That’s what Micah Sifry, Sunlight’s senior strategic consultant and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum says today, about an E-Tech on a panel on "civic hacking" — online activists taking government data in its raw and user-unfriendly state, and making it accessible and helpful to citizens.

Sounds familiar.

The panel discussed a number of British sites launched by our colleagues at mySociety.org as well as the hacking of the UN at UNDemocracy.com, where you can now get easy access to the transcripts of the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council in structured formats, information that was previously very hard to get your hands on. Neat stuff.

"When an institution is broken," Micah writes, "more scrutiny can only help fix it."

Yup.