only way to address our current problems. Our political circles are awash in so-called "leaders" - alpha-male types who git 'er done like blind (American) football players, conniving backroom puppetmasters, and a smattering of determined yet relatively impotent do-gooders. Enough. It's high time to bring meritocracy to politics. Iff the Public Service Academy can do that, I'm all for it.