In elementary school, I loved Show and Tell. I loved to hunt around my house for an object I could bring to school with a story. It’s not hard to see… - Heather Brooke

You find most journalists now are on all these social networks. They’re all about creating… they want a direct relationship with their audience, in a way that politicians have been very loathe to do. They don’t want to come down to the masses. They still want to be in that fortress, in that ivory tower where they can lecture down to people. They haven’t really adapted to this two-way communication.

Maybe you would prefer not to be bothered with how the government is run. If that's the case then you have no right to complain when your taxes are raised, or if your children's education is substandard, or you have to wait a year for a vital operation. Good government does not happen by itself but is the result of individual effort. One of the easiest and most effective things you can do is simply to ask for information. I hope I've given you the tools and confidence to do exactly that.

What I've seen from being in this access to information field for so long is that it used to be quite a niche interest, and it's gone mainstream. Everybody, increasingly, around the world, wants to know about what people in power are doing. They want a say in decisions that are made in their name and with their money. It's this democratization of information that I think is an information enlightenment, and it has many of the same principles of the first Enlightenment. It's about searching for the truth, not because somebody says it's true, "because I say so." No, it's about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested. That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions about the right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people, or that women should be subordinate to men, or that the Church was the official word of God.