Most of the policy that got enacted has its own reasons. Policymakers and policy analyst have debated policies for years. These policies impact peopleβs lives but very few people had a direct say on how policy was proposed, analyzed and enacted. Democracy thrives on public opinion. Ironically, nowadays the very foundation of democracy is shaken because of public opinion. And it turns out, factual understanding of world also is getting blurry day by day. When people do not own the research fundings or are not in the policy debating loop, they disagree with policies even though it benefits them.
A lot of the policies especially science and public good policies should be data driven. National Representatives and other policymakers should not just make the data public but have a wider discussion before even presenting it on public sphere.
Conspiracies and falsified information can only be rooted out if we let people know how much money , time and effort was behind the policy. Average people do not know the level of investment when they are sharing/retweeting/making memes about falsified information. People should be made aware that science research is not just a google search. Google search is not research. One is merely fishing for information in google search. for example, only very few scholar know how much of investment it took to eradicate measles through immunization policy but now it is only taking a share/retweet to bring it back because they donβt see how many professional spent their time, how much governments invested money and how many schools/universities debated / cross checked and verfied before it got into public sphere and i think this is exactly where a general people should be included. This is only possible through sharing of public data.A repository of metadata for every single public policy that got enacted.
