I'm going to talk about hackers. And the image that comes to your mind when I say that word is probably not of Benjamin Franklin, but I'm going to explain to you why it should be.
今天我要谈的是有关黑客的话题。 当我说到“黑客”这个词的时候 你脑中所出现的画面可能不会是 本杰明·富兰克林, 但我想要告诉你, 为什么应该是富兰克林。
The image that comes to your mind is probably more likely of a pasty kid sitting in a basement doing something mischievous, or of a shady criminal who is trying to steal your identity, or of an international rogue with a political agenda. And mainstream culture has kind of fed this idea that hackers are people that we should be afraid of.
你脑中出现的画面 估计是一个面色苍白的年轻人 在地下室里做坏事 他可能要盗用你的身份, 或者进行有政治意图的 跨国诈骗。 主流文化告诉我们 黑客是我们应当害怕 并且远离的人群。
But like most things in technology and the technology world, hacking has equal power for good as it has for evil. For every hacker that's trying to steal your identity there's one that's building a tool that will help you find your loved ones after a disaster or to monitor environmental quality after an oil spill. Hacking is really just any amateur innovation on an existing system, and it is a deeply democratic activity. It's about critical thinking. It's about questioning existing ways of doing things. It's the idea that if you see a problem, you work to fix it, and not just complain about it. And in many ways, hacking is what built America. Betsy Ross was a hacker. The Underground Railroad was a brilliant hack. And from the Wright brothers to Steve Jobs, hacking has always been at the foundation of American democracy.
但是,在科技世界里的 大部分科技活动, 黑客制造福祉 和破坏的能力是等同的。 有个在试图盗用你身份的黑客 同时就有一个黑客在创建 可以帮助你在灾难后寻找亲人的工具, 或者在漏油事件后 监控环境质量的工具。 黑客行为真的只是一种对现有系统 的业余创新行为, 并且是一种影响深远的民主活动, 它与批判性思维有关, 它也与挑战现有的处事方式有关。 主要的意义是,当你发现问题, 你不是仅仅在旁边抱怨, 而是会找到方法去解决问题。 从某种程度上来说, 黑客行为建立了美国, 贝琪·罗斯是一个黑客。 (译者注:她设计并缝制了美国第一面国旗) 地铁的设计是一个绝妙的黑客发明。 从怀特兄弟到史蒂夫·乔布斯, 黑客行为一直是美国 民主的基石。
So if there's one thing I want to leave you here with today, it's that the next time you think about who a hacker is, you think not of this guy but of this guy, Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the greatest hackers of all time. He was one of America's most prolific inventors, though he famously never filed a patent, because he thought that all human knowledge should be freely available. He brought us bifocals and the lightning rod, and of course there was his collaboration on the invention of American democracy.
所以今天,我想要告诉你们最重要的是, 下次当你们想黑客是什么样的时候, 你不要想到这个家伙, 而是这位先生,本杰明·富兰克林, 他是史上最伟大的黑客。 他是美国最多产的发明家之一, 尽管他不曾有一个专利, 因为他认为,人类的知识发明 应免费共享。 他发明了双光眼镜和避雷针, 当然,他还协助建立了 美国民主制度。
And in Code For America, we really try to embody the spirit of Ben Franklin. He was a tinkerer and a statesman whose conception of citizenship was always predicated on action. He believed that government could be built by the people, and we call those people civic hackers.
我所在的机构“为美国编程”( code for america) 就尝试去实践本杰明 · 富兰克林的精神。 他是一位多面手和政治家, 他认为,作为公民 需要将公民的想法付诸行动。 他认为政府可以 由人民建立, 我们称呼这些人为公民黑客。
So it's no wonder that the values that underly a healthy democracy, like collaboration and empowerment and participation and enterprise, are the same values that underly the Internet. And so it's no surprise that many hackers are turning their attention to the problem of government.
所以不足为奇的是 支撑起健康的民主机制的价值基石, 像协作和赋予权力、 参与和创业精神, 和互联网的价值基石是同样的。 所以不令人意外的是,很多骇客 把注意力转向政府的问题。
But before I give you a few examples of what civic hacking looks like, I want to make clear that you don't have to be a programmer to be a civic hacker. You just have to believe that you can bring a 21st-century tool set to bear on the problems that government faces. And we hear all the time from our community of civic hackers at Code for America that they didn't understand how much nontechnical work actually went into civic hacking projects. So keep that in mind. All of you are potential civic hackers.
但在我给你举几个例子 告诉你什么是公民黑客之前, 我想要清楚地告诉你, 你不需要先成为一名程序员才能做公民黑客。 你只需要相信,你可以 用 21 世纪的现代工具来解决 政府面临着的问题。 我们时常发现,我们 “为美国编程”社群的公民黑客 并不懂到底有多少非技术性工作 进入民间黑客项目。 因此,请记住, 你们都有可能成为公民黑客。
So what does civic hacking look like? Our team last year in Honolulu, which in this case was three full-time fellows who were doing a year of public service, were asked by the city to rebuild the website. And it's a massive thing of tens of thousands of pages which just wasn't going to be possible in the few months that they had. So instead, they decided to build a parallel site that better conformed to how citizens actually want to interact with information on a city website. They're looking for answers to questions, and they want to take action when they're done, which is really hard to do from a site that looks like this. So our team built Honolulu Answers, which is a super-simple search interface where you enter a search term or a question and get back plain language answers that drive a user towards action. Now the site itself was easy enough to build, but the team was faced with the challenge of how they populate all of the content. It would have taken the three of them a very long time, especially given that none of them are actually from Honolulu. And so they did something that's really radical, when you think about how government is used to working. They asked citizens to write the content. So you've heard of a hack-a-thon. They held a write-a-thon, where on one Saturday afternoon -- ("What do I do about wild pigs being a nuisance?") (Laughter) — Wild pigs are a huge problem in Honolulu, apparently. In one Saturday afternoon, they were able to populate most of the content for most of the frequently asked questions, but more importantly than that, they created a new way for citizens to participate in their government.
公民黑客是怎样的呢? 我们团队去年在檀香山, 这三位都是全职雇员, 他们正在担任为期一年的公职, 工作是按市政府的要求重建网站。 它是成千上万页面的大规模工作, 这工作,在他们仅有的几个月时间内 是不可能完成的。 所以,他们决定建立一个平行的网站 更好地符合公民实际上 想要从城市网站上 汲取信息的需求。 他们在寻找答案, 他们想要在网站做好的时候人们可以有实际的行动 从这样的一个网站 真的很难。 随后我们的团队搭建了“檀香山答案”, 它是一个超简单的搜索界面, 你只需要输入搜索词或一个问题, 就可以得到用平实语言写成的答案, 这驱使用户继续使用。 网站本身是容易建成的, 但团队面临的挑战是 他们如何填充所有内容。 这将会占用他们三个人 很长的时间, 特别是在他们都不是 檀香山本地人的情况下。 所以他们做了一件真的很前卫的事, 之所以这么讲,是因为 要他们颠覆了人们关于政府该如何运作的想象 他们要求公民自己书写内容。 你应该听说过“编程马拉松” (hack-a-thon)。 他们举行了“书写马拉松” (write-a-thon), 在某个星期六的下午 -- ("野猪被人讨厌要怎么办?")(笑声)-- 在檀香山,野猪显然是个大问题。 在星期六的下午, 他们能够书写填充大部分内容 以解答大多数的常见问题, 但比这更重要的是, 他们创造了公民参与政府互动的新途径。
Now, I think this is a really cool story in and of itself, but it gets more awesome. On the National Day of Civic Hacking this past June in Oakland, where I live, the Code For America team in Oakland took the open source code base of Honolulu Answers and turned it into Oakland Answers, and again we held a write-a-thon where we took the most frequently asked questions and had citizens write the answers to them, and I got into the act. I authored this answer, and a few others. And I'm trying to this day to articulate the sense of empowerment and responsibility that I feel for the place that I live based simply on this small act of participation. And by stitching together my small act with the thousands of other small acts of participation that we're enabling through civic hacking, we think we can reenergize citizenship and restore trust in government.
我觉得这本身就是一个很酷的故事, 它变得越来越棒。 今年的公民黑客日 在六月时,在我居住的奥克兰举办, “为美国编程”团队在奥克兰 采取了开放“檀香山答案”源码的代码 并把它变成了“奥克兰答案”, 于是我们再次举行“书写马拉松”, 我们收集了最常见的问题, 并号召市民做出解答, 随后我开始行动。 我和其他几个人创作了这个答案。 这一天我试图感觉到 我对所生活居住的城市 有被赋予权力和责任的滋味, 这样的感受只是基于 参与活动这件这小小的举动。 把我的小小行动和 成千上万人参与的 小小行动加在一起 我们就有能力通过公民黑客行为, 重振公民权利, 并且恢复对政府的信任。
At this point, you may be wondering what city officials think of all this. They actually love it. As most of you guys know, cities are being asked every day to do more with less, and they're always looking for innovative solutions to entrenched problems. So when you give citizens a way to participate beyond attending a town hall meeting, cities can actually capture the capacity in their communities to do the business of government.
此时,你可能会想 市政公务人员会如何看待这一切。 他们很喜欢。 你们中大部分人知道, 人们每天期待着 城市能花小钱办大事, 他们一直在寻找 创新的解决方案 来处理这根深蒂固的问题。 所以,当你给予公民参与的路径 除了出席市政厅会议以外的路径, 城市实际上可以汲取 居住在这里的社群的能力 来为政府出谋划策。
Now I don't want to leave the impression that civic hacking is just an American phenomenon. It's happening across the globe, and one of my favorite examples is from Mexico City, where earlier this year, the Mexico House of Representatives entered into a contract with a software development firm to build an app that legislators would use to track bills. So this was just for the handful of legislators in the House. And the contract was a two-year contract for 9.3 million dollars. Now a lot of people were really angry about this, especially geeks who knew that 9.3 million dollars was an absolutely outrageous amount of money for what was a very simple app. But instead of taking to the streets, they issued a challenge. They asked programmers in Mexico to build something better and cheaper, and they offered a prize of 9,300 dollars -- 10,000 times cheaper than the government contract, and they gave the entrants 10 days. And in those 10 days, they submitted 173 apps, five of which were presented to Congress and are still in the app store today. And because of this action, that contract was vacated, and now this has sparked a movement in Mexico City which is home to one of our partners, Code for Mexico City.
我不想留下这样的印象 公民黑客只是美国才会出现的现象。 在全球其他地区也在发生着, 我最喜欢的例子之一 是墨西哥城,今年年初, 墨西哥众议院的代表 与一个软件开发公司签订了合同, 要建立一个应用程序, 使议员能够用来跟进条例草案。 这只是为少数几个 在众议院的议员。 合同为期两年, 数额为 930 万美金。 很多人都对这件事表示很生气, 特别是程序员们知道, 要写这样一个非常简单的应用程序 930 万绝对是夸张到令人愤慨的高昂报价。 但他们没有走上街头抗议, 而是发出了挑战。 他们要求在墨西哥的程序员们 创建出更好且更便宜的程序, 他们提供的奖金是 9300 美元 -- 比政府合同 便宜一万倍, 他们给参赛者 10 天时间。 在那十天里, 参赛者共提交了 173 个应用程序, 其中五个被筛选出来送往议会, 目前仍然能够在苹果在线商店看到它们。 因为这一行动, 该合同被撤销了, 在墨西哥城,现在 这行动引发了一场运动, 这是我们另一个伙伴的故事, “为墨西哥城编程”。
And so what you see in all three of these places, in Honolulu and in Oakland and in Mexico City, are the elements that are at the core of civic hacking. It's citizens who saw things that could be working better and they decided to fix them, and through that work, they're creating a 21st-century ecosystem of participation. They're creating a whole new set of ways for citizens to be involved, besides voting or signing a petition or protesting. They can actually build government.
你在这三个地方可以看到的是, 它们是檀香山,奥克兰和墨西哥城, 公民黑客核心要素的组成部分。 公民看到可改进的地方 于是决定要修复它们, 通过这项工作,他们正在创建 参与政务的 21 世纪生态系统。 他们正在创建一套全新的方法 让公民参与, 除了投票、签署请愿书 或抗议之外的政治参与行动, 实际上,他们可以建立政府。
So back to our friend Ben Franklin, who, one of his lesser-known accomplishments was that in 1736 he founded the first volunteer firefighting company in Philadelphia, called a brigade. And it's because he and his friends noticed that the city was having trouble keeping up with all the fires that were happening in the city, so in true civic hacker fashion, they built a solution.
所以回到我们的朋友 本杰明·富兰克林, 他不那么鲜为人知的成就之一 就是于 1736 年,他在费城创立了 第一个志愿性的消防公司, 叫作“消防小分队“。 这是因为他和他的朋友们注意到 城市所遇到的麻烦 通常与在城市内着火有关, 正是因为他们有公民黑客的潜质才能这样做, 他们建立了一个解决方案。
And we have our own brigades at Code for America working on the projects that I've just described, and we want to ask you to follow in Ben Franklin's footsteps and come join us. We have 31 brigades in the U.S. We are pleased to announce today that we're opening up the brigade to international cities for the first time, starting with cities in Poland and Japan and Ireland. You can find out if there's a brigade where you live at brigade.codeforamerica.org, and if there's not a brigade where you live, we will help you. We've created a tool kit which also lives at brigade.codeforamerica.org, and we will support you along the way. Our goal is to create a global network of civic hackers who are innovating on the existing system in order to build tools that will solve entrenched problems, that will support local government, and that will empower citizens.
我们在“为美国编程” 组织内也有自己的旅 从事我刚才所描述的工作, 我们希望你 能够跟随本杰明·富兰克林的脚步, 来加入我们。 我们在美国有 31 个旅, 今天我们很高兴地宣布 我们的“小分队”要向国际城市开放 这是第一次发生的事, 我们开始与波兰、日本 还有爱尔兰等城市合作, 你可以在 brigade.codeforamerica.org 这网页 找出在你居住的地方是否有一个旅, 如果你居住的地方没有旅,我们将帮助你, 我们已经创建了一个工具包,也可以在 brigade.codeforamerica.org 这网站上找到, 我们会支持你一路向前。 我们的目标是创建 一个公民黑客的全球网络, 其中聚合所有试图 在现有系统上做出创新的人, 为了生成能够解决 根深蒂固的问题的工具, 能够用于帮助地方政府, 能够用于提高公民被赋予的力量。
So please come hack with us.
所以请来和我们一起当黑客。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)