Venture Democracy
Web 2.0 is still the rave, nobody can shut up about it. I’m sure it reared its flashy head at hotdog eating contests simply because it’s so trendy. Anyhow, some of the topics it touches are very meaningful and we should take the time to pay them the attention they deserve.
Risa over at Open Journal stopped to ponder on a recent Wired article called “Saving Democracy With Web 2.0“. Jennifer Granick writes (her words):
“I try to convince Web 2.0 innovators that they can improve our political system. I write about Bruce Cahan’s (of Urban Logic) ideas for tagging datasets with spatial and other metadata to make them interoperate with other information. Bruce’s work involves using the market to encourage cities to do this with their data, creating a metric called “sustainable resiliancy”, so that in crisis decision makers have critical infrastructure, public health data, pollution flow, and all sorts of other critical information in a cool-looking, comprehensive map.” - source: Jennifer Granick’s blog
A nice followup was this comment linking to a few pratical UK sites by one of her readers. I just wanted to add that in Canada we have formed a citizen’s collective to enabled each of us to make better use of the information flowing through various governmental grids. Check it out and get involved! It’s called “Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data”.
