I'd like to make a couple of brief comments on “open by default”, which of course is the name of our report, and we had a lot of discussion around that concept or principle.
First of all, to go back to your question about whether more open data would reduce the request for open information, I doubt that, frankly. I think it's about culture and expectations and about how we understand our relationship to government. If it turns out that we start to think that this is public property and should be available and start thinking about how we're going to govern, my guess is that's not going to restrict the number of requests for open information. We're going to expect access to that too.
I want to go one step further and just say this. This is a much longer discussion but we spend a lot of time talking about this with each other in the group and also with the participants in the various sessions. The way we've governed for a long time has been around an assumption that governments retreat. They make decisions and they need to be in private when they make these decisions. Then they announce and they communicate and defend their policies.
We kept hearing from people of all sorts that the more complex it gets out there, the more information technology and communications and other things are out there, the reality is that model simply doesn't work for all kinds of reasons. It doesn't mean it's bad; it served us very well. If the model of policy-making requires a high level of privacy or secrecy that you can no longer control, it puts it at odds with ourselves. I think what we heard a lot of people saying is that the real challenge for politics over the next 10 years is recognizing that you can't make policy that way. I'm not saying any policies but just having a model based on secrecy in the traditional way increasingly will not work, and how you get ahead of it where the principle is not open when we say it's open, it's open by default, may well be the challenge that lies ahead for all of us.