Aproximando cidadãos
Virtual worlds, real cultures
Diplomacy doesn’t belong just to the physical world anymore. The project Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds explores how foreign affairs policies can improve the engagement with Muslim communities all around the world, using complex opportunities provided through the use of immersive virtual spaces like Second Life.
In this video developed during the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. in September 2009, Rita J. King and Joshua S. Fouts, both Senior Fellows of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, talk to WebCitizen about their project and its mission.
King and Fouts chose the virtual world of Second Life as platform for their research due to many reasons, among them the fact that it is the most widespread international virtual world platform. That is their idea: how could people learn about other cultures in a experimental, authentic virtual space, and how this information can add or improve the diplomatic work in the physical and real world?
The project objective was to verify how much they could learn about Islam in a space that has the potential to bring new insights and to crush prejudices and boundaries cemented in the real world.
Rita J. King is Chairwoman and Creative Director of Dancing Ink Productions, and Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
Joshua S. Fouts is Global Strategist of Dancing Ink Productions, and Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is a non-profit and non-governmental and educational American institution that through its programs, publications and website, aims to be the main destination for ethic decisions in international discussions. Since its foundation in 1914, the council has been focusing in the importance of ethic values in international affairs, and aims to be a “voice for ethics” all over the world.
See the video of the project here.
Innovation in service of communication between governments and citizens
After spending more than two decades working for technology companies in the Silicon Valley in California, Lewis Shepherd is today the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Government, besides writing for the well-known blog Sheperds Pi.
In this exclusive interview granted to WebCitizen during the Gov 2.0 Summit, Lewis talks about how new media technologies are today creating new social communication online channels between governments and citizens.
Social networks have the potential to connect everyone in a way that wasn’t possible some time ago. Governments should mirror this social power by creating the opportunity to increase the trust between governments and citizens, in the shapes of the crescent trust existent between social network users. In Lewis opinion, there’s nothing like politics to force a new and creative way to think about the communication with a great number of people.
Microsoft wants to place itself as a pioneer and innovative company in this revolution, concerned about expanding public participation and strengthening citizenship in a collaborative way.
MySociety, building services that people want to use
Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of MySociety, a British open source NGO, which is world reference in websites pro-democracy and pro-citizenship. Among the many websites that the NGO manages, is the parliamentary transparency site TheyWorkForYou, which shows information about every British parliamentarians, and the FixMyStreet, which, as the name suggests, is a simple and clear site that allows British citizens to denounce, monitor and discuss local problems as defective traffic lights, bumpy streets, vandalism in their neighborhoods. Thousands of denounces were sent to the responsible rulers through the site.
This exclusive interview was given to WebCitizen during the event Gov 2.0 Summit, where Tom was one of the speakers. Here, he explained that the MySociety.org mission is to build simple websites that offer to people simple and tangible benefits in their lives, and to use new technologies to improve the quality of life of the citizens.
Spacebook, NASA’s social space
Emma Antunes is in charge of the development and implementation of Spacebook, an intern social network of NASA. Spacebook is kind of a Facebook created to stimulate the inter-disciplinary collaboration between NASA’s employees, with profiles, forums, groups and social bookmarking. Each employee does his or her own homepage where they can update their status, share files, collaborate in a Wiki, add other people and follow their activities, join communities, groups and forums of interest, and even to exchange equipment and information relevant to their jobs and functions.
In this exclusive interview to WebCitizen during Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C., Emma discuss the challenges and benefits of a connectivity and collaboration tool like the Spacebook, and the impact of it in the professional functionality for the NASA’s employees.
Traffic 2.0
BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), the public transport system in the city of San Francisco has been successfully using the Web 2.0 tools to leverage the efficiency, transparency, accountability, participation, collaboration and new models of partnership between the community and the city government.
Melissa Jordan, representative of BART, which responsibility areas include the content for the official site, updates for Twitter and Facebook, posts on the agency’s official Blog, as the whole strategy for social development through the Internet, had gave us an exclusive interview after a tiresome presentation day during the Gov 2.0 Showcase Expo, which came one day before the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C. in September this year.
In this interview Melissa tells how a governmental agency can use technology to become a provider of not only services but also information (not only from the agency itself but also the content produced by its users), building a civic participation connectivity with the public transport users in a light, trustworthy, authentic, well humored and wide w
BART also collaborates in the Web not only with the system users, but also with NGOs promoting interactive activities that benefit the community and the planet, as, for instance, the Bike to Work Day, in a partnership with Bay Area Bike Coalition.
Connection to change the world
Mark Drapeau is a scientist, writer, and consultant in the public and private spheres, focusing on the technology, innovation, government and society areas. Currently he’s deputy professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs of the George Washington University, in the American capital, he has received a lot of national awards and honors for his works.
Drapeau has created the term “goverati” to describe the group of people that understand the governmental mechanisms and how the new social technologies make possible better communication, transparency, participation and collaboration between citizens and governments.
He has recently found the Government 2.0 Club, an international organization that promotes events about the intersection between social technologies and the government. He also was the Co-chair in the schedule committee for the Gov 2.0 Showcase Expo, event that opened the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C. in September, 2009.
During this event that Drapeau gave an exclusive interview to WebCitizen, he talks about how the new media are causing irreversible ruptures in many aspects in the society, such as in traditional education and journalism areas, and how the social media are replacing newspapers and magazines as sources of information.
Mark Drapeau’s blog: http://www.markdrapeau.com/
Mark Drapeau’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/cheeky_geeky
Blog Action Day – Changes that change
The climate changes don’t come alone, by the way they insist to always have company. To help to deal with many changes derived from climate changes, a small list follows:
Good maners: “If you can’t talk about roads or weather, then don’t open your mouth.” That is a recommendation of a mother to her daughter in a novel by Jane Austen (English novelist, 1775-1817). That was a golden rule to live together in society, in England, in order to avoid polemic or personal uncomfortable subjects. Those rules aren’t anymore in fashion, currently would be impossible to use the weather as a theme for light conversations during the traditional five o’clock tea. By the way, roads even less…
Jokes: do you remember that old joke that is about to ask to a distracted interlocutor if the polar bear feeds on penguins? As the person reviews the knowledge on the bear’s food chain, we remind that the polar bear lives in the North Pole, as penguins populate the South Pole. In times of climate change, however, even the old jokes must be treated with caution. I don’t know if we’ll reach the extreme to have bears meeting penguins around, but this bear has been leading unusual meetings – even dates – with other species. Hybrid cubs of polar bears and grey bears, species that don’t usually met, are already wandering around.
Maldives Islands, located on the Indian Ocean, takes the risk to disappear with the increase on the level of oceans caused by the global warming
Tourism: destinations never thought before for family vacation, as the Arctic, will become commonplace. In the other hand, ski stations will need to find other objective for its facilities. Other class that can become a great attraction is the adventure submarine tourism. That is about the visitation of disappeared countries, diving for the most boldness, and with submarines, for the most rich.
Geography: we don’t have only to forget what we knew one day, but we also have to review our ideas about maps, continents, seas and the very geography itself. That is, by the melting of the ice caps due to the climate changes, countries and cities will vanish from the map and inaccessible places will become destinations for vacations. But, everything in a dynamic constant, that is, what you see on the map today, could not be there tomorrow, not only because the increase on the level of the seas, but also because of tsunamis, hurricanes and other extreme climate events.
Refugees: even today, the disasters are the great factor of migration and movement of populations, the increase of frequency and intensity of these events, derived from climate changes, unavoidably intensify such processes. The amount of people involved in movements and migrations caused by climate changes are estimated to leap from the 50 million in 2010 to around of 700 million in 2050. Furthermore, the increase on the level of the seas directly threatens the existence of 40 countries at least, as, for example, Tuvalu and Maldives, small island countries that will develop a new situation: refugees literally with no country.
The climate changes can extremely change the Planet biodiversity and animals such as the polar bear can become legends
Monsters from the past: the role performed by the dinosaurs and mammoths in our lives will be fulfilled, in the future, by animals that exist today. By the current climate changes, the great problem is that, in most of cases, there’s no place for animal populations to move and, in certain cases, this scenario is escalated by the fact that there isn’t in the population enough diversity to develop individuals resistant to the new environmental conditions. Probable result: extinction. So, the most probable isn’t that penguins and polar bears to meet in some place on the planet, but is that both become only legends of a world with biodiversity…
Legendary views: some of us that had the privilege to see views as the caps with actual ice, the great glaciers, small island countries, and marvelous cities by the cost live will be live witnesses that these views had existed in fact and that aren’t another resource from Photoshop…
Starving and poverty: that won’t change, only increase. Besides the refugees, already mentioned, many agriculture systems can collapse and part of the small resources that most of the human population have today to buy their daily food will have to be spent in other necessities, as shelter, health and even water.
Flying saucer: before a symbol of science fiction, can become the only chance to escape from a planet hostile to human life…
Nurit Bensusan is writer, blogger and biologist. Her great occupation is to think without rails
Blog Action Day – The subject is getting hot
It’s not to keep remembering “immemorial times”, but haven’t been so long since the countries got together its representatives in a great ecologic conference, the greater of all times, in Rio, in 92, with the city symptomatic taken by the Brazilian army to assure “the safety” and an agreement, from the governor in that time, Leonel Brizola, with the barons of the city to legalize it…
In that time, when we’re talking about global warming we had to face the economic lobby of oil with a whole block of renowned scientists that defended the increase of concentration of greenhouse effect gases by the use of energy after the industrial revolution, the human territorial occupation model and the negligence with the absorption capacity of the environment which would have little to do with the global warming. This is a natural cycle of the earth, irreversible and not related with humans and their way of life.
Well, 17 years after, the Kyoto Protocol in the ways for renovation, many things have changed.
Today is difficult to find someone that doesn’t have an understanding even rough about the greenhouse effect and its causes and it’s already a regular knowledge to know that the environment doesn’t support anymore, that we pay a high price for deforestation, that Brazil is among the 5 great emitters of greenhouse effect gases in the world and is still reluctant to assume a position to cut exemplary emissions, the same fears of the consequences of it for economy already satanized by the United States.
Greenhouse effect and global warming contribute for the melting of the ice caps and ecologic unbalances that are already a reality on our Planet
About my life on it, I’ve passed from a young engineer that talked about a distant and incomprehensible subject (it could look like a crook’s thing) to a professional with experience in this area of current and future climate changes, being asked to talk, write, discuss, inform and educate new professionals and decision makers about the subject.
More… particular things due to advances in solutions, as emissions compensations, neutralizations, and names as Carbon Free (created in the living room of my house), have become world terms that are associated to the most famous brands in the world, the main corporations and have turned into a new economy, the economy of payment of environmental services, the forest economy, not that about deforestation, but about the recovering and preservation of forests!
Well, so it’s alright, we advanced a lot, as human kind, if we think about that the formalization of environmentalism was marked with the book Silent Spring and the governmental structures as ministries and offices of environment are recent not only in Brazil, but in the world…
It’s alright if we are not talking about a goal, to hold the increase of average temperature in the globe in 2 C degrees in 2100, by the idea of a cooperative effort between the countries for that and if we didn’t know that we will reach the very 2 C degrees in 2050, just considering the inertial result of greenhouse effect gases already emitted.
It’s alright if into the sceneries of human behavior in the fight and decrease stipulated by the IPCC (International Panel of Climate Change, Peace Nobel with Al Gore in 2007) we didn’t find ourselves in the worst case scenario, which leads for an increase of temperature even greater or a necessity to extrapolate the solutions…
It’s alright if the geo-economy of the planet didn’t was suffering already meaningful changes, the Islands in the Pacific wasn’t submerging, if the occurrence of cataclysms with great probability to be caused by climate change wasn’t exponentially growing…
And it’s alright if the speed of decision of our governmental representatives didn’t obey anymore the political and diplomatic dynamic rather than the urgent necessity on the weight of the problem and its potential escalate for social exclusion…
Not that bad if the amazing capacity of awareness that the humanity had developed by the availability of information and speed of its medias could mean a coordinated action (or not?) that passes by the asking to elected, to the associations and local, regional and global actions.
Families mobilize and protest on the streets following manifestations all over the world against the global warming
In this year of 2009 we’re living a happy blooming of the action of the society about the subject, and that is a great difference.
We already had the Ecologic March, in São Paulo, we had the movement Global Climate Act, that begun at the World Social Forum and ends in a great event on December 12th, during the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, which the very march and others took part. We had the planet day.
Mobilizations spread out through the Internet and now this beautiful Global Action Day.
This great difference is the notion of that the change isn’t only in the economy, politics and diplomacy.
It’s, before everything else, a cultural change that we’re all involved and interested, because it results in a change in the way of life and perception of things that compose this very life, dreams and expectations.
And this time isn’t possible to pretend that we are not seeing and to wait for ready solutions.
We’ve to notice that if the world doesn’t fit us, we’re not fitting on this world.
We’ve to discuss the essential, to qualify again the luxury and to review the beauty.
We’ll get through, because our capacity to surprise is huge.
But it’s right there, with the willing to do, the necessity to express and the mobilization.
Let’s keep moving!
Francisco Maciel, chairman of the Iniciativa Verde ou Txai Brasil, musician and poet
Blog Action Day – October 15, 2009
Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day, October 15, 2009. Our aim is to raise awareness about the relevance of the subject in particular and and trigger a global participative discussion.
By doing so on the same day, in all the languages of the four corners of the world, the international blogging community bring their multiple audiences together to the same point, use their platforms, gather their voices and open a space for a discussion about the very future of our planet.
Out of this discussion naturally flow new ideas, advice, action plans, ways.
In 2007 on the theme of the Environment, bloggers disseminated environmental experiments, sustainable practices, and focused their audience’s attention on organizations and companies promoting green agendas.
In 2008 the theme of Poverty,was covered and gained global repercussion and similarly focused the blogging community’s energies around discussing the wide breadth of the issue from many perspectives and identifying innovative and unexpected solutions.
This year we aim to do the same for Climate Change, an issue that threatens us all. In December of 2009 the United Nations will sponsor a major summit on climate change in Copenhagen where world leaders will gather and try to reach an international agreement on avoiding the worst consequences of the climate crisis.
How can you help?
Blog Action Day is about mass participation. Anyone is free to join in on Blog Action Day and there is no limit on the number of posts, the type of posts or the direction of thoughts and opinions.
The goal of Blog Action Day 2009 is to be the greatest event of social change and awareness on the Web. On October 15, 2009, post the video on your blog, follow the official Twitter and read the official blog for information about the issue, more ideas about how you can participate. Get involved, get your readers involved, help us change the world, and save our planet!
And the winner is…
One of the most interesting digital initiatives on Obama’s government was the site data.gov. Basically, the federal government has taken a wide range of data that already existed inside the government and make them public. What before was followed only by administration employees suddenly was opened to the entire world, for anyone who wants to snoop in, in the hope that smart people go look into and go help to improve the government. Based on it, a non-governmental organization pro-transparency called Sunlight Foundation has made a very interesting contest called Apps for America. The idea is simple: to award the developers that made the best applications for Internet based on data from the data.gov
The award delivery was made in Washington at September 8th, during the Gov 2.0 Summit. We were there and we had the chance to interview the great winner, Joe Pringle who earned a prize of 10,000 dollars for the help to make the excellent DataMasher. The DataMasher allows you to take two series of data from data.gov to make relations. For example, you can find if there’s correlation between the number of fast-food stores per capita and the diabetes index in a state (answer: there is. The state with more diners, Louisiana, is also the second one with the great percentage of diabetic adults. And the disease lower indexes are all in the states from the American northeast and west where there are few fast-foods). Or it’s possible to compare expenses with education and school performance. Violent crime and poverty rate. Organic food availability and obesity rate. Campaign contributions and federal expenses. And so on. With DataMasher any citizen can become a researcher with new information about public administration.
In this interview, Joe talks about the Apps for America, discusses the future of the government and philosophizes about the viability of a direct democracy.
Denis Russo Burgierman
