Techonomy 13

Civic researcher and strategist Kate Krontiris discusses the current and future relationship of technology and the election process. Read the full transcript below. (Transcript by Realtime Transcriptions.) Krontiris: Thank you. Good morning, everybody. So by a show of hands, how many of you voted in the last presidential election? Okay. What about a mayoral election maybe? A few less. What about, like, local city council or special ballot measure? Okay, this room is unique. We’re going to come back to this in a minute, but I want to try and convince you this morning of sort of two main arguments. The first is that the next wave of civic innovation is going to require civic entrepreneurs to tackle really unsexy, highly complicated, largely behind-the-scenes challenges that will not be fixed by developing an app that solves a purely informational or technical problem. Think fixing American elections. And the second argument that I want to make is that what this burgeoning sector needs is risk capital. In other words, risk-taking people and organizations who believe in the quality of a civic and public life and want to help fix some of these deeper public problems that we confronted. So we figured out how to use technology to order Chinese food, to go on a date, to buy clothes, to share the experience immediately across a variety of different social platforms, and those things are fine. They drive economic activity, they save consumers time, and they seem to give a lot of people pleasure. But the digital leaders...