We are in an era of institution failure. From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall St. there is a recognition that our institutions no longer sufficiently serve us. Open data can’t solve this problem, but it is part of the solution. The challenge of the old order and the institutions it fostered is that its organizing principle is built around the management (control) of processes, it’s been about the application of the industrial production model to government services.

What’s needed, then, are mechanisms for users to delegate authority over their devices to third parties while holding those parties accountable for their decisions, along with a less autarkic definition of user freedom that leaves room for such delegation. This is a new problem for the software industry, but fortunately it’s not a new problem for Western civilization. Centuries ago, western societies began to develop institutions and principles for delegating authority to third-party regulators while still holding them accountable for their decisions.

DevOps is the growing practice of forging tight collaboration between application developers and IT operations staff to continually improve performance, automation, and scalability of software and systems. The philosophy is also the force behind scripting language-based infrastructure automation tools, such as Puppet and Chef. But it’s also a reflection of the necessities that come from trying to provide reliable systems based on increasingly complex and unreliable stacks of software and infrastructure.

To aid him in his fight, Amit is going to need a bone marrow transfusion. Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000. This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.