Netgain Challenge

We’ve seen that social media is not a silver bullet for creating lasting political change. As companies amass large datasets about the structure of our societies, it will become increasingly important that the same information is also in the hands of people in order to ensure they do not become oppressed by governments, or by those who seek to control them. In one sense, equal access to data about our social structures is as foundational as journalism in ensuring democratic and free societies. While a networked society holds great promise to reset the equilibrium between top-down and bottom-up power, that will only be possible if we measure change with a shared dataset. We will begin to realize that what we reveal in collective societal information may be even more important than individual privacy.