Jennifer Granick wrote an article for Wired News on Oct, 25, 2006 titled "Saving Democracy With Web 2.0." She writes, "I'd like to see applications that go further, mashing up statistics about government procurement contracts with databases of campaign finance donations -- visually tracing the path of a dollar as it travels from campaign contributor to contract procurement."
My concern is that we the public are not able to fully understand important natural resource and ecosystem issues because information is often controlled or interpreted by special and political interests. I believe that the new developments in Social Networking and Web 2.0 applications can help create a groundswell of public interest in making the government and special interests much more responsive to the public concerns for a sustainable local, regional, national and global future.
Granick also quotes Bruce Cahan, president of the nonprofit Urban Logic, "We read of billion-dollar national infrastructure repair cost studies on the eve of highway legislation, or scary medical risks on the eve of public health or environmental budget hearings," Cahan told me. "Special interests with special knowledge compete to out-shock us because we've made their funding depend on public fear.
"But with a common performance benchmark, we can model urban risks so that both voters and markets can hold government accountable for creating multidimensional solutions to complex problems." Granick writes that "Cahan proposes using new data-sharing technology to blend various performance metrics for cities into a spatially weighted measure called "sustainable resiliency." People can then use the measure as ratings for capital markets, insurance and even politicians."
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