Thomas Friedman's NY Times article today Marching with a Mouse provides vivid tribute to the financial market power of transparent accountability.
Back in 1990, I became fascinated with the Web's latent capacity to mine truth, and put it in spatial context through regional maps. Bloggers layer their personal views of truth. Speaking through maps and numbers are more robust ways for the "social Web" to argue environmental and other social justice causes.
My work here in Silicon Valley aims to grow regional "sustainable resiliency™" by transparently accounting for the impacts of consumer, business, NGO and government purchasing and investment patterns. Grassroots campaigns will flourish when affinity groups have objectifying tools (like sustainable resiliency™) to benchmark true impacts, and what to do about them. Once markets can count better regional impacts, they'll finance regional improvements.
Way to go Tom Friedman!
I think the corporates are aware of threat of this web 2.0 movement, that's why they're trying their best to be part of it, take Fox's recent announcement to launch a YouTube rival for example.