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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

transparent government isn't really a solution unless people are willing to act on the data. but we have already shown that this isn't the case. when people hear of corruption are the people involved outed? for the most part no.

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I don't think that's fair. Exposing government data in general will allow people (citizens, consumers, whatever...) to see _systemic_ corruption. Often when we hear of corruption, it is represented as a single point (politician X, company y, etc...) of failure in the democratic system.

Exposing data like thins allows the citizenry to be data driven instead of anecdotal and emotional. I think that's the important break from past governmental practices.

maybe young people see it as a single failure. most people over the age of 30 know better.

besides, what is the punishment model of our democracy? voting the other party in? yeah, that works.

I vote for a return of the public gallows.

I think you and I are in agreement. The feedback mechanism of the republic is broken because there is no punishment. You are correct when you say, "most people over the age of 30 know better." However, I believe that people under 30 understand that too. The difference with making data publicly available is that we can _quantify_ how systemic the problem is. Punishment to our representatives is difficult the same way it is difficult to punish most white collar crimes--it's easy to perform complected book cooking in ways that most can't follow. Making the data available will allow people with those abilities to monitor activity in the public. Or put another way, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

I think once the hard evidence is in we'll see less and less of the party support mechanisms because the corruption can be so easily proven that congress critters will scatter once a little light is shown on their dirty deeds. Then new (possibly younger) data-driven representation will take their place. In my rough back-of-no-envelope estimation, this will take at least a generation.

to break this down: you think that showing that the degree of corruption is constant (systemic corruption) will have a greater impact on the public conscious than traditional methods of exposing gov. corruption because the traditional methods have so much variance.

this could very well be true. I will be watching developments in this area.

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