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Submitted to The Information Society.
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Version of 30 June 1999.
5500 words.
Abstract
This article outlines an institutional orientation to the issues that citizens and governments face as they seek to promote applications of information technology that promote democratic values. At the most basic level, networked computing can support the growth of decentralized communities of common interest. Principles from participatory design can be also adapted to the development of public information systems. The institutional orientation is illustrated by specific applications to commerce, education, economic development, and the political system. Finally, the increasingly global nature of technical standards is used to explore the institutional consequences of globalization more generally.
1 Introduction
Democracy faces vast challenges and opportunities that arise with the exponential growth of information technology. Information technology is distinctive in its great generality and in its adaptability to a seemingly endless series of purposes. Cars drive only on roads, but information technology is equally at home in offices, factories, trucks, telephones, shirt pockets, spacecraft, thermostats, intensive care units, and kindergartens. The purposes to which we put information technology are distinctive as well. Hammers drive nails, but information technology structures human relationships. The ATM machine defines what you can and cannot do in your relationship with the bank, at least at three in the morning. Electronic mail structures your online interactions with other people, making some things easy and other things hard. And an online archive of newspapers structures your ability to learn about the people whose lives the reporters have written about. Put in heavier language, information technology is part and parcel of social institutions: the institutions shape the workings of the technology, and the technology shapes the workings of the institutions. My thesis is that cheap, pervasive, networked information technology brings an occasion for a thoroughgoing renegotiation of the ground rules of every sphere of social life, that is to say, every institution.
What exactly is an institution? "Institution" does not just mean "organization". Rather, an institution is a set of organizing principles that remains stable over long period, even as individuals and organizations come and go (Commons 1924, Goodin 1996, March and Olsen 1989, North 1990, Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Institutions are the connective tissue, the building blocks, or as I've said, the ground rules of a given sector of society. For example, one institutional aspect of the economy is a bank's relationship to the firms to which it lends -- this relationship is much closer in Germany, say, than in the United States. Another example in my own line of work is the custom of giving people credit when you use their ideas, something which I am obligated to do when preparing my work for publication in a journal. Institutions encompass a heterogeneous and interlocking variety of phenomena: roles, customs, language, law, and technical standards.
Institutions change slowly, and so the idea that many institutions might now change at once is a big deal. That is because institutions go a long way toward defining who we are. To say that one is a teacher, a husband, a mayor, a creditor, a parishioner, a parolee, or a library patron are all institutional facts, and we have all acquired vast abilities to conduct ourselves in terms of the rituals and expectations that those various institutions create. A society is likewise defined in large measure by its particular set of institutions, all interacting with one another and all embodying in some way, to some degree, the values and history of that society. As our institutions change, therefore, we change too, perhaps more deeply than we know.
The role of information technology in institutional change should concern us in two ways. First, if we are going to renegotiate all of the ground rules of society, we should do it in a democratic way. And second, if society is going to get a lot of new ground rules, we should hope that those ground rules embody democratic values and support a democratic way of life. The problem is, we hardly know what either of those propositions means, much less how to get them into practice. Although law is an important element of any institution, the institutions themselves cannot be legislated. I have no answers But I have some questions.
2 A Case Study: Privacy
To motivate these questions, let me begin with a topic that is on the front burner right now, namely privacy (by which I will mean specifically informational privacy). Privacy pertains to individuals' ability to negotiate relationships with others by controlling information about themselves (Agre 1997). Privacy obviously has its limits, but it is also a precondition for anyone's ability to grow and flourish as a human being. As such it is an institutional phenomenon, and it takes particular forms in every particular institution: in relations with the government, in business, in family life, and in the political process, to name a few.
Privacy is the object of customs, architecture, technology, and public policy. The modern history of privacy policy begins around 1970 with the adoption of information technology by the emerging welfare states of northern Europe (Flaherty 1989). As such, privacy policy has always been conceptualized primarily in political terms: rights to correction of false information, for example, or to be notified of the purposes for which the information is being collected. The development of privacy policy along these lines has now culminated in the European Union's celebrated Data Protection Directive and its implementation by the EU member states. Because of the directive's celebrated strictures on cross-border data flows, countries such as Canada now find themselves under pressure to pass laws broadly similar to those of the EU.
Meanwhile, the world to which the data protection framework originally responded has changed considerably, particularly in regard to the rise of distributed computing and its widespread application in the private sector. For this and other reasons, the data protection framework is expanding to incorporate adaptations to particular sectors. What is more, technical innovation has raised the possibility of quite different, technology-driven approaches to privacy protection, based either on the use of cryptographic protocols to protect personal identity (Chaum 1992) or on the use of interactive computing to support individualized negotiation of privacy preferences (Reagle and Cranor 1999).
I want to use this familiar story to make several points that apply much more broadly:
(1) The globalization of the policy process, with or without global forums.
(2) The role of technical standards, themselves global in nature, in implementing or undermining policy goals.
(3) The danger that policy will drift out of sync with technology, and the possibility that the world will not end when it does.
(4) The sectorally specific nature of some but not most of the issues.
(5) The increasingly intimate role of the technology in people's lives, and consequently the increasing sensitivity of the policy issues that the technology raises.
(6) The esoteric quality of the issues, and the problems this poses for decision-making in a democracy.
(7) The great unclarity of the conditions under which hypothetical market-based approaches to the problem can be expected to work.
3 Supporting Democracy
Those are some of the challenges What are the opportunities? Networked information technology holds out the promise of universal access to the means of association -- the mechanisms by which people can reach out to one another to think together, act together, do business together, grieve together, and generally be a part of something together. Of course, people already do these things through the mail, and over the telephone, and through churches and unions and county fairs. But networked information technology, and specifically the Internet, provides an extraordinarily versatile complement to all of these existing media and spaces. The Internet makes it easy to organize loose networks of people across a distance, or keep the logistical details of an organization in order between conferences, or to get the word out quickly when something happens. Almost everyone agrees that these things multiplied by millions, and not the actions of the government, that keep society running. An authoritarian society must scatter these lateral connections and teach people to orient themselves upwards and downwards, whether in a bureaucracy or in a stratified system of orders and classes. A democratic society keeps its millions of lateral connections in working order so that people can continually come together, whether for business or governance or culture, as needs and opportunities arise (Putnam 1993). If the Internet facilitates such things, and does not facilitate too many things that do not belong in the life of a democracy, then it is good.
So far I have described the Internet as if it is a fixed and known quantity. It is not. The Internet is at an early stage of development. It is still poorly integrated into its institutional surroundings, and so far as most ordinary people ever see, it still consists of only a few useful services, inspiring perhaps but rather dysfunctional as well. For these reasons and others, the Internet is best understood as a vacant lot. The structures that get built on this lot will help to define the institutions of the next century. Yet little is inevitable or certain about what those structures will be. It is precisely the miracle of information technology that the possibilities are wide open, and the Internet-mediated institutions that emerge over the coming decades will be chosen, or will evolve, but will not be dictated by some fictional essence of the Internet. We are called therefore to comprehend and discuss and experiment with the interactions among technology, economics, culture, and law that will define us and our children in the near-enough future.
Among the many important things that people can do together on the Internet, I want to focus on one: thinking together. People everywhere want to connect with other people who are in similar situations (Agre 1998a). Mothers everywhere have plenty to talk about. Immigrants to a country intensively compare notes with other immigrants who come from the same place. Accountants organize conferences, and so do doctors, and historians, and stamp collectors. Hospitals organize support groups for people with cancer. In each case, a shared situation provides the basis for shared thinking, passing information, telling stories, naming feelings, solving problems, and figuring out whether one's own experiences are strange and unique or, more commonly, not. Whether or not they ever organize to bargain collectively or elect a candidate, each of these communities of practice develops its own public sphere with its own language and agenda and traditions.
These phenomena all existed before the Internet, but with the Internet they have now intensified, with literally immeasurable consequences for society. Internet-mediated collective cognition does have its problems: an in-group can become even more of an in-group if it wants to. At the same time, the Internet facilitates something important: membership in multiple communities. Some Internet mailing lists and discussion forums express national identities, but others express a wide variety of other kinds of identities. This is a different kind of pluralism: not just the coexistence of autonomous groups that completely define their members but the interweaving of a whole elaborate matrix of cross-cutting groups that make no such claims.
This is the fundamental promise of the Internet for the health of civil society, and technical people and government people alike feel drawn to supporting it. In each case, the challenge is the same: what measures can have the effect of supporting civil society without creating the temptation or the means to control it? The starting point in each case is a certain faith and a corresponding renunciation: the faith that people who share democratic values will form their own associations in their own time, and the renunciation of any need to do it for them. We can provide concepts and processes and tools, but we can never have enough money, or enough power, to cause a community to exist through our own will. This, perhaps, is the great attraction of the word infrastructure: infrastructure, supposedly, facilitates without dictating. Life is rarely so simple, of course, and yet perhaps the inevitable problems can be solved in a democratic fashion.
One of these problems concerns the main tradition of system design itself. Computer system design first took form in military and industrial settings whose particular orientation to power and hierarchy provide poor models for the rest of society. Although the practices of system design have been adapted to other settings with some degree of success, important vestiges remain of the original command-and-control philosophy. In command-and-control environments, for example, nobody is anonymous and privacy is meaningless. As a result, conventional system design practices take for granted that every significant event will be captured as a highly portable data record that fully identifies its participants. Alternative methods are now available, thanks to the efforts of privacy-minded cryptographers, but these methods have not been widely integrated into the conventional practices, much less the uncounted thousands of legacy systems that operate on the command-and-control model.
4 Democratic Processes
Information technology, then, holds some qualified promise as a promoter of democratic values. Yet a great many decisions will be made in the coming years as information technologies and institutions coevolve, and we have a moral obligation to try to make these decisions in a democratic spirit. The first principle of democratic decision-making, of course, is effective participation of all of the stakeholders, and the technology already makes it much easier for stakeholder groups to think together about the technological and institutional changes that will soon affect them. Many people have complained that the Internet seems to be used largely to discuss the Internet. But surely there are few more important things for a great diversity of social groups to be discussing right now, and the members of those groups who discuss the Internet online are roughly the ones who know best what they are talking about.
How, then, to involve these stakeholder groups in the actual processes of technical and institutional design? Research in Scandinavia since the 1970's has developed an array of methods known together as participatory design (Bjerknes, Ehn, and Kyng 1987). Participatory design, understandably, arose in a place and time when unions had the ability to bargain collectively over the technologies that their members employed on the job. Although the methods themselves are intended to apply more broadly, they still tend to presuppose the situation of software being designed on a custom basis for use in a particular workplace. The great strength of participatory design is its emphasis on process and imagination. Every design process is political under the surface, but participatory design brings the politics out into the open where it has some hope of being conducted in an honest matter. The focus on imagination is intended to overcome the designer's oft-heard lament that "users don't know what they want" -- a situation that arises for the simple reason that users don't know what they can have. By drawing explicit attention to matters of process and imagination, participatory design ensures, or at least makes conceivable, that the design process takes full account of the myriad of institutional matters that determine whether the resulting software is actually useful, and actually used, in practice. This is no small accomplishment, and progressive American companies are now adapting participatory methods to their own design processes (Schuler and Namioka 1993).
The great limitation of participatory design is that software is less and less produced on a bespoke, one-shot basis. Powerful economic arguments favor the emergence of standards, official or de facto, in most categories of software. Faced with a choice between a custom scheduling system that is finely tailored to an organization's needs and a generic scheduling system that costs five thousand times less, the generic system increasingly wins out. This phenomenon is a powerful force for the global standardization of business practices -- standardization, that is, on the business models of the society where the dominant software package was written. In this setting, the meaning of participatory design is much less clear. Even if a packaged software firm wanted to involve stakeholder groups in its design processes, where exactly would these groups be found (Grudin 1991)? This question is obviously one for market researchers and anthropologists, up to a point, but it still serves a purpose for stakeholder groups to have some actual power in the design process, to make certain that their concerns, which are frequently difficult to communicate to those who do not do the job every day, get heard.
Participatory design works on a local scale, then, but on the scale of a whole society it is necessary to rely on experimentation, incrementalism, and identity.
First, experimentation. The lack of money for grandiose social innovation can be a good thing sometimes when it inspires programs to fund, evaluate, and publicize demonstration projects. One virtue of a program of demonstration projects, such as the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program of the United States Department of Commerce, is that the call for proposals, suitably crafted, can motivate interested parties to form social networks and negotiate working alliances among themselves in order to write proposals. I refer to these social networks as "Internet civil society" (Agre 1998b): because the applicability of the Internet crosses so many social boundaries, Internet experimentation has provided the occasion for a great many social connections that might not otherwise have been made -- just the sort of loose networks that make for a healthy civil society. Proposed experiments should be chosen for their feasibility, of course, but they should also be chosen for their stories: a powerful story about applying new technology in an appropriate, effective way is an invaluable addition to the culture. That is why the projects should be publicized.
Second, incrementalism. Another virtue of participatory design is the practice of iterative prototyping: producing successive iterations of a system, from cardboard mockups to bare-bones demos to working beta releases, that stakeholder groups can see and use and talk about and think with. A concrete prototype makes the discussion much more productive than a programmer's box-and-arrow diagram. Incrementalism is also a tenet of the work practices of the Internet Engineering Task Force. One reason for the triumph of the Internet is that the IETF insisted on working code before approving a standard, and they deliberately got one batch of functionality working before moving on to the next (Lehr 1995). The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), by contrast, designed Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) without this discipline, and left implementation to vendors. Although conceptually sophisticated, OSI collapsed of its own weight. Microsoft also employs incremental development practices, and they have achieved some control over their deadlines by assigning priorities to functionalities and postponing to later releases the ones that they cannot implement in time (Cusumano and Smith 1997). This approach is consciously integrated with the firm's market strategy: if the market changes, the company can change its plans for a given package while still having working code to show for their efforts so far. Incrementalism is thus a strategy well-suited for any design process that must interact with the real world, whether for purposes of democratic decision-making or any others. It is also an example of a larger theme: the growing convergence between the practices of information technology markets and the practices of democratic politics.
Finally, identity. A crucial feature of most information technologies is what economists call network effects: the incentive to adopt a given technology is determined in large measure by the number of other people who have adopted it (Katz and Shapiro 1994). This can be true for several reasons: the technology might only be useful for interacting with others who use compatible technology, or else the technology might provide a platform for software products that will only be produced if a big enough market exists. Even if these network effects are not present, software exhibits significant economies of scale: a software package can be considerable cheaper if many people buy it, since almost all of the cost went into producing the first copy.
As a result of these effects, most new information technologies are only economically feasible once they are adopted by a critical mass of users. The diffusion of a new information technology therefore frequently resembles a social movement, and indeed market strategists sometimes employ that language (Davidow 1986, Kling and Iacono 1988). Social movements require powerful myths, and the most powerful myths resonate with or facilitate the transformation of their believers' social identities. This is a very real sense on which information technology is shaped by culture and social processes. It also helps explain the role of government in the diffusion of many network technologies. It is largely forgotten now that electrification in the United States was in significant measure a public campaign of the New Deal (Tobey 1996), and many Internet users are apparently unaware of the role of the National Science Foundation in spreading Internet culture. This is the expressive role of government, a legitimate part of any functioning democracy, as much as its funding role.
Together, these three themes make up a reasonably actionable model of the societal learning curve for new information technologies. Institutions change slowly and the machinery will be much cheaper soon enough, so invest in the learning curve and let the society as a whole make its choices.
5 Applications
To illustrate the policy consequences of the institutional perspective, let me sketch some of the issues that arise in four institutional fields: commerce, education, economic development, and the political system.
The promise of electronic commerce, as opposed to well-established systems of Electronic Data Interchange, is to connect buyers and sellers very efficiently without regard to distance and to permit them to conduct business electronically without the benefit of a specific prearranged contractual framework (Kalakota and Whinston 1996). The Internet, on this view, is the ultimate marketplace, and it might be supposed that one could throw open the doors to a general purpose advertising, invoicing, and settlement facility and thereby displace scores of obsolete old-technology marketplaces overnight. Such, however, is not the case, as a number of failed business plans have shown. Marketplaces, it seems, are much more complicated than that, and much more tuned to the particular demands of each market. The real success stories to date are low-technology mechanisms such as job boards that provide value simply by bringing buyers and sellers together.
Although it will be a long march before strangers routinely conduct complex automated transactions online, the next several years will see the rise of numerous new-technology marketplace mechanisms, to the point that we must consider the properties of markets in marketplaces. Under what conditions does the market in marketplaces lead to fair markets, and in what conditions does the market in marketplaces lead to avoidably biased marketplaces that require regulation? Does it suffice to permit new market institutions to arise and then to consider the appropriate type of regulation, or will the new market institutions be impervious to change once a critical mass of market participants had begun using them? In the case of digital signature mechanisms, legislation to date has not reflected the interests of all stakeholders, and the result in many states has been a risk allocation policy that is strikingly at odds with common law traditions and highly successful precedents such as credit cards (Winn 1998). It remains to be seen whether such policies distort the further development of electronic commerce institutions.
On the other hand, a hopeful sign for consumer protection can be found in the Internet discussion groups that unite the customers in a given market. Users of America Online, for example, have organized a number of actions to influence AOL's terms of service, and the market in personal computers is rendered somewhat less confusing by active Internet forums. These mechanisms work reasonably well when consumers can benefit by sharing their experiences, but they do not solve the free-ridership problems that make it uneconomic for small bank depositors, for example, to engage in the complex work of monitoring a bank's solvency (Dewatripont and Tirole 1994). In such cases, government monitoring or other such measures are still necessary.
Educational institutions have a long history of misguided technology-driven innovations that waste money on machinery to little educational effect. Part of the problem, no doubt, is the inability of educational institutions to reorganize themselves to make productive use of potentially useful technologies. More often, though, the problem has lain with gadget-focused stories about education that did not incorporate any realistic plan for the institutions that would have to put those stories into practice. As school systems in many countries rush to install Internet connections, the great fear is that the pattern will repeat itself.
It is quite possible to use the Internet ineffectively or even counterproductively in a classroom, and no school can be saved by simply dropping in an Internet connection without appropriate curriculum materials, training, and other such complementary measures. That is why it is important to have a substantive theory of educational institutions, and to identify an institutional problem that the Internet can actually be used to solve. One such problem concerns the working conditions and career prospects of teachers. It takes a special person to work alone in a room with thirty or more children for six hours a day for thirty years, with little or no hope of promotion, without burning out. The Internet can be used to alleviate these problems by incorporating collaboration with distant teachers and classes into the day's work (Riel 1993). As the technology improves, opportunities for collaboration and professional community may increase, leading to spread of the Internet among teachers may encourage greater sharing of teaching methods among the teachers themselves, thus offsetting the excessive power of non-teaching experts to control teachers' work. This is obviously not a complete solution to all the problems of the schools, but it is an example of speculation that is motivated by institutions and not just by technology.
The Internet has been used in a large number of "community networking" projects aimed at encouraging economic development and revitalizing civic institutions (Schuler 1996). "Community" in this case refers to geographical communities, and the community network is intended to complement, and to be embedded in, a variety of other mechanisms by which the members of a community might collaborate. Hearing about such projects, skeptics have often objected that the market is providing affordable Internet access and cheap low-end personal computers on its own, without the need for government projects to build duplicative networks or operate Internet service providers that compete with the multitude of private ISP's that already exist. This objection does have some force if the community networking project is badly designed. The idea of "building a network" is unfortunately highly ambiguous: it could refer to anything from laying custom-designed fiber optic lines in the ground to starting a mailing list on the local university's listserv. Municipalities and nonprofit organizations have in fact initiated successful projects at every point along this spectrum. But such projects can fail miserably, either politically or economically or both, when they fail to complement a wide range of other factors, from emerging technical standards to the training programs of local volunteer user groups. Looking back on the first question of experiments, it is time to codify a replicable civic design methodology that assesses both the technical and business environment and the needs and assets of the community.
The political system has been a special object of the technological imagination in recent years, and much effort has been expended on technical schemes to disintermediate existing political institutions. While those existing institutions could certainly stand bettering, subtle analysis is required to understand the role that information technology could possibly play. First of all, the numerous proposals to use computer networks to implement plebiscitary (or "direct") democracy are impractical. Online voting, for example, is as close to impossible as anything can be. Even if cheap standardized technologies emerge to solve the authentication problems that threaten a fair ballot, no online technology can prevent the threat of coercion. Unless the great majority of voters are required to appear at a voting station and mark their ballots in voting booths, nothing remains to stop an organization from holding "voting parties" in which the organization's members are pressured to cast their votes in view of one another.
Electronic plebiscites are impractical for another more interesting reason. Computer networks may be ideally suited for distributing political information, but not for processing it. Political intermediaries such as interest groups and political parties are not just conduits for information; they also perform a great deal of analysis that cannot be automated with any foreseeable technology. As the raw materials of political analysis become available online, however, it becomes possible to imagine alternative forms of political mediation. On the other hand, political activists who do work extensively online have so far found it nearly impossible to build membership or raise funds online. It remains to be seen how political organizations will maintain relations with their constituencies as the Internet converges with television and the telephone.
6 Globalization
It is a commonplace by now that many of the traditional levers of national economic and technology policies no longer function in the new environment of global integration. This development is often expressed hyperbolically in terms of the end of the nation-state (Ohmae 1990). The crystallizing moment for this emerging awareness was the collapse of the European Union's Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 under coordinated attack from currency speculators. Less widely appreciated is the even more significant development that took place over the subsequent two years as investors finally became able to arbitrage interest rates among different national markets routinely and on a large scale (Bryan and Farrell 1996). As a result, governments are now much less capable of manipulating their national economies by setting domestic interest rates. Fortunately, during the same period some force, whether information technology or something else, seems to have abolished the business cycle. Let us hope that this lasts.
These stories are usefully juxtaposed to another story, the Clinton Administration's attempts to install key escrow technology in the world's communications infrastructure. As with the case of economic intervention, policy levers that might have achieved the Administration's goals in the old days -- government purchasing, for example -- no longer seem to function. Unpopular though its strategy is, at least among the computer industry and civil libertarians, the Administration's successive attempts have demonstrated a growing appreciation of the global, standards-based dynamics of new information and communications technologies. Through a combination of multilateral negotiations and increasing flexibility as to means, the Administration has sought to assemble a critical mass of allies within governments while simultaneously splitting off a critical mass of vendors who are willing to compromise in exchange for critical export permits. Although it remains to be seen whether this strategy succeeds, I believe it is a prototype for other strategies on other issues for good or ill in the future.
If the lesson does generalize then the consequences are profound: a globalized policy process embodied in a patchwork of nontransparent negotiating venues, and a globalized standards process likewise embodied in specialist organizations. The challenges to democracy in such a situation are obviously considerable, as are the challenges to national policy. Any rational response to the global dynamics of policy and standardization should begin with monitoring: a systematic practice of identifying, assessing, and publicizing those policy issues that show signs of becoming globalized. This has long been part of the diplomat's work, of course; the point is that it is moving the center of the national policy process. The monitoring of emerging standards issues on the basis of the public interest and national economic strategy is even less well developed. The costs of being surprised by global policy and standards developments, however, are considerable, precisely because these developments will increasingly require institutional changes. A nation whose institutions are distinctive in any way will increasingly be required to assess the global forces that are operating on them, consider whether to change them or defend them, and determine how to do so without creating intolerable disruption or inequity. Nations whose institutions lie on the leading edge of global trends, on the other hand, may be able to establish themselves in positions of global political leadership, as well as establishing a strong position in the relevant global markets for systems and expertise.
7 Conclusion
Let me conclude with an intellectual caution. Many people, in the United States at least, have grown hostile toward institutions as such. Every technology comes wrapped in a story, and these days the story is likely to involve the demolition of hidebound institutional orders. Technologies, however, like food, should be unwrapped before use, and the fantasy of discontinuous social change should be allowed to expire with the end of the 20th century.
It helps to distinguish two mechanisms of institutional change, creative destruction and digestion. Creative destruction is the invention of alternative, parallel institutions that compete with and possibly replace the existing ones. Digestion is the process by which institutions lay hold of a new technology while adapting it to their own existing ways. Although creative destruction appeals to the fantasy of discontinuous institutional change, digestion has its virtues as well. Hidebound though they might be, those existing institutions will generally incorporate a great deal of accumulated social learning that should not be discarded lightly. A genuinely powerful technology, moreover, will amplify some aspects of the institution and not others, leading to the disruption of past equilibria and an opening for consensus-building and experimentation toward alternatives. It is too early to tell which mechanism, creative destruction or digestion, will best explain the upcoming transitions in the many and various institutions of our respective societies. But it is not too early to ask the question.
Acknowledgements
This is a revised version of a plenary speech at the "Government on the Net" conference, Ottawa, April 1998. I appreciate the comments of participants at that conference.
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