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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The Power of Information Taskforce, which was established to advise the UK government on how to take advantage of new developments in digital media, released it’s report to the Cabinet Office earlier this week in beta. There are 25 recommendations in all. Many themes in the report resonate strongly with the issues I have been [...]

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In an age of highly-complex and often highly-expensive social network mapping and analysis tools, it’s good to know that some people still appreciate the value of getting back to basics. Net-Map, a simple network analysis tool, was developed by Eva Schiffer while at the International Food Policy Research Institute to help farmers in rural [...]

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Technologists and science fiction writers have long envisioned a world where a seamless worldwide network of Internet-connected sensors could capture every event, action, and change on earth, giving us unprecedented real-time information about the state of the world. Such remote sensing and surveillance capabilities could easily have Orwellian consequences, but they can also empower citizens [...]

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For those of you already worrying about $200 barrels of oil, you may want to stop reading now. The New Scientist recently released an interactive graphic of the world’s oil flows and chokepoints that highlights just how vulnerable the world’s oil supply is to conflict, terrorism, natural disasters, and other factors beyond our control.

In a [...]

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Google Earth has become a platform for revealing atrocities in Dafur, tracking the spread of the avian flu, and analyzing the effect of climate change on sea levels, among dozens of other great applications. Recently the State of Alabama’s Homeland Security department opted to use Google Earth as a platform for emergency management.
The site threads [...]

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My Wikinomics co-author Don Tapscott has an interesting post on Wiki cities over on wikinomics.com. He discusses the “Wiki City Rome” initiative, a project led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city’s pulse in real time. The project features a giant on-screen display [...]

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