Recently, Tim O’Reilly, a web pioneer, presented at the Gov 2.0 conference. In his talk, he talks about “Do it ourselves [government]”. He advocates putting more power in the hands of citizens by transforming the government into a platform for civic action. Essentially, we need to move away from expecting government to do everything for us and start helping government by building tools so that citizens can do things themselves. His position is quite American, but his point that internet technologies now allow us to do more as citizens rings deeply true. To make this happen, the government must provide data and information in an open and accessible way. We encourage you to watch his short talk below.