Systemic problem: how we think about technological innovation as it relates social challenges.

• We tend to think of global digital technology platforms as for-profit organizations, funded by venture capital, developed according to principles perfected in Silicon Valley. Google, Facebook, Uber, Alibaba, Amazon, etc.
• We also mostly try to solve social and public policy challenges in a jurisdictional way. Municipal, Provincial/State, National. Malaysia created their own freelance work platform, Toronto manages its transportation challenges (for now), Nova Scotia has its own health care system.
• Where governments have tried to build useful technology, they have often failed (at least initially). In many cases that failure has been very public. E-health in Ontario, payroll systems in Canada and France, healthcare.gov in the US, UK's attempt to digitize the NHS.
• Our challenges are similar in different countries, as has largely been true in the past. What's different is that digital technology should enable us to act collectively to address at least some of these.

Some key questions and thought starters:

• In an age where the power of global platforms has been pretty clearly demonstrated, is there an opportunity to elevate some of our public policy challenges to a supra-national level, and approach them with the same global ambition as massive technology companies do? Would that allow for better answers?
• If we thought about technology platforms as fundamental infrastructure, designed to enable a better society, in the same way we think about roads, sewers and public schools, how would that change the way we invested in technology? What ideas might that generate?
• Envision this scenario: three co-founders, one is an expert in data regulation, one is an experienced public servant and one has built and exited a few technology platform companies. If you gave them $1B and the mandate to build a new platform in the public interest, with full government support and enough oversight to protect people's data, what could they build?

It's also useful to ask: what if we don't do anything? What if we continue to think of platforms as things to regulate or break-up, rather than maps to what's possible?

For many, there's a sense that the future is happening to us, and there's nothing we can do about it. Technology, and the companies that dominate it, has become a mysterious threat that will take our jobs, profit from our information and, possibly, build robots to kill us when we're no longer helpful. The government complains, but appears powerless and without ideas. If nothing changes, and people don't start seeing digital technology as potentially helpful, will people continue to accept our current system as acceptable?

Question for discussion prior to Nov 14th that I need help with: is the "tech for good" movement, and organizations like the Open Data Institute, Mozilla, OpenAI, doteveryone, etc. likely to address these issues? I'm asking this quite honestly, as the question this challenge paper asks is whether we've fully explored the new public goods or services that could be created using technology. Are our current efforts to make technology serve humanity considering the whole solution set, if we removed all constraints (funding, talent, jurisdictions, etc.)?