Reverse-Engineering Government Transparency (WHY2025)

The hacker ethic teaches us that information should be free. So why do governments still keep so much of it inaccessible and out of reach? In this talk, we'll break down the barriers to digital transparency, show how hackers can help open up the government, and lay out a vision for a more democratic, accountable and open state. Governments should be radically more transparent, because public information and open data allow researchers, businesses, and voters to make better decisions. But too often, public data is fragmented, incomplete, hard to access, or never published at all. At [Open State Foundation](https://openstate.eu/), we’ve spent more than a decade working to unlock that information. In this talk, we’ll share how we use a hacker's mindset to reverse-engineer transparency: - from tracking how long ministries take to answer Access to Information requests (the answer will surprise you), - to scraping hundreds of document portals into one search engine, - to building public calendars of ministerial meetings that anyone can subscribe to. But above all, we’ll ask: how can hackers help open up the government? Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/3BFFLY/