Hackers save the hats of democracy

In Code for America, Katherine Brasey supervises non -profit initiatives, including the volunteer program and the international partnership program. Braice lives in Auckland, California, and her activities are aimed at uniting local governments and technologists to jointly improve the city. In the lecture read on the TED platform, she spoke about the connection between hacking and civil activity, which, oddly enough, is. Slon publishes its own translation of the lecture.

I want to talk about hackers. Most likely, when you hear this word, it seems to you by no means Benjamin Franklin. However, I will try to explain why it should be. The averaged image of a hacker is an inflated teenager who fell in a basement, where no one prevents him from creating all sorts of computer outrages. Another option is a criminal stirring personal data, or a crook of international caliber, guided by political considerations. And the mainstream is largely full of the idea that hackers are people who should be afraid.

Like most technologies in the technological world, hacking can serve both evil and good. For each hacker who was pushing the personal data of an honest citizen, there is a hacker who created a program with which you can find relatives in the event of a disaster or monitor the environmental situation after oil leakage.

Khacklism is an amateur innovation acting on top of the existing system, and it is deeply democratic activity. Hakerism is critical thinking. To be a hacker means constantly questioning the established methods of work.

The idea is that when you see the problem, you work to fix it, and not just complain. America is largely at a hacking. Betsy Ross was a hacker, The Underground Railroad is a great example of a hacking. From the Wright brothers to Steve Jobs Haking, and remains the foundation of American democracy.
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Therefore, the thought that I want to convey to you is the next time you hear the “hacker”, think about Benjamin Franklin, the main hacker of all time. He was one of the most prolific inventors and at the same time never tried to get a patent, because he believed that any knowledge should remain in the public domain. Thanks to him, we received bifocal glasses and a lightning rod, and he laid the foundation of American democracy.

In Code for America, we just take the principles of Franklin as a basis. The artisan and statesman, he believed that the concept of a citizen is primarily based on action. Franklin believed that the state could be built by people, and we call these people civilian hackers.

It is not surprising that the basic values ​​of democracy - cooperation, expanding rights and opportunities, entrepreneurship - are fundamental to the Internet. It is not surprising that many hackers are interested in problems of state scale.

But before showing you a few examples of civilian hacking, I want you to understand: it is not necessary to be a programmer to become a civil hacker. You just need to understand that you can use the XXI century tools to solve problems facing the state. We constantly hear from our community civil hackers that they did not even assume how much non-lactic work was invested in civilian hacking projects. Remember this. All of you are potential civilian hackers.

What does civil hacking look like? Last year, our team in Gonolulu, three guys who were civil service there, asked to remake a local website. This is a huge contraption with tens of thousands of pages, so it was impossible to do work in the remaining several months. The guys decided to build a parallel site, more precisely, corresponding to the expectations of citizens from this kind of resource. They were looking for answers to questions, which was a rather complicated activity, because the previous site looked like a devil knew what. Therefore, our team launched Honolulu Answers - a super -elemental search interface, where you enter a request and get a simple text answer. The site was quite easy to create, but the question faced the question of filling it with content. Three of them would take a huge amount of time, especially considering that none of them lived in gonolulo. Therefore, they came up with a rather radical way, when compared with how the state usually works: they asked citizens to engage in content. They managed to find information on most of the frequently asked questions, but more importantly another. They felt and introduced a new way of interacting citizens with the state.

A rather cool story in itself, but then more. On the day of civilian hacking in Auckland, where I live, our team has taken the open code of Honolulu Answers and made OAKLAND ANSWERS out of it. We asked citizens to write answers to the most popular questions. I also took part. So, looking at the result of this small enterprise, we believe that the hacking will allow the word “citizen” to give a new meaning and restore confidence in the state.

You may have thought - how do officials relate to this? Yes, they are delighted.

The cities are now required to be as much as possible as possible, and they are always in search of innovative solutions. Therefore, giving citizens the possibility of real participation, and not just holding meetings, you can fix the desire of the community to do the state of the state.

I do not want you to decide that civilian hacking is exclusively American history. No, this is a global process, and my favorite example is Mexico City, where this year the local House of Representatives concluded a contract with the developers' team to create an application for tracking accounts. The contract was two years, its amount was 9.3 million dollars. Understanding people came into a fury. Especially geeks, who knew perfectly well that $ 9.3 million is an absolutely monstrous amount of money for the simplest application. But instead of going outside, they came up with a competition, asked programmers in Mexico City to create an application better and cheaper and appointed a prize - $ 9,300. A thousand times less than the state proposed. The participants were given ten days. 173 applications were developed, five of them were presented to Congress, and they are still in the AppStore. Because of this, the contract was canceled, and a movement appeared in Mexico City, where our partner is also present- Code for Mexico City.

What is happening in Gonolulu, Auckland and Mexico City is the essence of civilian hucking. Citizens drew attention to things that can be done better, and decided to fix them, thus creating an ecosystem of participation of the 21st century. New ways to involve citizens in the life of the country and the city are born, in addition to voting, the signature of petition or protest. This actually helps to build a state and society.

Let's get back to our friend Franklin. One of his achievements is the organization in 1736 at the Philadelphia of the Brigade of Firefighters-Voltaires. They just noticed with friends that the city did not have time to keep track of all the fires. Code for America has its own brigades, there are 31 of them in America. We are growing, and brigades appear in the cities of Poland, Japan and Ireland. You can check if there is such a brigade next to you, on the site Codeforamerica.org, and if not, we will try to help you. All created tools are also on the site. Our goal is to create a global network of civilian hackers bringing innovation to the current system to find new tools to solve long -rooted problems. This will help local governments and give citizens self -confidence. Let's do a hacking together!