Page:Code Swaraj - Carl Malamud - Sam Pitroda.djvu/16

Code Swaraj everywhere. Even in America it's true, because government does not want you to know about that stuff."

This fight goes on at all levels. We are doing it in the US, we are doing it in Europe.

[applause]

We need people like that to join in this battle for digital development. Digital development is not about hardware or software, it is also about efforts like this. Your health data, who owns your health data? It's a big issue globally. What will you do with your health data? Issues of privacy, piracy. But the main challenge is to open up the system, open government, open data, open platforms, open software.

Yesterday I spent entire day at Gandhi Ashram on Nonviolence, and Gandhi-ji would have liked open government platforms. Gandhi-ji was all about open-source software. Gandhi-ji would be tweeting today. Gandhi-ji would be on the Facebook today. Gandhi-ji would have blogged today, because it was about the media, publishing, printing, sending newspapers out.

We are saying, how can government hold onto this information? We have to fight it. Take Gandhian approach, satyagraha in digital world. Satyagraha means filing a court case, petition, explaining to government, and saying, "You are wrong, public is right. This is public information, it is not your information." This is also part of digital development. Many people understand it, believe me.

There are only a handful of people in this world who grasp this larger issue. Everybody does one little piece. We have a group of friends, I'm on the board of World Wide Web. With me on the board is the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, so I work with him on promoting that.

Then our friend Vinton Cerf, who works with us, Vinton Cerf is the father of Internet. Tim Berners-Lee is the father of Web, Vint is the father of Internet.

You need to be with all these people. You need to work with them to be able to understand, and all of this has to be a labor of love. It is not a job. Nobody gives you a job to work with Vint Cerf. There is no government position which says, "Now you go make friends with inventor of Web," but you've got to do that. Somebody has to do it.