Panel on information and public policy

Computing professionals have been immersed predominantly in problems of how to acquire, formulate, and retrieve information with some vague notion that someone, somewhere, sometime is going to use that information to better frame suitable policy. This assumes of course a rational universe in which strategies are based on outcomes of observations and guided by criteria which optimize something reasonable—such as health, income, production, power, or what have you. We may be waking up now to the realization that the technical problem has a much broader scope than first envisioned. The technical problem may have to also include a demonstration that information can be used to formulate rational policy in the first place and how to do it.