O'Reilly Radar's recent article entitled "Ten Government Hacks" was very interesting to me because I work for an advocacy organization, and I've always been interested in politics. The article lists ten things that a technologist (such as me) can do to hold government to account (demanding a certain level of service by technological tests), and in some cases improve peoples' access to government resources (by building systems that improve access to publicly available information, by aggregating it, making it searchable, putting it online, etc.). It's a challenging article because the person it's about has already done this successfully. It's easy for us to complain about government, but when there's something we can do to improve the state of affairs, are we prepared to step out and do it? Am I?
The Media Volunteer project is one such project. Using distributed mass volunteering, we can build online systems whereby volunteers can keep databases that matter to them up to date. Plan B, NIH, and others will be rolled out over the coming months and years, and these will make public content more publically accessible. We can actually, in a distributed way, start taking contributing to and improving government systems!