So when the White House was built

in the early 19th century, it was an open house.

Neighbors came and went. Under President Adams,

a local dentist happened by.

He wanted to shake the President's hand.

The President dismissed the Secretary of State,

whom he was conferring with, and asked the dentist

if he would remove a tooth.

Later, in the 1850s, under President Pierce,

he was known to have remarked

— probably the only thing he's known for —

when a neighbor passed by and said, "I'd love to see

the beautiful house," and Pierce said to him,

"Why my dear sir, of course you may come in.

This isn't my house. It is the people's house."

Well, when I got to the White House in the beginning

of 2009, at the start of the Obama Administration,

the White House was anything but open.

Bomb blast curtains covered my windows.

We were running Windows 2000.

Social media were blocked at the firewall.

We didn't have a blog, let alone a dozen twitter accounts

like we have today.

I came in to become the head of Open Government,

to take the values and the practices of transparency,

participation and collaboration, and instill them

into the way that we work, to open up government,

to work with people.

Now one of the things that we know

is that companies are very good at getting people to work

together in teams and in networks to make

very complex products, like cars and computers,

and the more complex the products are a society creates,

the more successful the society is over time.

Companies make goods, but governments,

they make public goods. They work on the cure for cancer

and educating our children and making roads,

but we don't have institutions that are particularly good

at this kind of complexity. We don't have institutions

that are good at bringing our talents to bear,

at working with us in this kind of open and collaborative way.

So when we wanted to create our Open Government policy,

what did we do? We wanted, naturally, to ask public sector

employees how we should open up government.

Turns out that had never been done before.

We wanted to ask members of the public to help us

come up with a policy, not after the fact, commenting

on a rule after it's written, the way is typically the case,

but in advance. There was no legal precedent,

no cultural precedent, no technical way of doing this.

In fact, many people told us it was illegal.

Here's the crux of the obstacle.

Governments exist to channel the flow of two things,

really, values and expertise to and from government

and to and from citizens to the end of making decisions.

But the way that our institutions are designed,

in our rather 18th-century, centralized model,

is to channel the flow of values through voting,

once every four years, once every two years, at best,

once a year. This is a rather anemic and thin way, in this

era of social media, for us to actually express our values.

Today we have technology that lets us express ourselves

a great deal, perhaps a little too much.

Then in the 19th century, we layer on

the concept of bureaucracy and the administrative state

to help us govern complex and large societies.

But we've centralized these bureaucracies.

We've entrenched them. And we know that

the smartest person always works for someone else.

We need to only look around this room to know that

expertise and intelligence is widely distributed in society,

and not limited simply to our institutions.

Scientists have been studying in recent years

the phenomenon that they often describe as flow,

that the design of our systems, whether natural or social,

channel the flow of whatever runs through them.

So a river is designed to channel the flow of water,

and the lightning bolt that comes out of a cloud channels

the flow of electricity, and a leaf is designed to channel

the flow of nutrients to the tree,

sometimes even having to route around an obstacle,

but to get that nutrition flowing.

The same can be said for our social systems, for our

systems of government, where, at the very least,

flow offers us a helpful metaphor for understanding

what the problem is, what's really broken,

and the urgent need that we have, that we all feel today,

to redesign the flow of our institutions.

We live in a Cambrian era of big data, of social networks,

and we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions

that are actually quite recent.

Think about it: What other business do you know,

what other sector of the economy, and especially one

as big as the public sector, that doesn't seek to reinvent

its business model on a regular basis?

Sure, we invest plenty in innovation. We invest

in broadband and science education and science grants,

but we invest far too little in reinventing and redesigning

the institutions that we have.

Now, it's very easy to complain, of course, about

partisan politics and entrenched bureaucracy, and we love

to complain about government. It's a perennial pastime,

especially around election time, but

the world is complex. We soon will have 10 billion people,

many of whom will lack basic resources.

So complain as we might, what actually can replace

what we have today?

What comes the day after the Arab Spring?

Well, one attractive alternative that obviously presents itself

to us is that of networks. Right? Networks

like Facebook and Twitter. They're lean. They're mean.

You've got 3,000 employees at Facebook

governing 900 million inhabitants.

We might even call them citizens, because they've recently

risen up to fight against legislative incursion,

and the citizens of these networks work together

to serve each other in great ways.

But private communities, private, corporate,

privatizing communities, are not bottom-up democracies.

They cannot replace government.

Friending someone on Facebook is not complex enough

to do the hard work of you and I collaborating

with each other and doing the hard work of governance.

But social media do teach us something.

Why is Twitter so successful? Because it opens up its platform.

It opens up the API to allow hundreds of thousands

of new applications to be built on top of it, so that we can

read and process information in new and exciting ways.

We need to think about how to open up the API

of government, and the way that we're going to do that,

the next great superpower is going to be the one

who can successfully combine the hierarchy of institution --

because we have to maintain those public values,

we have to coordinate the flow -- but with the diversity

and the pulsating life and the chaos and the excitement

of networks, all of us working together to build

these new innovations on top of our institutions,

to engage in the practice of governance.

We have a precedent for this. Good old Henry II here,

in the 12th century, invented the jury.

Powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power

from government to citizens.

Today we have the opportunity, and we have

the imperative, to create thousands of new ways

of interconnecting between networks and institutions,

thousands of new kinds of juries: the citizen jury,

the Carrotmob, the hackathon, we are just beginning

to invent the models by which we can cocreate

the process of governance.

Now, we don't fully have a picture of what this will look like

yet, but we're seeing pockets of evolution

emerging all around us -- maybe not even evolution,

I'd even start to call it a revolution -- in the way that we govern.

Some of it's very high-tech,

and some of it is extremely low-tech,

such as the project that MKSS is running in Rajasthan,

India, where they take the spending data of the state

and paint it on 100,000 village walls,

and then invite the villagers to come and comment

who is on the government payroll, who's actually died,

what are the bridges that have been built to nowhere,

and to work together through civic engagement to save

real money and participate and have access to that budget.

But it's not just about policing government.

It's also about creating government.

Spacehive in the U.K. is engaging in crowd-funding,

getting you and me to raise the money to build

the goalposts and the park benches that will actually

allow us to deliver better services in our communities.

No one is better at this activity of actually getting us

to engage in delivering services,

sometimes where none exist, than Ushahidi.

Created after the