UN Democracy

= makes UN data and information usable

URL = http://www.undemocracy.com/

Description

"A small group led by Julian Todd, a "civil hacker" in Liverpool is seeking to change all that by laboriously scraping the data out of the site and republishing it with persistent URLs. That way, even if the UN removes the information it will be retained in Google caches or the Wayback Machine at the internet archive (archive.org). The site also links through to other decisions and debates.

When you do that, said Stefan Mogdalinski, Tom Loosemore, and Danny O'Brien at the Emerging Technology conference (conferences.oreilly.com/etech) last week in San Diego, some strange voting patterns emerge.

The US Congress and the UK parliament have adapted to being televised by now. In the UN, however, "they don't think they're being watched at all, so you see horse-trading in a fairly raw form".

The next technical step is to import the XML data they have now into a relational database with a new front end and create tools for action - the UN equivalent of faxyourmp.com.

Will this effort by itself fix the UN? Even the team themselves don't think so exactly. But they do think shedding the sunlight of the web on the institution will increase transparency and therefore accountability.

"Global problems need global hacks," said Mogdalinski. "The UN is the de facto world government. It's the only institution we have where governments talk to each other and stuff happens - and it's pretty broken."

At the very least, said Mogdalinski, the site will help people understand how the UN was meant to function. "It started after a global catastrophe. Now we're heading for another one, with climate change."

Once people have a model in their heads of how the UN is supposed to work, it ought to be possible to apply pressure at the national level to push representatives to become accountable." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/13/internet.politics)