MOSCOW: I have just returned to Star City (Russia’s spaceflight training center) from a long weekend in Moscow, and it struck me how much – and how little – has changed since I first came here 20 years ago, in the spring of 1989.
As I passed an ad in the Moscow metro promoting advertising space for sale, I remembered hurtling down one of those same long, fast escalators sometime in the mid-1990’s with a pioneering advertising man. “Look at all those empty walls! he marveled. “Some day they could be full of ads. Today, they are, indeed, crammed with ads, fulfilling his wildest dreams. A few years ago, I would be thrilled to see a Web site listed within any of those ads. Now URLs are routine.
In fact, a couple of years ago, the Russian search-engine company Yandex (I’m on its board), took out an ad gently poking fun at Russia’s old regime of opacity. At the bottom of every escalator in the Moscow metro is a glass booth for the escalator monitor – usually a grumpy-looking woman whose sole job is to turn off the escalator in case of an emergency. There’s a sign on the booth that says, “The escalator monitor does not answer questions, in a Soviet-style formulation that’s close to saying, “The monitor does not give consultations.
Yandex bought ads in about half the subway cars, saying, “The operator does not give consultations. so please address your questions to Yandex. Everyone immediately got the reference. Yandex’s ads are gone, but those signs are, unfortunately, still there – not just in the metro, but in many other places where public servants do not want to talk to the public – police stations, ticket offices, and public buildings of many kinds.
Information has been so scarce in Russia that Web sites such as tutu.ru (train and plane schedules) and banki.ru (bank information for consumers) seem like miracles. But, while governments may be unresponsive, everywhere commercially-driven enterprises are responding to user feedback.
Elsewhere in the world, the same trends are already more developed. Both legislation and the forces of competition and consumer demand are driving companies to disclose more about their products and to respond to consumer queries. Ten years ago, you were lucky to find the phone number and address of the manufacturer on a tube of toothpaste. Now, you can usually find a Web site that will let you find out more and ask questions.
But that’s from the manufacturer’s point of view. Even more interesting are sites and services such as Twitter and Viewpoints (I’m an adviser) and many other blogs and rating services that offer independent views.
And then there’s Barcode Wikipedia (http://www.sicamp.org/?page_id=21), a brilliant project still waiting to get off the ground. The idea is that you can scan in the barcode of any product, and get third-party information – where it was made, what was used to make it (ingredients, components, and labor), how much CO2 it created, etc. Of course, there will be arguments about the data, just as there are arguments about Wikipedia’s accuracy. But having a central place to argue about facts, one easily linked from any product, would be a huge step forward for practical transparency.
Meanwhile, consumers are applying that same curiosity to their governments. If we know how sausages are made, shouldn’t we also be able to find out how laws are made and enforced, and what the government officials whose salaries we pay do with their time?
That’s starting to happen, too. I’m a member of the board of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to government transparency in the United States. Our first initiative was to get the members of the US Congress to post their own schedules online. If some legislator wants to post that an hour is private, that’s fine. People deserve their privacy. But if that hour was really a lunch with a lobbyist, then they (and their aides) would have to lie deliberately to conceal it.
Of course, there is no way to enforce full disclosure, but by creating explicit processes and expectations, we hope to reset norms. If an official meets with a lobbyist and is not ashamed of it, he can simply say so. Voters can make their own judgments. And if an official meets mostly with lobbyists, at the expense of other types of meetings, voters can make judgments about that, too.
Sunlight is not alone. It is funding and collaborating with a variety of start-ups devoted to collecting, manipulating, and visualizing data from all kinds of public records and other sources. Their tools can be used by anyone, in any country – as long as they can get the data. With luck, the tools will foster demand for the data.
We want people to expect to see such information, just as they now expect information about a food product or an item of clothing.
If normal people had asked more questions, and had expected to understand the answers they were getting, we might not have gotten ourselves into the financial crisis currently gripping the world. If people had really understood what was going on, they might have had the sense to stop borrowing money they couldn’t pay back and buying things they couldn’t afford.
But this crisis may have one good outcome: people will be less likely to listen to authorities, and more interested in finding out for themselves what is going on.
Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, is an active investor in a variety of start-ups around the world. Her interests include information technology, health care and private aviation and space travel. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
