Glenn Reynolds notes a debate going around the blogosphere about assigning bloggers to cover politicians or journalists. This is already being done over at MIT by an intriguing social commentary on the now dead Total Information Awareness project and is called Government Information Awareness.
If the blogosphere would get behind the GIA project it would accomplish several goals. It would be a one stop shop for such monitoring information. Information reports would be handled in a way that would create a uniform format and ease the technical problems of compiling the information as an easily searchable aggregate. And bloggers could get some traffic boosts by blogging about the process in parallel to submitting information to the project.
There's no reason why politicians should continue to enjoy the fractured and inefficient state of current watchdog organizations. GIA would enable popular oversight to enter the information age. Hopefully, it would also change the character of the people elected to fulfill these responsibilities.
Posted by TMLutas at January 16, 2004 09:51 AM