I really enjoyed this post, and I have a few reactions to it. The author is lobbying for online advocacy, which I hate to say, will not be fruitful without som

I really enjoyed this post, and I have a few reactions to it. The author is lobbying for online advocacy, which I hate to say, will not be fruitful without some kind of major political shift in our country's political processes and institutions. Our two-party system doesn't allow for a member of congress to suddenly say "I'm going to let my constituents decide how I vote on each bill." I'm sure it angers some when I say this, (I only mean to state a fact,) but the real way to make an impact is through lobbying. SOPA and PIPA were amazing, yes, but time has proven that their impact cannot be replicated. When it comes to internet regulations, the bigger players in Silicon Valley have already started to realize this and opened a lobby shop in DC. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/250205-internet-lobbying-group-goes-live http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/250205-i... My second point is that because our government is so broken already, it makes it even harder for citizens to have an active say in how it operates and the decisions it makes. Even the White House realizes this, but they don't have the power to change this overnight. However, their steps forward have been in the right direction; Obama created the "Chief Technology Officer" position and appointed Todd Park, an extremely accomplished entrepreneur, to the role. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/03/09/todd-park-named-new-us-chief-technology-officer http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/03/09/todd-park-named-ne... (Disclosure: I'm a Presidential Innovation Fellow in a program that Todd heads up.) Bringing government technology into the 21st century is something that will benefit every American citizen by allowing government to beter serve him or her. Finally, I want to stress that the onus to create change is not entirely on Silicon Valley. Tim O'Reilly, in one of his essays, has a great chapter entitled "Government as a Platform". http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596804350/defining_government_2_0_lessons_learned_.html http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596804350/defining_govern... Until our government moves beyond Open Data and to full read/write APIs, there is a significant limit to how we can interface with it. Most government information systems are only accessible via web portals built in the 90s. Think about it... if your internal business tools were restricted to software built in 1995, how productive would your organization be? And we're not talking about the best software of the era, we're talking about custom-off-the-shelf pieces of crap, built by huge government contractors who make most of their money by launching satellites and building tanks. So if there's an overarching point to my post, it's that the problem is much more nuanced than just "Silicon Valley doesn't care." Changing that apathy, though, is still a good first step.