快猫短视频

When you hear the word 鈥渉acker鈥�, who do you picture? Thanks to media coverage of criminal hacking, you probably won鈥檛 think of someone perched across a table from a politician trying to improve public transport, government efficiency, or the availability of school places in deprived areas. Yet many self-proclaimed hackers are evolving a new role for themselves as the white knights of democracy.

Meet the civic hackers 鈥� an army of volunteer coders who are challenging preconceptions about hacking and changing the way your government operates. In a time of plummeting budgets and efficiency drives, those in power have realised that they needn鈥檛 always rely on slow-moving, expensive outsourcing and development to improve public services. Instead, they can consider running a hackathon, at which tech-savvy members of the public come together to create apps and other digital tools that promise to enhance the provision of healthcare, schools or policing.

What started as mere tinkering is now promoted by governments across Europe and the Americas. Some civic apps boast hundreds of thousands of users and the movement鈥檚 backers have grown so much in power that they now command the ear of municipal and national politicians. Earlier this month, the US saw 11,000 people participate in hackathons across the country, with support from the White House. But is civic hacking really as beneficial as its proponents claim? Could it change the relationship between you and your government? And what are the downsides?

Since the early days of computing, hacker culture has prized values of freedom and access to information. While some hackers are criminals, the term hacking is often simply understood as the process of improving and rebuilding technology via unconventional means. Gabriella Coleman of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who studies , has shown how, for many, the term is a badge of honour that denotes the ability to derive clever and unexpected technical solutions to a problem.

鈥淭he term hacker is a badge of honour that denotes the ability to solve problems鈥�

Given this ethos, it is perhaps less surprising that self-proclaimed hackers might want to improve their government and public services, which many see as inefficient, inaccessible to citizens and technologically outdated. In particular, much civic hacking calls for open government. That is, government that releases data about its activities and public services, which can be used to build apps for the benefit of citizens.

For many civic hackers, the potential for what open government can achieve was first demonstrated with substance by the British outfit , founded 10 years ago by Tom Steinberg and James Crabtree. When they launched a service in 2005 to help citizens contact politicians, most MPs did not have a publicly available email address or a website. Their service, called , now routes as many as 200,000 messages a year, according to Myfanwy Nixon, who works for the project.

Hack to basics

Since then, mySociety has launched websites such as , which allows people to tell their local council about problems such as broken pavements, fly-tipping and faulty streetlamps. This site receives several thousand such reports every week.

The achievements of mySociety eventually influenced the UK government鈥檚 digital agenda. Steinberg became an adviser to the prime minister and the government now boasts an open data hub at . Other governments around the world have followed suit. An organisation called the was created in 2011 to encourage the provision of data specifically to promote transparency and spur on civic hacking. Its members include governments from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, with Australia intending to join.

Civic apps that tap into this wave of newly open data are now widely available. If you live in a major city, the chances are that there is at least one app or website ready to reveal something you didn鈥檛 know about your local area or government.

In the US, for instance, a called BlightStatus allows residents of New Orleans to see information about derelict houses in their area and how the city is dealing with them. With many of the city鈥檚 suburbs still in ruins thanks to Hurricane Katrina, the app has attracted tens of thousands of users, its makers claim. Other tools reveal the location of , , real-time bus locations鈥� the list goes on.

Now that governments and city managers have realised what civic hacking can achieve, the idea has begun to diffuse into public services that few might expect would fit with hacker culture, such as emergency services or healthcare. Even NASA has embraced hackathons (see 鈥�Hack space鈥�).

It is no longer just about improving access to governments, but about enhancing the technology that doctors, police and other public servants use within their departments. This is traditionally achieved by employing internal programmers or outsourcing to private companies. But in April, London鈥檚 Metropolitan Police Service held a hackathon at which developers and police officers gathered to build apps to assist front-line policing. Its organisers claim it was the first ever exclusively police-led hackathon in the UK. 鈥淚t felt like the police needed a little injection of innovation and new ideas,鈥� says Lewis Westbury, a Google employee and volunteer police officer who had the idea for the 鈥溾�� event.

Neil Beet, a police officer who helped organise the hackathon, was encouraged by ideas proposed on the day. One highlight for him was a smartphone app that gave each constable information about the vicinity, from the nearest custody suite 鈥� officers often make arrests in unfamiliar areas 鈥� to the location of first aid kits. 鈥淚f you rolled that out I think every police officer would put that on their own phone, if not on a corporate device,鈥� he says.

The UK鈥檚 National Health Service, too, has embraced , a doctor at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London. Highlights from the hackathon include , which provides a digital way of recording information about samples of patients鈥� bone marrow. According to Reynolds, the current NHS method involves using an old-fashioned mechanical counting device. Cellcountr is never going to transform medicine, but it makes the job of haematologists using it that bit more efficient, and crucially, is unlikely to have emerged via traditional routes under current tight NHS budgets.

Civic hacking is now evolving beyond its early grass roots activity. Hackathons nowadays are often well-organised affairs, run by non-profit organisations and co-ordinated at a national scale. And civic-minded programmers can win substantial funding to develop their ideas.

Reshaping government

One of the biggest and most influential organisations to emerge from the movement is in the US, one of the main organising partners behind the . Last year, this non-profit organisation received over $3 million in donations and grants, which it is using to help fund programmers 鈥� known as Fellows 鈥� to work with city governments for 12 months at a time. It is responsible for some of the most successful US civic apps so far, but has much loftier ambitions beyond simply improving digital public services.

Abhi Nemani, chief of staff for Code for America, explains that the organisation鈥檚 prime objective is to reshape government itself. 鈥淥ur highest-level metric for success for a year, and what we鈥檙e held to [by donors] is structural change inside government. So we want to see cities change their rules, be more open or innovative or we want to see them hire, promote or support 鈥榗hange agents鈥� who want to do something differently.鈥�

Those change agents could be individuals like the chief data officers recently appointed in the cities of San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago to open up city data. This role is a new addition to the municipal hierarchy, and takes civic hacking right into the heart of local government.

However, not everybody thinks we should rush into this new model of running government. , the author of Smart Cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia, due to be published in October, is generally excited about the potential for civic hacking, but he is outspoken about the dangers of embracing such activity too hastily. He argues that some civic hacks that appear successful sometimes have serious flaws. For example, in the US a variety of smartphone apps and websites have emerged around the non-emergency telephone service, 311. Many city dwellers dial this number to tell urban authorities about problems such as noise, potholes or malfunctioning traffic lights. Now they can track the progress of their complaint with websites such as Chicago鈥檚 , which was built by civic hackers supported by Code for America.

The problem, Townsend says, is that these tools are predominantly used by middle-class, native English speakers with smartphones. Those citizens are arguably getting a better service from their government than the poor and uneducated, and the question of achieving equality of access was seemingly overlooked. 鈥淵ou鈥檝e designed a feedback loop that targets government services to the people who are best and most able to complain,鈥� says Townsend.

And as for the hackathons themselves, their misuse is now acknowledged by many in civic hacking circles. Derek Eder, co-founder of a regular hack night in Chicago, says of one-off hackathons: 鈥淓very one I go to has diminishing returns.鈥� They鈥檙e only suited to cities in the early stages of embracing civic hacking, he says.

There are also some social issues that hackathons focused on improving efficiency and access could never solve, like unemployment or homelessness 鈥� both of which have been grappled with at hack days. Emma Mulqueeny, CEO of the UK civic hacking consultancy , which has staged hack days for various UK government agencies, says poorly managed hackathons exploit developers and provide short-term fixes only. Rewired State exists as a middle-man between volunteers and governments to try to prevent that from happening, she explains. 鈥淲e would say: this bit the hackers can help you with; this bit, you guys need to deal with,鈥� she says.

Others are more critical. , author of the book To Save Everything, Click Here derides governments鈥� modern obsession with what he calls 鈥渟olutionism鈥� 鈥� a blind preoccupation with trying to fix deep societal problems through quick technical fixes like apps. He also warns that the big winners will not be individual citizens, but the private sector, because of cities鈥� and governments鈥� redistribution of what were once their own responsibilities.

Indeed, a host of start-up companies has emerged off the back of hack days, because governments are often happy to open up their data coffers and let others sell the apps they build based on that data. And much civic hacking is dominated by the breathless language of Silicon Valley and the technology industry. For example, some have dubbed the trend , and opens by asking its reader: 鈥淲hat would society look like if we felt about our governments the way we feel about our smartphones?鈥� Some in the civic hacking movement go further in drawing parallels with consumer goods, arguing that government and citizens should have a commercial relationship, with services provided in exchange for taxes.

鈥淢uch civic hacking is dominated by the breathless language of Silicon Valley and the technology industry鈥�

Morozov scolds those who he says want to treat citizenship in this way, and that 鈥渉iding beneath this glossy veneer of disruption-talk is the same old gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism鈥�. Townsend too, although supportive of Code for America, stresses that the things that make cities and government different from companies need to be part of civic hacking, not eradicated by it. 鈥淐itizens are not customers, and they鈥檙e not employees,鈥� he says. Nemani at Code for America agrees that a consumer perspective is the wrong way to think about citizenship. 鈥淲e encourage individuals to do more than just pay taxes, to instead go into public service,鈥� he says.

Definitions, clearly, are still being thrashed out in this young and energetic movement. Civic hacking has established a pedigree that demonstrates its potential for positive impact. But a more rigorous debate over how this activity should evolve, or how authorities ought to engage it, is only beginning to happen publicly.

This discussion, if successful, may dampen the utopian rhetoric and get at what civic hacking can really accomplish 鈥� and what it cannot. For now, it is clear that these ideas have already been embraced by those with the power to shape the way we live. And so for many people, the term hacker is about to take on a whole new meaning.

Correction Abhi Nemani鈥檚 comments on whether citizens and governments should have a consumer relationship have been clarified since this article was first published on 26 June 2013.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淧ower politechs鈥�