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Business Title: Saving Democracy With Web 2.0 Hey, Web 2.0! Election Day is Nov. 7, and your country needs you. At BarCamp, SuperHappyDevHouse, NetSquared and other hacker get-togethers, scores of entrepreneurs and engineers arrive eager to collaborate, make information easier to share and use, and mobilize groups for effective action. Though it may not be obvious, the road marks in this amorphous thing called Web 2.0 are political: grassroots participation, forging new connections, and empowering from the ground up. The ideal democratic process is participatory and the Web 2.0 phenomenon is about democratizing digital technology. There's never been a better time to tap that technological ethic to re-democratize our democracy. Many Americans believe that our political system is broken, and that money is to blame. Legislators are beholden to donations from special interest groups. Regulators pass through a revolving door to take jobs in the very industries they used to regulate. Big campaign donors somehow land big government contracts, despite arcane public bidding processes. New data-sharing technology can enable citizens to follow the money in comprehensive and compelling ways, and vote accordingly. Today, you can already access online data on which companies donate to which political parties and candidates, and make some good guesses about what they get in return. http://Opensecrets.org, run by the Center for Responsive Politics, provides a startling amount of information on campaign donations, members of Congress and special interest groups. http://MAPLight.org provides a detailed service for tracing California state legislation, including who supported and who killed various bills. A new, publicly accessible government website mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 will soon list the federal government's grants and contracts, tracing exactly how tax money is being spent. Knowing how much money is spent for which programs, and where, is a great start. Knowing what good, if any, spending that money accomplishes would be even better. Web 2.0 technology can help citizens process and understand political donations, government contracts and programs, and performance metrics in all sorts of important and novel ways. For example, tagging information about federal expenditures, unpaved highways or toxic waste sites with GeoRSS would let citizens easily cross-reference the data with other information, including campaign donations. Data feeds that use Ajax, JSON and OpenGIS Web Map Service can incorporate externally hosted geospatial capabilities into mashups that weave data together into a single, multifeatured map. These capabilities would make publicly accessible information publicly comprehensible, for a multitude of uses and applications, incorporating a variety of data. Major internet players are beginning to understand the power of mapping political data. This past Monday, Google announced that it would overlay 2006 campaign data from the Federal Election Commission and http://Opensecrets.org on top of Google Earth. Users can see stars on the U.S. map wherever there are races for congressional seats and state governorships. Clicking on a star opens up a bubble with information about races in that area. 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. Similarly, citizens should be able to see which districts receive infrastructure improvement and which are left out in the cold; which have true public health, and which only have subsidies for health plans that their residents and businesses can't afford. Cross-link Environmental Protection Agency permits for particle emissions with census information and campaign contributions, and you might find out if polluted air is the result of racism, cronyism or both. Are asthma cases in inner cities or breast cancer cases in suburbs a byproduct of human or political genomes? Do campaign contributions from real estate developers result in urban decay and indoor pollutants (stoking more asthma cases) in poor neighborhoods? Better-synthesized information can reveal the dynamics of cause and effect, chart the money trail and lay bare the profit motive. Pioneers in this field, like Bruce Cahan (bcahan@urbanlogic.org), president of the nonprofit Urban Logic, envision the end of business as usual in politics. Voters and officeholders will be able to connect the dots in previously impossible ways. Social finance markets and technology will change the way budgeting and regulation happens. 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. "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." Cahan is using the market to encourage data tagging of performance benchmarks by creating new financing schemes that offer cities, businesses and nongovernmental organizations cheaper interest and insurance rates as a reward for building sustainable resiliency into their regions. Like Web 2.0, ideas like sustainable resiliency are completely nonpartisan, totally political and fundamentally democratic. Some Americans have given up on politics, but not on making the world a happier, healthier and more sustainable place. I'd like to see entrepreneurs focused on building the next billion-dollar YouTube clone carve some time out of the day to take the cool new Web 2.0 tools for sharing and collaboration, and apply them to make publicly available data sets. Make them manageable, interoperable and visually compelling. Do that, and you've created new ways to make government responsive to the public, and to magnify the individual power of each educated and informed voter.
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