Monday July 07, 2003

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for posting on MIT's Government Information Awareness initiative. As stated in this Houston Chronicle article,

GIA hopes to create an enormous but self-sustaining community where users do the work of keeping it running and credible.

Its creators at Media Lab -- a research center whose eclectic projects bridge technology, the arts and media -- view the project not just as a way to pool the collective wisdom of government watchdogs but also as a tool to counter new government technologies that are consolidating information about citizens.

This is the same kind of decentralized, networked information-sharing thinking that underpins the internet generally, and open-source software specifically. I hope that in conjunction with the efforts of The Electronic Frontier Foundation (mission: with digital rights and freedom for all ...), such decentralized networks lead to increasingly clear notions of private rights and government responsibilities to respect those rights.

Oooh, there I go being an optimist again!

UPDATE: This "about" sub-page on the GIA website has a very interesting quote from Franklin Roosevelt:

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its soverieign control over its government.

It also indicates how transparent an institution this information network is intended to be: note at the bottom the section titled "Data Model", where you can see how the information is gathered, analyzed, and connected. Fascinating, and a very healthy example of transparency of process to increase credibility of outcome.

I'll be very interested to keep an eye on this one ...