"Loved data lives longer"

--- Beth Noveck at a Long Now Foundation seminar, March 2010, as reported by Stewart Brand (see the "Summary" tab)

Quote in context:

"Loved data lives longer," Noveck declared. She encourages citizens to "adopt a dataset," and to demand ever wider release of government data troves. (One audience member requested that all the aerial photographs ever made by the US Geological Survey be digitized and published.) The Obama adminstration is finding that the whole process of opening up government digitally doesn't have to wait for pefection. It can move ahead swiftly on the Internet standard of "rough consensus and running code."

I also liked:

Noveck said the government is replacing its reflex "there's a form for that" habits with "there's an app for that," and a panoply of cloud-based apps...

“Development is a goal, not a tool”

--- Sheila Herrling, Center for Global Development, quoted in a story by Jesse Zwick in The New Republic, "The Downside of 'Smart Power'", 30 November 2009, second page

Quote in context:

“Smart power,” of course, is a perfectly reasonable idea. But foreign aid is a zero-sum game. Elevating it into a central strategic instrument of our foreign policy means that something else--something noble and altruistic, something embedded in the historic mission of foreign aid--could soon be lost. Sheila Herrling of the Center for Global Development puts it succinctly: “Development,” she says, “is a goal, not a tool.” A longtime foreign aid observer relays that Clinton, aware of some of the simmering discontent at USAID, asked a group of aid experts before her confirmation what she could say or do to make the agency’s career civil servants excited again--to inspire them. She could start by making a difficult admission: that “smart power,” whatever its merits, comes with a genuine downside.