Intergenerational Democracy
The conclusion to the legal brief submitted by Linda Hamel (the General Counsel of the Technology Division) to the Senate post-audit committee:
Prior generations of the Commonwealth’s citizens have taken pains to ensure that current and historic government records are available to our citizens. Our children’s children will live in a world of information technology that we cannot now imagine. Long after today’s popular office applications have disappeared, future Massachusetts citizens will seek information about the past. When we create documents today in open standard formats, we engage in intergenerational democracy, reaching forward across time to future citizens of our Commonwealth to offer them unfettered access to the electronic record of their past and our future, and backward across time to honor the ideals of past citizens of the Commonwealth who fought for open access to public records.
