Since yesterday, November 25th, when I launched my book in Lisbon, I feel that I didn’t just put a work into the world, I also took on a responsibility. Half a century of dealing with governments, systems and postponed reforms taught me that no text is valid without a road and that no diagnosis is useful if it does not generate movement. While presenting the iGov – Active Citizenshiphe realized that every chronicle, memory and provocation was an invitation, a push and a call for the country to wake up.
For 52 years, I saw the State close and open in cycles, promising reforms that never came, reinventing bureaucracies in new electronic forms, losing digital sovereignty while I believed I had gained it. I saw 30 governments repeat mistakes and vanity fairs, I saw informational silos turn into trenches, technologies purchased as talismans applied as patches and citizens forced to be reborn every year before the administration. I wrote this book because it is not enough to modernize, we need to understand, question and act.
But yesterday I realized that the book alone is not enough. It needs to come off the shelf, cross the country, be discussed, contradicted and enriched. It needs to gain road, dust and voices. That’s why I announced my Citizenship Caravans, perhaps the most ambitious and risky part of this project.
I don’t want formal events or conferences drowned out by powerpoints. I want live meetings with mayors, civic associations, schools, universities, companies and citizens who are never called to the table where their future is decided. I want conversations where the fight against bureaucracy is discussed without fear, where we talk about digital transformation without romanticizing technology, where we understand the difference between algorithmic governance and living democracy, where we face the risk of techno-feudalism and the urgency of recovering digital sovereignty. I want to listen, inspire and mobilize, because no reform will survive without active citizenship.
They ask me if it’s worth it. It is not utopia to believe that a State crossed by silos, resistance and vested interests can be transformed by public participation. I answer that not only is it worth it, but it is impossible for the future to happen without it. Technology has become a political and ethical territory where democracy in the coming decades will play out. Artificial intelligence (AI), big dataautomation and machine-to-machine regulation are today the center of the conflicts we are already experiencing. Either citizens regain their place or they will be replaced by humanityless metrics and algorithms.
The caravans will cross territories where digital exclusion is the rule. We will face disbelief, democratic fatigue and increasingly hollow populist speeches, but we will also find those who want to think about the future and realize that state reform is a matter of collective survival. We will find teachers and doctors stuck in mechanical tasks, immigrants persecuted and lost between procedures, young people who do not believe in voting, mayors suffocated by the lack of interoperability and professionals who have lost dignity in the electronic bureaucracy they were supposed to combat. They are all in the book and they will all have a place in the conversation.
Yesterday I presented a book and today I begin a journey. I know it is longer than I am, more ambitious than any political agenda, and more urgent than many admit. I believe that every kilometer covered by the Citizenship Caravans can rescue a piece of the future that we have been putting off. A future where technology serves democracy, where the State recovers its mission and where the citizen is once again the center of everything.
If this book is your compass, the road will be fireproof. Perhaps, after crossing the country, I will be able to confirm that the true digital transformation of the State begins with the civic transformation of each one of us.
E-governance specialist