Change.org has a little write up of my conversation with Dave Witzel and Jerry Michalski earlier today. The post on Change.org does a decent job of capturing the main thesis, but the conversation itself covered more ground, including some reflections on the changing roles of business, government and individual citizens in addressing environmental problems and [...]

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Are our institutions for global problem-solving broken? The recent failure to secure a meaningful climate change deal in Copenhagen and the global financial crisis suggest that existing global institutions require extensive rewiring. Decades of economic development, integration of product and service markets, cross-border travel and new technologies enabling virtual interaction have created a world that [...]

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Google’s clash with China raises some more fundamental questions. It’s now been 20 years since the June 4th incident in Tiananmen and political change has been, as Mao predicted, “like crossing a river, feeling for the pebbles one at a time.” The question, over the long term, is whether the ghosts of Tiananmen will come back [...]

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I was delighted to hear that Google has finally thrown down the gauntlet in China. No longer will it be complicit in denying freedom of information and expression to Chinese citizens. Google is now on the right side of the moral equation. But will it change anything?
Like Iran and Burma, China has modernized and adapted [...]

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The right to make freedom of information requests is in enshrined in most democratic countries (Wikipedia says 70 countries have such legislation). But how often is that right actually invoked? My guess is that it’s vastly underutilized and that most members of the public would be surprised to know what they could find out  if [...]

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There’s something else missing from recovery.gov altogether (see below):  the ability for citizens to have input into which projects get funded in their jurisdictions.
Stimuluswatch.org, evidently a work in progress, provides an interesting (albeit imperfect) example of how this might work. Launched by team led by Jerry Brito at George Mason University, the site encourages citizens around the country with [...]

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Although recovery.gov was launched on the same day Obama signed the stimulus bill, I’ve been holding back on posting until there was a bit more substance to report on. There’s still no meat unfortunately (the graphic below is about as detailed as the information currently gets), but I’ll provide my 2 cents anyways.

Obama has promised [...]

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After posting on Galaxy Zoo last week and then catching up with one of the project leaders today I learned that the next generation of this phenomenal citizen science project was just launched last night.

In the original Galaxy Zoo nearly 150,000 citizen scientists helped astronomers at Oxford and Yale classify roughly 1 million galaxies [...]

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In the past, natural resource conservation came down to the capacity of an authoritative, centralized body in a geographic territory to monitor and control the exploitation of a given resource, whether forests, minerals or fisheries. Said regulators would issue permits for exploitation, often acting from a distance and on the basis of very sparse and [...]

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Participatory regulation is arguably the best way to surface and defeat corruption in government and industry. I’ve highlighted a range of impressive efforts below. They range from Transparency International’s more top-down survey and index approach to the bottom-up Wikileaks site where anybody can post documents that uncover instances of corruption. You can add your examples [...]

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