As we saw in Copenhagen last year, the failure of our governments to reach an agreement on how best to distribute the costs of fighting climate change has brought international negotiations to a standstill. It would be mistaken, however, for anyone to believe that governments bear sole responsibility for our collective paralysis. Governments, after all, have to answer to their electorates, and we have collectively failed in our responsibility as an informed citizenry when we chose to be sloppy about educating ourselves about the science and economic implications of global warming.
This uncomfortable reality is emblematic of the problem of rational ignorance: while we would all be better off if we could all be coerced into spending more time educating ourselves about avoiding the worst consequences of climate change, few people have an incentive to do so. Currently, even though most information on climate change are freely available on the web, they tend to be disaggregated and technical, thereby significantly increasing the costs of comprehension and assimilation.
Current institutional arrangements, however, have followed a ‘walled gardens’ approach, whereby climate change experts find themselves ever more distanced from the very society their mandate is seeking to transform. Our existing model of knowledge acquisition has largely been focused on having a concentrated group of people push the frontiers of knowledge to progressively more esoteric fields rather than trying to inform the general public about the basic issues involved. This inevitably generates distrust among even the educated public, as we saw in the ‘Climategate’ incident involving leaked emails from the University of East Anglia.
It is time to break down those walls. We need to create a global movement that does not just put more protests and rallies onto the streets; we need a worldwide collaboration of ideas and effort from a thinking crowd, on a scale never seen before to prevent the worst consequences of climate change. And we need it quickly, for time is running out.
So how do we create this thinking crowd on a large enough scale? We believe that the current movement towards collaborative open source web platforms (think Wikipedia) and online social networking (think Facebook) can help us get there.
The tremendous success of Wikipedia has shown us that user-generated content under an open, dynamic and interactive peer review system can rival or even surpass expert-generated content on conventional media channels in terms of accuracy and by sheer volume. Other open source platforms such as InnoCentive – which seeks to ‘harness brainpower across the world to solve problems that really matter’ – have shown us how open innovation can bring about effective and unconventional solutions to our greatest problems.
Our vision is to create an online social networking platform with user-generated content that not only allows our users to communicate with andeducate each other about climate change, but also enables them to collaborate with each other via organic processes of open discussion and innovation. Given the number of young people – to whom the future of this planet really belongs – already on social networking sites, we also hope to catalyze youth engagement on this issue.
Outsourcing potential solutions to climate change to a thinking crowd – this is what we at Crowdsource Climate are seeking to do. We are currently developing our main website, but we have also created a Facebook application to start engaging our users from the LSE and Imperial College early. Log on and be a pioneer member of the thinking crowd today!
Related posts:
- The climate has changed for good. Adaptation is now the answer
- Chinese Ambassador on climate change: “a very real threat”
- Viridian: Runaway runway to climate disaster
- Measured Musings – Copenhagen consensus: wishful thinking?
- “I’m on the pavement, thinking about the government”