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Of course I think that there is an important role for think tanks.
The only thing is that their role is changing.
I think think tanks and NGOs have been used to have this privileged position
influencing power directly, and being part of the elite.
And now because the elite structure's collapsed,
they have to adjust to the new climate.
So they are suddenly competing for the attention.
They don't have a direct influence on politicians anymore.
So I think that the think tanks will be very needed
especially since society are needed,
because I believe that ultimately the sustainable solutions are the good ones.
They are tested by time, by knowledge.
And of course specialists who are preparing policies
and who are implementing policies will always need white papers.
Even me as an activist who try to advocate for certain issues,
I need white papers. I need the knowledge.
I need to be good at argumentation. So do media.
So do other opinion makers in the society.
So the white papers will be needed
but the target group for that will be much smaller, or is small.
But what I think is that think tanks can also use their knowledge
not to sell it collectively as a package to the society,
but they can also become influential debaters,
and influential movers and shakers in societies.
And they can be more active in communicating micro-messages.
So not the whole white paper, but if a white paper contains something very important:
a micro-detail or a finding that is useful for this debate on Twitter
or that debate on Facebook
or this reaction to a certain public debate in the media,
I think that it's worth to do it.
For example, I can tell you one example for Fair Play Alliance, my organization.
Our most successful post on Facebook was a letter of VĂ clav Havel,
former president of Czechoslovakia, withdrawing Ivan Gaparovic
from the position of general prosecutor of Czechoslovakia.
Now he's currently the president of Slovakia
and he's facing another debate to withdraw him from the position.
And I was very surprised by this.
That we published a letter which was, in a sense,
just showing a certain attitude of the president to this
to this person that wasn't any significant in that debate as such.
But what we did that after this picture,
we posted a link to a complete parliamentary debate about our current president.
And what happened is that people got really interested in this
because of the power of the letter.
And part of them read the whole debate
and started parallel discussions on the internet.
So without this post, nobody would even know that there is a such a debate
from the past that might be relevant to the discussion.
And of course not everybody's going to read it
but it helped to really steer the debate on different places about this issue.