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The whole, 'Is the Internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.

So there's always been this clash between what is the public good - that which belongs to all of us in common - and what can be exploited for a private interest.

Our civic society is really all we have by way of nationhood.

As citizens we have to be more thoughtful and more educated and more informed. I turn on the TV and I see these grown people screaming at each other, and I think, well, if we don't get our civility back, we're in trouble.

People are not fundamentally bad. It only takes the smallest of correctives to take care of that tiny minority that wants to disrupt the community.

It seems to me that we're in danger of losing sight of certain basic civic values in society by allowing the growth of a whole generation of people who really have no sense of attachment to society.

In an age when many of our citizens casually reveal information about themselves in social media wildly beyond anything imaginable only a decade ago, it would seem to be a useful exercise in civics to re-educate the public about the value and purpose of protecting against unwarranted government intrusion.

Treating people fairly and with civility is not a bad thing... It would be good for our country if political leaders actually took that to heart.

I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.

By bringing out into the public domain how human institutions actually behave, we can understand frankly, to a degree, for the first time the civilization that we actually have.