Wikipedia is the world’s most successful model of citizen engagement and collaboration. It began ten years ago as an experiment... View Article
Continue readingTools for Transparency: Open Atrium
Today, our guest post is written by Joshua Gay, a programmer, activist, and community organizer whose interests revolve around technology,... View Article
Continue readingEPA’s Wiki
It's a welcome change of pace to be able to say something nice about the federal government. Federal Computer Week reports on the Environmental Protection Agency's use of the Web 2.0 style to help local citizens in Washington State working to clean up Puget Sound.
Last November, EPA held its 2007 Environmental Information Symposium where they activated its Puget Sound Information Challenge wiki. Participants were asked to supply information that could help local groups working to restore the Sound. The Web site was up over the two days of the conference, and received 18,000 page views, 175 entries with everything from documents to decision support systems and a significant volume of e-mail, the magazine reports.
Continue reading“Wiki the Vote” on Congresspedia
We’re launching something new over at Congresspedia.org today -- "Wiki the Vote," a project to build citizen-written profiles on each and every candidate for Congress in 2008.
This project gives you the tools you need to research candidates and share your knowledge on the records, agendas and influences of congressional incumbents and challengers. We started with nearly 300 basic profiles to be expanded and updated by citizens, journalists and even the campaigns themselves (or those of their opponents). Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors.
Trying to Keep Up
The Senate took some steps forward last week to make its activities more transparent, but honestly, some of the most innovative and exciting stuff to make government more transparent is coming from individual lawmakers themselves (and in one case government) and enterprising organizations and citizens.
First, take a look at Freshman Senator Jon Tester posting of his daily schedule. How refreshing is this!? I hope others will pick up on his efforts to be really transparent about how he's spending his time, and on those of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand's too. (Sen. Tester's schedule and Rep. Gillibrand's can be found on their pages on Congresspedia too.) We hope that some of our readers will send what these two lawmakers are doing to their representatives as models for what it means to execute the public's business in a public way.
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