Burning the Dead Wood

The bodies of law, regulation, and procedure that govern our lives are forms of hyperlinked text, where each part of the system is connected to and dependent on many others. But we have not given this system the most powerful affordances of hyperlinked text, which the internet has spent the past thirty years teaching us to navigate and order and imagine. Instead, we leave it to opaque and lumbering bureaucracies to interpret and steward the frameworks that shape our lives.

Civic reform is most often aimed at the substance of policy, and even when our best minds turn to governance we hear about sweeping changes like electoral finance integrity, shiny new Ministerial portfolios, Government term extension, more Members of Parliament, Official Information Act shake-ups, and other noble topics. Unfortunately, Executive-driven reforms require an exorbitant coincidence of wants, and the changes they imagine may mean almost nothing to most people.

We are planning instead to reshape the substrate of policy, the underlying base on which our laws and regulations are cultivated. This is not about changing the law but about putting it into a modern container, where it can be searched and understood and upgraded with minimal friction.

There is a version of change that does not wait for government sanction. We prove this in our own lives, switching and shifting the objects and actors of our private spaces in response to innovation, competition, and inspiration. We have so much freedom when it comes to the digital spaces of our private consumption, creative projects, and social connections. But the systems that determine how we live and progress together are medieval, and they are holding us back.

We argue that open digital information systems can reinvigorate the operational models of public administration and at the same time move the needle on the strength of our democracy, and that we can begin now.