bm241 Making Better Use of the United Nations

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Lots of governments and supranational organizations like the UN have websites, yet few are really understandable or usable for the average person. At the 24C3 in Berlin this past weekend, I sat down with Julian from undemocracy.com . His work has helped create a place on the internet where anyone can search, link, and read about who said what at the United Nations, in order to better understand what our nations are doing on the international level.

We Discuss:

  • The problems with the regular UN website
  • Documents, votes, statements
  • Searchability, linkability
  • What was necessary to create undemocracy.com
  • connections with wikipedia
  • His UK parliamentary project, http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/
  • NExt steps
  • Appeal to the public

Music:

  • Bruce Springsteen – Your Own Worst Enemy
  • The Clash – One More Time

8 thoughts on “bm241 Making Better Use of the United Nations

  1. January 2, 2008 at 3:19 am

    Sounds like a metaphor for the UN itself.

  2. January 2, 2008 at 7:14 pm

    i will be using this. nice cast and the audio was fantastic. will listen again.

  3. Miguel
    January 9, 2008 at 2:17 pm

    One question wasn´t made tough… was it? Why does the UN block out external linking?

  4. bicyclemark
    January 9, 2008 at 5:25 pm

    Not sure if its in the recording but this came up frequently in our conversations.. in the end.. neither of us knows. In his experience, he thinks if it connected to their overal policy of being accessible to the public but not really.

  5. Peter Michels
    February 1, 2008 at 10:55 pm

    Hi, will there be a live chat and or a live audio stream or atleast audio recordings on your interview with leeves.org?

  6. bicyclemark
    February 2, 2008 at 3:31 am

    Just posted it. Unfortunately I had an undetected problem during the interview, but well… give it a listen.