And the biggest everyday interface is bureaucracy. Your train is late. You try to get a passport and wait months. You hit processes that feel designed to exhaus...
So we’re launching our first “presidential hackathon” style initiative. It’s called “Germany, What Sucks?”
And “What works?”
Exactly. Everyone in Germany can submit ideas for how Germany can work better.
People can also vote: which ideas resonate? Where do you agree, and where do you disagree? We can see where polarization is real, and where it’s overstated. And...
Then the best ideas will move into action: civic tech teams will work on them and bring them to life.
We don’t know which ideas yet. That’s the point. We need you to submit them, argue for them, refine them. That’s how we innovate Germany again. And it’s only th...
Amazing. Turning complaints into energy!
...into renewal. Not a wildfire that burns trust down, but a campfire for people to gather around.
Circa 2014 in Taiwan, the government’s approval rating was in single digits. In a country of 23 million people, it felt like everything the president said had 2...
By 2020, after hundreds of Join initiatives and Presidential Hackathon projects, approval rose above 70 percent. In six years, a dramatic shift.
But, you can leapfrog this. You do not need six years. You can do it in six months, because we now have better tools for sensemaking and synthesis. What used to...
...rticipation, more visible results, more trust. Democracy can be fast, fair and fun.
Audrey built these models ten years ago, and they’re being exported now. Estonia is doing it, the Baltic states, now even the U.S., and hopefully Germany. We ca...
Of course you will.
Taiwan was like Estonia for radical participation, because we built institutions early and they work well enough.
But Germany has a lot of “bureaucracy pain” that can become fuel. And we are also seeing in the U.S. that what people call “polarization” is often a kind of tra...
In California, I have been working with Governor Gavin Newsom and Jennifer Siebel Newsom, California’s First Partner, to build Engaged California. We are using...
When the problem is real, people look past ideology and co-create.
You’ve said two things. One: the U.S. is more polarized than Germany. And two: the U.S. is not actually polarized, it’s partly an illusion, because people often...
