...of the commons of information. The thing is this is scarce, and it is overused. This is abundant and under produced.

The thing is, the commons of land is a mirror image. If this were a mirror...

The word "commons" is associated with physical commons, like fisheries or land or the atmosphere.

I would offer to you, by the way, not to use the word "commons." I’m being provocative, but I’ve done loads of stuff. I did stuff from commons, as well.

That’s why, also, this phrase I want to and share with you, if there’s one thing you take from this talk. We talked about brand. We had a very good concession that way, on "open," you get this.

Yeah, capitalism and socialism had a baby. It’s like suddenly we’ve got the best of both worlds. We could have the innovation. We could have market‑based innovation, but we could have it all be open. The underlying good that we’re producing, the information, is fully open.

Going back here, the point is that the open world, it isn’t so much about governance. It’s about if you transform the economy in this way, it’s kind of like if socialism with capitalism got together and had a child.

Right, but two effects there ‑‑ the network affects the platforms. The non‑rival good is the left‑hand side, which is the infinite economy of scale. One of the things is this choice.

Right, but forget even surveillance. Just think about Uber, eBay, even Android if you like, Wikipedia. This is a world of where there’s one thing.

It’s not like the old world. This is a world in which one person gets everything. As we said, we get monopoly, basically.

Right. That goes both ways. The problem with this is you take non‑rival and platforms and you combine them with closed, you get massive inequality.

The point is, if we go the open route, we get innovation, we get freedom, etc. But we go the closed route ‑‑ and this is what’s important ‑‑ most people in government, in my experience of your colleagues, don’t get that the change of the information age, it isn’t ...

I’ve drawn this diagram badly, but you’ve got the choice, plus the tech change. If you put them together, they give you two different worlds. I’ve drawn this diagram in Denmark a couple of months ago and did it better.

This part already happens. The top part, this is just technology, if you like, or more the structure of the economy. The question is this choice.

Yes, exactly, but these two things then combine with a choice. What then comes in is a big choice here. That choice is open versus closed.

Right, but it’s why all the debate about Uber... when I go to lots of countries, people go, "Uber’s so new and it’s so digital." It’s got nothing. It’s like a marketplace. It’s like the market in Lyon in 1250.

It’s more than that. The information age has two big impacts. One is non‑rival goods. I’m going to use tech terminology, because you get it. The other is what I’d call platforms, otherwise known for many hundreds of years as marketplaces, but people now call them platforms.

It’s because this transforms the economy, and that has an impact on inequality.

Why do I want an open world? Not especially, and I’m not saying this, I don’t want this because of government.

Right! However, you’ve got to get more of them interested in the open world.

Exactly, it’s a foundation. It’s a foundational stone, but it’s almost a joke ‑‑ Open Knowledge without open minds has little impact. The open minds part is very hard.

The reason I’m particularly interested in that, is not specifically because I think of its impact on governance immediately. It would have an impact, because government information would be open, as well. We’d be able to see what we’re doing and may be able to hold them to account better.

The other thing I’m trying to get as a story made into is that, for me, what I say about open world, I want a world in which all information is open. That means all movies, all music, all apps, all algorithms, all designs, etc.

So the challenge I wrote here is I think open as participation in governance is hugely important. The role of tech, I think tech can have an impact here (open governance), but the impact here (open data) is big.

The irony was once you could email, everyone else could email. I remember all the representatives would say, "Now I get hundreds of thousands of emails. I don’t even read them anymore. [laughs] You have to come visit me to have me listen to you."

I’ve done activism for 15 years. I did a lot of activism around IT. My experience was, yeah, I could email people rather than write a letter. It was some help, but a campaign on issues was this part.

For example, I see a bunch of the funders in this space, who funded Open Knowledge, who are all into transparency and accountability. They’re like, "Why are we not making all this difference to accountability?" I’m like, "Well, why was it ever going to do it?"

It comes back to this project I’m doing on society, that we don’t have time to go into today. One of the things that I wrote in that post in 2012, about managing expectations, was be very realistic about what tech will do.

I would say it’s not generations. It’s to do with maybe then changes in the way that we behave.

Maybe culture could help solve it, in the sense that if we all were pro‑social in a very strong sense, but there’s no magic fix. There’s no technology fix for those things.

No, it’s culture and education and a collective action problem and a principal agent problem.

They are problems of collective action. They’re problems of informing yourself, of which...

I just think the role of open information, transparency, is actually relatively small and I think the technology is relatively small. I think the problems evolved in governance are hard problems that technology has little impact on.

Or, I’m skeptical about open government. What I would say is, if you read the article, people are interested in better governance. I think that’s hugely important. I am very interested in it.

Yeah, but also I’m not necessarily that interested in open government. [laughs]

But also there’s an orthogonality. Basically, what I’m trying to draw here, there’s open information.

The drawing on your...

One of the things I would be skeptical is like this drawing. You can read this afterwards. Can we get back to the drawing just for a moment?

You can read it yourself. Basically, when I first went around in UK, I’d say five, six years ago, 2010, this woman came up. She said, "Look, I’ve heard stuff about government 2.0. It’s about open data, it’s about participation."

Yeah, that second one. No, sorry, the first one. I misread the first list. It’s the first one.

There’s a post that would be great to read. It’s called "Managing Expectations," and then type "tech" and "open" or something, "tech open." Hit that. I think it should...

I have a long piece. I don’t know if you can bring up here?

Basically, you can tell we should really have Sylvie drawing here. These are terrible drawings.

So open...

I’ve talked about this in my big debate with Tom Steinberg. I’ll draw a diagram maybe.

The Pol.is thing.

Wow, that’s fantastic.

In government, you’re dealing with issues of a much less informed population, dealing with issues in which there’s much less consensus sometimes.

It’s also they work in a very technical, narrow area, in which consensus is... much of the reason governments have so much a harder problem, and it’s important that we, as geeks, remember this, is because governments deal with issues in which there’s much less... IETF debating about Internet protocols, ...

It’s also because they’re geeks.