This TED Talk suggests that our governments should be driven by collective prioritization using technology.  As much as there are pros and cons to collective decision-making, at least leaders could be more sensitive to the values of their constituents and focus on the things that matter most to people.  The challenge, of course, is to have a democratization of information for the masses, meaning data that puts problems in a perspective very different from typical media, so that people know the scale — and not merely the coverage — of issues and impacts on the global community.