bm241 Making Better Use of the United Nations

January 2, 2008

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
Play

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8 Responses to bm241 Making Better Use of the United Nations

  1. holywriter on January 2, 2008 at 3:19 am

    Sounds like a metaphor for the UN itself.

  2. madame l. on January 2, 2008 at 7:14 pm

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

  3. [...] WH wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt [...]

  4. Miguel on January 9, 2008 at 2:17 pm

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

  5. bicyclemark on 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.

  6. Freesteel » Blog Archive » Chaos Computer Roundup on January 31, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    [...] got featured in a podcast by bicyclemark — which I’m not going to listen to because it’s my own voice, which is even more [...]

  7. Peter Michels on 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?

  8. bicyclemark on 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.