By Rebecca McCauley Rench

In the past, we have created bureaucracy, protocols, rules, laws, and systems to appease the masses and control the majority of a problem. We no longer live in a world where we need to treat everyone as a majority. Rather, we live in a world where we can communicate our specific needs, desires, and situation to our leaders and government through the data we continually create. We have wearable devices that can share our current heart rate and there are refrigerators that can create a shopping list for us. There are many other pieces of information we could program such devices to share with those around us providing services and assistance. Why should we continue to live in a society that makes general rules as needed for the lowest denominator or majority of the population? As the information age continues, we have the opportunity to create a society where individual attention is a real possibility. If we choose, we can create a governance structure that takes advantage of this data sharing to provide services tailored to individual needs. We should embrace the data revolution to make all our lives better, more individualized, and to create more effective, efficient government services.