Open Journal Montreal

In a Wired article from October 25th called Saving Democracy with Web 2.0 Jennifer Granick writes:

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.

(…)

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.

For those of you still unsure what we mean by Web 2.0, you can check this wikipedia definition of the term out, and then rest assured that not that many people who use it are totally sure either. But if it will come to acquire real significance it will be with applications of the kind Granick calls for- those that empower users to make meaning of the vast and senseless storehouses of data we’ve long been gathering. A popular and important challenge to the trendy “information economy” buzz of the nineties came from those, like Carolyn Marvin, who wondered whether the mania for data could ever produce knowledge, wisdom, meaning; all those subtler-than-lists things that might concievably help politics, society and, you know, warring civilizations. The question is still valid.

We have more web based, “community” evolved tools then ever before (check out this mind-blowing assembly from the techcrunch index) and many of us rest firm in the belief that this kind of technology can change the world for the better. But is anything changing for the better?

Our behavior as a species within a fragile environment still seems monstrously distorted, and we are plummetting toward total environmental collapse at speeds that reduce the timeline by half each time they are updated. As “civilizations” we fare no better- it feels like governments internationally find it increasingly possible to avoid the real work of crafting and sustaining systems that are oriented toward peace and mutual prosperity. The gap between what’s happening politically- which is supposed to be the apex of our skills in conversation- and what’s happening technologically is huge. What’s up with that? We have a great deal of rhetoric about grassroots, organic, sustainable, synergy; and all too often these seem to be used as rallying cries for investors or voters, not for meaningful change.

In 2005 the “Carter Center’s Global Development Initiative (GDI) convened an unprecedented group of global leaders, thinkers, and policy makers to tackle the ongoing issues surrounding the world’s efforts to help those less fortunate.” Describing the vast majority of the world’s population- those who experience scarily disproportionate poverty, violence, polution and disempowerment- as “less fortunate” kind of reads like a slap in the face, but at least they tried to have a useful conversation.
Leaders from developing countries (another not-great term) specifically the president’s of Mali and Mozambique emphasized:

not being able to identify the policies they felt would lead to the kind of transformative growth they needed in order to become a player in the globalization process and, by so doing, address poverty in a meaningful and sustainable way. Both Presidents spoke passionately on this point. At the same time, it was recognized that the necessary institutions were absent to allow them to articulate and argue those policies with the international community. They also lack the institutions to implement the kind of home-grown policies they seek to follow - institutions which will uphold the rule of law and create conditions where civil servants and the private sector can function effectively.

As for the latter dilemma- lacking insitutions to uphold the rule of law and to create conditions for an effective civil and private sector- it’s a catch 22 situation, institutions like universities, courts, theatres, newspapers, a free press online and off that could foster home grown wisdom and help produce cultures of safety and knowledge, all require some degree of safety and knowledge as a precondition for success. The former- not being able to identify truly effective and empowering policies- is everybody’s problem. It is what leaves us susceptible to small and large scale betrayals and mistakes. Identifying what policy works in what contexts is an enormously complex task, and it’s the one I think could be most meangingfully engaged by the open source process and the new Web.

Web 2.0 start ups regularly receive tens of millions of dollars in funding so that small groups of people can make tools that “everybody” benefits from. Really, despite their techno-utopian branding as revolutionary, they are in most cases more conduits, at least in the short term, for the rich getting richer, and very few offer a demonstrable commitment to transparency and equality that would help balance out. To me it seems too little is done with too much money too much of the time. We have an astronomical waste problem - anyone who’s ever seen the good food thrown out at hotal banquets, restaurants, farmer’s markets even and worse, factories, knows that we have yet to resolve the most heart-wrenchingly basic problems of efficiency. People starve, we throw out crates and tonnes of food. If there was ever a problem that should be tackled by venture capital and collective effort, this is it, I think, and yet we lose pespective.

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[ originally posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 9:46 am and is filed under Open Source, Communication, Everything. ]