Net2 Think Tank is a monthly blogging event open to anyone.   We post a question or topic to the NetSquared community and participants submit responses either on their own blogs or on the NetSquared Community Blog.   At the end of the month, the entries get pulled together in the Net2 Think Tank Round-Up.   This month, the topic focused on the search for questions instead of answers.

Read the contributions from March's participants.

Topic:

What are the real issues, stories, ideas or questions that could inform new technology innovations focused on social change?  

Do you have a story from "the front line" to share? What issues are you facing at your organization or does your community face every day? What questions do you think innovators should ask about their new applications or technology tools? What kind of resources would you use when building a new approach to social change using technology?

Responses:

NetSquared Community Member, Dan Knauss explained:

The real issue: our need for open, web-accessible government (and other public interest) data feeds in open standard formats--XML, KML, etc. Change in this direction seems inevitable, but it will really take off when there are nationally known and federally promulgated models for data sharing. The result will be direct access and public participation in governance, better sources for journalism of all kinds, and a new basis for topical and geographically defined markets--interactive online news and community applications based on the contextuialized, meaningful presentation of public data and the opportunity for collaborative responses to it. We probably all know Everyblock--I'm talking about what happens when Everyblock-type applications can go anywhere.

Another NetSquared Community Member, Pablo, contributed a very thoughtful piece:

...any kind of tool aimed at social change today must give average citizens more power. In essence, Indian independence and the civil rights movement were both about empowering politically marginalized groups.

Today we face a similar problem regarding average American citizens. Representative democracy is alive and well in the United States; however, the entities being represented are corporations and not average citizens. So any tool for social change should do one of two things: either seek to shift power from corporations and the political elite to average citizens or dramatize the injustice of corporate dominance of democratic processes.   Read more.

Do you have a story or question to share based on the Net2 Think Tank topic?   We'd still love to hear it!  

Next month's Net2 Think Tank will be announced here on the blog, in the Net2News enewsletter, and on Facebook & LinkedIn on April 2.