Social Governance System
Social Governance System
Following are people sharing some of the same vision as the Social Governance System.
Fadi Chehadé, former CEO of ICANN, has argued that the systems governing the internet — and by extension much of global communication — were built for a different era and no longer serve the populations they affect. His call for more inclusive, multi-stakeholder governance structures echoes the core premise of SGS: that governance frameworks need to be redesigned from the ground up, not merely patched.
▶ Watch: Our Internet — A Shared Global Resource (WCIT 2014)The inventor of the World Wide Web has spent recent years warning that what was built as an open, decentralized tool for human connection has been captured by centralized platforms that operate without meaningful accountability. Berners-Lee's work on Solid and the Magna Carta for the Web reflects an understanding that technical architecture and governance architecture are inseparable — a principle central to the SGS framework.
▶ Watch: A Magna Carta for the Web (TED)Economist and TED Fellow Charity Wayua has documented how governance systems in Kenya and across Africa fail not because of a lack of resources, but because of structural design failures — systems that were never built to serve the people they govern. Her on-the-ground reform work demonstrates both the urgency of the problem and the possibility of change at scale, starting with communities.
▶ Watch: Kenya's Unexpected Solution to Corruption (TED)Co-founder of Superrr Lab, Julia Kloiber works at the intersection of technology, public policy, and civil society. Her argument — that digital tools must be designed with democratic values built in, not bolted on as an afterthought — is directly aligned with the SGS approach of treating governance as a system to be designed, tested, and improved.
▶ Watch: Let's Build Better Digital Tools for Our CitiesHarvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has made the case that the fundamental problem in American governance is not bad politicians but a corrupted system — one where the incentive structures make good governance nearly impossible. His work on institutional design and systemic corruption points toward exactly the kind of structural rethinking that SGS is pursuing.
▶ Watch: We the People, and the Republic We Must Reclaim (TED)Estonia's digital governance experiment is the most successful real-world demonstration that governance can be rebuilt as a system. By digitizing public services, creating transparent data infrastructure, and designing participation into the architecture of the state, Estonia has shown that the principles of good system design — accountability, efficiency, accessibility — apply just as well to governance as to any other complex operation. SGS sees this not as a model to copy, but as evidence that the project is possible.
▶ Watch: What a Digital Government Looks Like — Anna Piperal (TED)