What are your top 5 sustainability policies?

I’m curious what would happen if we all list our top 5 sustainability policies. Or perhaps not Top 5, but just 5 that are critical to our vision of a sustainable future. What would be the pattern? What sort of resonance would we discover? What do we want to collectively promote as leaders of the sustainability movement?

Please feel free to invite friends to this exploration. The more perspectives, the richer the picture.

I’d like to compare what we’d all say, wouldn’t you?

peace, jdk

By the way – to Comment on this prompt, you can either click towards the bottom right of this post where it says “x # of comments, ” and then scroll down the page to the bottom, or click on the title of this post, and then scroll down to the bottom of the new page.  Is that helpful?

What has become of our democracy?

“Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.” – Sydney J. Harris

“Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.” – Harry Emerson Fosdick

Now this makes Democracy sound like a dreamy political system indeed, so what’s the problem? Why are we still charting a course designed by the corporations?

“People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote – a very different thing.” – Walter H. Judd

“Free” speech is often thrown around when discussing campaign advertising. ‘We should be free to make our voices heard’ goes the argument, and I agree. However, when the volume of our voice is directly related to the size of our wallet (with exceptions, of course), this argument gets murky.

What if we could design something better suited to the job? Like a web portal that enables everyone’s voice to be heard, regardless of your wealth and connections. What would our political conversations look like then?

I’m starting a website called Platforums.org to explore these ideas. It’s a social networking website for politics, and should be up in beta before the end of 2008.

This is the first of what I hope will be an ongoing conversation around the web-enabled tools of the next era of participative democracy. If this interests you, check out the good work being done by OpenCongress.org for a taste of the future of transparent democracy.

peace

john d. kennedy