Most young people aren't interested in politics and changing their minds will take more than voting campaigns or a high-school course in civics.Engagement has to happen on their terms. And for that we need to think way outside the box. Two news stories last week may point the way.STORY 1: According to the Wall Street Journal, a new spectator sport is sweeping the globe: watching people play videogames.Scoff if you want, but young people love it. Last October 32 million of them went online to watch the "League of Legends" championship. That is more viewers than the finales for "Breaking Bad," "24" and "The Sopranos" combined.Watching is also very big business. Amazon.com just spent a billion dollars to buy Twitch, the world's largest internet site for videogame spectators. Twitch is now the fourth biggest source of US internet traffic, after Netflix, Google and Apple—and it is barely three years old.STORY 2: The Ottawa Citizen reports that Statistics Canada is poised to adopt a radical new way of conducting the census. Rather than dispatch the usual army of enumerators, the department says it can get all the information it needs just by scraping some 500 government databases.Finland, Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany are already doing this. As a result, while Holland's 1971 census cost $143 million, the cost of their 2011 “virtual” census dropped to $2 million.So what do these stories have to do with engaging youth? The clear lesson from Twitch is that these young people really don't see the world as we do. Youth culture is so intertwined with cyberspace that what we see as watching cartoons is to them an Olympic experience. No wonder they are disengaged.But if we really want to engage them, rather than shaking our heads, we should be asking whether this fascination with online games could be leveraged. Does it build any special skills and how could we inspire young people to put them to work in the public interest?There is an iconic scene in the film The Matrix where Neo, the reluctant hero, finally sees through appearances and reality appears before him as dazzling streams of data that he now controls with his mind.[caption id="attachment_88281" align="alignnone" width="375"] Neo sees the Matrix[/caption]What if these video-gamers suddenly found themselves immersed in a world of pure data where their internet skills gave them the power to alter reality? For a gaming wizard, this would be the ultimate challenge.The lesson from StatsCan is that a brave new world of data entrepreneurialism is rapidly emerging that could make this fantasy real. The Open Government Partnership is a worldwide movement that includes Canada and some 60 other countries. These governments have pledged to make their huge data holdings public so people can use them freely to build all kinds of new and extraordinary things, from a simple app to buy stocks online to complex models for climate change. Young people are enthusiastic users.For instance, SchoolZone is an app that combines school location data with traffic data to help parents identify the most dangerous intersections and find the safest route to school. It was built by some young data entrepreneurs in BC, with no help from government beyond access to the raw data.As the data comes online, thousands of new apps are appearing every month, many designed by young people. But this is only the beginning. By the end of the decade, billions of e-devices will be pulsing out data from every corner of the earth, every minute of every day. The scope and scale of this new resource is truly breathtaking. We are on the threshold of the next internet era: the era of Big Data.When it comes to youth and politics, there may be a remarkable convergence of interest and opportunity here. As governments throw their data vaults open, they could also be leveraging this resource to transform young people's passion for videogames into a passion for policy innovation.In the next election, all parties should commit to a major investment of funds—say, $500 million over five years—to create “the greatest internet game on earth:” a new Canada-wide program in data entrepreneurialism.While the idea of a sponsorship and awards program for apps is not new—lots of smaller versions have been launched, often with great success—what is unique here is the scale of the program and the opportunity to link it to this new internet era.The program would fund thousands of Open Data projects for young people across the country, challenging them to put their gaming skills to work solving public issues, from street crime to famine. The result would be a new generation of policy ideas and tools, much like the early days of Web 2.0.The government could even partner with a platform like Twitch to turn internet spectator sports into a new kind of policy arena. Exceptional apps could be showcased at national and international competitions. Imagine a contest between two climate-change apps. The designers would not only propose options, but could use these apps to model and debate the impact of different policies before an internet audience and in real time.The goal of this new program would be to produce a cohort of smart young people that could act as the vanguard for a new breed of data entrepreneurs. To succeed, they would have to explore, learn about, debate and master real policy issues—as would their fans. In short, they would have to engage. But they would do so on their own terms—and in the process they would transform how policy and politics are done.At half a billion dollars, it's a bargain.Dr. Don Lenihan is an internationally recognized expert on democracy, public engagement, accountability and service delivery. Since 2009, he has been Senior Associate at Canada's Public Policy Forum in Ottawa. From October 2013 to April 2014, Don served as Chair of the Ontario Open Government Engagement Team. The views expressed here are those of the columnist alone. Don can be reached at: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at: @DonLenihan