TikTok knows what you want to see. Why doesn’t the government know what you need to know?
Yesterday I gave a keynote at the Dutch Ministry of the Interior’s Open Data Conference, where I shared my latest brainchild, working title: WooPush (an obvious combination of my current OpenGov and prior RecSys work).
The motivation: the Dutch government publishes enormous amounts of open data. In WooGLe alone we now have 8.8 million documents, and counting. That’s great, but we also know this doesn’t reach citizens very well: “open data empowers the empowered“, mostly researchers, journalists, and data diggers know how to work with it.
The idea behind WooPush is simple: what if we used the technology that Big Tech employs to keep you glued to your screen, notifications, recommendation systems, personalization, to proactively inform citizens about government decisions that affect them? Not to maximize engagement, but to inform and activate people. The technology of the attention economy, for informed citizenship.
The technology exists, we have the data, and we have the citizens. Now we just need to figure out how to build this responsibly. That’s what I’ll be working on the coming months.