[frankest]

I’ve been thinking about what objective harnesses can be put around governance for companies and governments as well. Transparency dashboards, clearer real-time feedback mechanisms. What do you suggest especially for governments (local, or even larger). Keep thinking AI might actually help improve our feedback mechanisms given all the noise.

[eries]

Yes, I do think this is something that LLMs should be very good at. As I've said in a couple of the comments in the thread, summarizing is LLMs' greatest superpower. But I have a whole chapter in the book about the use of metrics and, of course, their misuse. I'd be very cautious here. Government reformers have often assumed that just having better data will cause agencies to make better decisions, but this is simply not true. The choice about which data to pay attention to, whether to make decisions in a scientific or humane way, are values questions, not just data questions. They require the installation of a specific ethos in the organization to stay true to those values. Without that, more data will not have any effect whatsoever.

[frankest]

Not just data but transparency of actions. Open source governance is interesting with some examples through git contributions for code and transparency of contributions to wikipedia, and things like Kanban boards and other lessons from project management. What if required government actions and requests are done with transparency - and so is the spending ledger. Public comments can be public too. It doesn’t replace human judgement but it provides direct feedback and clear sight into things that are normally hidden and deliberately obfuscated.