GovTrack.Us

GovTrack.Us has information on all bills going back to 1993 and follows the status of current pending legislation as it goes through the law-making processs.

My brother Coburn’s idea is that these drafts of legislation could lay a foundation for innovative improvements by citizens.  Here, all the current bills before the House and Senate are posted and could be the basis for pragmatic solutions, writing or rewriting, or just increased citizen awareness to inform other roadblocks or incentives for other innovations.

Change.org – Online petition tool

I grew up in NH, where town meetings happen every March to approve the town budget.  My hometown has 1600 people in, and people still say Aye and Nay to practically every line of the budget.

Change.org holds my heart steady – this online petition tool uses the power of the internet to communicate agreement of a body politic on an issue.

All in favor, say Aye!

Supply Chain Transparency

Sourcemap is a collaborative mapping tool, for individuals to map out where things come from and encourage Supply Chain Transparency.  It would be great if there were maps to illustrate where things go.

I’m going to target you sourcemap.  Supply chains are key to this aspiring think tank.

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK)

Random Hacks of Kindness is a community of innovation focused on developing practical open source solutions to disaster risk management and climate change adaptation challenges. Random Hacks of Kindness was founded in 2009 in partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank.

RHoK works by bringing together experts in development and volunteers with a broad set of skills in software development and design. The goal is to produce practical open source solutions to development problems. Events give the community an opportunity to sprint on projects, but the community continues to collaborate around the year.

I’m going to target you RHoK!

Number Sense & how we unlearn the intuition of a log scale

My favorite science/wonder reporting is a WNYC program called RadioLab.

One episode called Innate Numbers discusses how children in our culture are trained out of an intuitive and innate understanding of the logarithmic scale and into integers and linear thinking.  This is based on research and speculation by Stanislas Dehaene who wrote The Number Sense and Susan Carey.

Solutions. A journal

Solutions Journal is a nonprofit print and online publication devoted to showcasing bold and innovative ideas for solving the world’s integrated ecological, social, and economic problems. Our mission is to provide a forum for developing and discussing seriously creative ideas to solve society’s most pressing problems in an integrated way.

Yes! In Our Back Yard. IOBY.org

NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) is an unwillingness to take responsability for both the positive and negative externalities of a given industry that makes the products we use.  In addition to resistance to egregious companies, it includes resistance to wind, solar, bioenergy, etc for reasons ranging from health, ecology, aesthetics, and property values and yet doesn’t consider how our daily use of these resources mined or manufactured elsewhere takes away our democratic powers of regulating the pollution associated with our own consumption. In Our Back Yard or ioby.org makes my heart swell.  It helps communities organize and fund sustainable projects block by block in NYC. X!

350.org

350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries.