Is it possible for geeks to fix the United Nations?
By Wendy M Grossman 
March 13 2008 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian The Guardian
Original Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/13/internet.politics http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/13/internet.politics


http://image.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/03/12/United-nations460x276.jpg \* MERGEFORMATINET
Probably not - or not directly. But some of the same people that have 2 million people tracking their MPs' voting records via the site http://www.theyworkforyou.com theyworkforyou.com and who, through http://www.farmsubsidy.org farmsubsidy.org, got the EU to publish full subsidy data, have set up http://www.UNdemocracy.com UNdemocracy.com, an attempt to shed light on the inner workings of the UN.
The UN has for some time made copies of its resolutions and other information online at http://www.un.org un.org, but like a lot of government initiatives the data published is hardly reusable in any meaningful way. URLs are not persistent, and data formats are not open.
A small group led by Julian Todd, a civil hacker in Liverpool is seeking to change all that by laboriously scraping the data out of the site and republishing it with persistent URLs. That way, even if the UN removes the information it will be retained in Google caches or the Wayback Machine at the internet archive (http://www.archive.org archive.org). The site also links through to other decisions and debates.
When you do that, said Stefan Mogdalinski, Tom Loosemore, and Danny O'Brien at the Emerging Technology conference (http://www.conferences.oreilly.com/etech conferences.oreilly.com/etech) last week in San Diego, some strange voting patterns emerge.
The US Congress and the UK parliament have adapted to being televised by now. In the UN, however, they don't think they're being watched at all, so you see horse-trading in a fairly raw form.
The next technical step is to import the XML data they have now into a relational database with a new front end and create tools for action - the UN equivalent of http://www.faxyourmp.com faxyourmp.com.
Will this effort by itself fix the UN? Even the team themselves don't think so exactly. But they do think shedding the sunlight of the web on the institution will increase transparency and therefore accountability.
Global problems need global hacks, said Mogdalinski. The UN is the de facto world government. It's the only institution we have where governments talk to each other and stuff happens - and it's pretty broken.
At the very least, said Mogdalinski, the site will help people understand how the UN was meant to function. It started after a global catastrophe. Now we're heading for another one, with climate change.
Once people have a model in their heads of how the UN is supposed to work, it ought to be possible to apply pressure at the national level to push representatives to become accountable.
We can't do this by ourselves, he says. It just needs one guy like Julian in every country. Plus, he says, a cash injection of $50,000 (£24,900) or so to clean up the interface and publish the rest of the data they have, back to 1950. The heavy lifting - parsing the data - is done.