Posts Tagged ‘information transparency’

Green Intelligence: Toward True Ecological Transparency

September 16th, 2009

Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Index and GoodGuide are two interesting systems to study.

Two months ago, Wal-Mart made an announcement that could set off an ecological earthquake: The giant retailer disclosed it was cooperating with an academic consortium to develop a sustainability index for rating its hundreds of thousands of products.

Just weeks after Wal-Mart’s announcement, the Harvard Business Review featured a cover story proclaiming that sustainability has become the key to successful corporate strategy. The article, co-authored by the University of Michigan-based strategy maven C.K. Prahalad, proclaimed that the next business model must be green and touted ecological innovation as the coming driver of economic growth.

Wal-Mart has handed the environmental movement a new tool for ameliorating the human footprint: using an emerging generation of information systems to create market pressures to upgrade the ecological performance of commerce and industry. This strategy entails making life-cycle-assessment data for products transparent — that is, labeling them with a sound, independent rating so shoppers can easily take the ecological impacts into account as they decide what to buy.

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A prototype for just such a sustainability index is already in operation: GoodGuide.com, launched earlier this year, aggregates more than 200 databases — from the global warming evaluations of companies compiled by ClimateCounts, to government listings of toxic chemicals — into a single rating on a 10-point scale.

The advantage of an all-in-one rating is this: say you’re buying a wood product that has won Forest Stewardship Council approval — but you also want to know how it rates on chemicals of concern, how workers are treated, and its carbon footprint. GoodGuide, developed by a team led by industrial ecologist Dara O’Rourke of the University of California at Berkeley, tells you all that, and much more — either in a single summative score (on a 1 to 10 scale), or broken down into sub-ratings in environmental, health, and social categories — and, if you’re determined to dig down to details, with transparency about how the ratings were arrived at. So far GoodGuide rates 70,000 or so individual products, with more in the pipeline

via Green Intelligence: Toward True Ecological Transparency by Daniel Goleman: Yale Environment 360.

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China city ‘to open up to media’

September 16th, 2009

Greater transparency and access to information for the media in Shenzhen, my hometown.

Government officials in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen will soon be required to be more accountable to the media, the city has announced.

From 1 December, officials could be sacked or reprimanded if they do not respond quickly to media requests.

Chinese media is tightly controlled by the state and independent investigative reporting is rare.

Shenzhen’s policy follows a relaxation of restrictions on foreign journalists after the Beijing Olympics.

“We are determined to change the random, passive and disorderly situation surrounding government press releases,” Su Huijun, the director of Shenzhen’s municipal press office, said.

“Shenzhen’s regulation will provide a meaningful experiment for this issue in China,” Mr Su was quoted as saying by China Daily, the country’s main state-run English language newspaper.

via BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China city ‘to open up to media’.

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‘Athens’ on the Net

September 16th, 2009

Thanks to Alastair for forwarding this article to me because it thoughtfully presents the enabling power and the dangers of the internet in influencing on our society’s political governance.

One thing that strikes me in this article assumes or interprets that democracy and the internet will enable everyone to have a voice and every voice is equal. This is the assumption behind the idea of crowdsourcing or “wisdom of the crowds.” While I do not disagree with the validity of these ideas in certain areas of applications, they should not override the fact that there are differences within the crowd. There will be people of greater expertise in the crowd than others. To simply deny the differences is a denial of such a reality.

I believe that internet applications need to allow us to zoom into the crowd and see the individuals. We should be able to distinguish one from another in the online mass. Trust is enabled when we come to know the individuals, which is brought up in the documentary file.

12giri.1902 ‘Athens’ on the Net “Can we all govern?” the movie asks at the outset. (It can, of course, be viewed on the Web.)

The people in this camp point to information technology’s aid to grassroots movements from Moldova to Iran. They look at India, where voters can now access, via text message, information on the criminal records of parliamentary candidates, and Africa, where cellphones are improving election monitoring. They note the new ease of extending reliable scientific and scholarly knowledge to a broad audience. They observe how the Internet, in democratizing access to facts and figures, encourages politician and citizen alike to base decisions on more than hunches.

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Another camp sees the Internet less rosily. Its members tend to be enthusiastic about the Web and enthusiastic about civic participation; they are skeptical of the Internet as a panacea for politics. They worry that it creates a falsely reassuring illusion of equality, openness, universality.

via ‘Athens’ on the Net – NYTimes.com.

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Increased Transperancy Leads to Cleaner Environment in China

September 8th, 2009

Increased Transperancy Leads to Cleaner Environment in China | Cleaner Greener China

This blog post has an embedded video of the dialogue about environmental information transparency in China. I have yet to watch the whole dialogue in its entirety…

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Posted in China, Environment

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Local governments keep Chinese public in the dark about pollution

September 7th, 2009

This article raise a number of questions that I am interested in and hope to research on.

  • Why are the local governments unwilling to make information more transparent?
  • What are the costs for doing so? What are the benefits? Cost and benefit whom?
  • How is the information made available to the public? IT? Newspaper? Radio?
  • And who are the public? General public? Environmental NGOs and environmental interest groups?

Polluters in China are operating in a “black box” of secrecy, the Ministry of Environmental Protection has warned amid a rash of violent protests related to industrial poisoning.

Offenders are protected by the vast majority of local authorities defying Beijing and violating state law by refusing to disclose information about pollution, with a study showing just 4 out of 113 local governments complied.

The ministry said this lack of transparency was partly to blame for recent riots over lead and manganese poisoning in Shaanxi, Hunan and Fujian, which has affected thousands of children.

via Local governments keep Chinese public in the dark about pollution | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

Later in this article, Majun commented that

“China has never had a tradition of opening up government information before,” said Ma, a winner earlier this week of the coveted Ramon Magsaysay Award for integrity in government. “The conclusion from our survey is that this is doable. If the local governments share best practice they can easily improve.”

Given China’s economic and political context, is it really that easy to change the “tradition?” Or do the local governments (with the central government’s “encouragement”), need a more detailed, well thought-out, and incremental roadmap?

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Posted in China, News

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