Ideas worth spreading

How the Internet will (one day) transform government

1,330,880 views |

Clay Shirky |

TEDGlobal 2012

• June 2012

The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can’t governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.

The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can’t governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

About the speaker

Clay Shirky

Social Media Theorist

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Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible -- with deep social and political implications.

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This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.