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Using Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a term that has come to encapsulate highly interactive forms of use of the internet, including multimedia, and user-provided content. MySpace, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Earth, Wikipedia, e-Bay, TradeMe, are all examples of Web 2.0. Website designers, and e-business people, know that the success of any website depends on the extent to which it provides the basis for building a user community with common interests and needs. To this can be added the democratising force of the internet. There is a constant demand for uses of the internet that give power and control to the user. This power and control can simply be control over the nature of the interaction with the web application (e.g. through having many choices or buttons to press in any screen, that will determine what happens next), or it can be purchasing power, the power to confer approval of particular suppliers, or it can be social or political power gained by giving wider access to particular types of information.
NZ2100 and KiwiGrow provide mechanisms to join up individuals, groups and organisations who share the common goal of sustainable development. Central to the ideas of NZ2100 and KiwiGrow is the creation of a global web-based sustainability reporting system, depending on collaborative, synergistic inputs of a multitude of players across the world. This global multimedia information system is structured around the universal NZ2100 model, and the basis of performance claims to be socially nurturing, socially adaptive, and so on, can be explored in terms of a wide variety of user supplied inputs. Voting mechanisms, and other decision aids, can be included to help build some sort of synthesis of the diverse views and inputs provided. Sustainable development is a complex, multifaceted notion, and it is beyond the resources of any one entity to provide all the information that is necessary. This is especially keenly felt in the area of ethical investment, where people wishing to invest ethically are confronted by a dearth of good information on a company's performance according to sustainability measures.
Traditional suppliers of information and knowledge, such as universities and research centres, and accustomed to one-way flow of information, are increasingly being challenged to demonstrate their relevance and connectedness with the rest of society and the economy. They may also have found that that over time, the trust that they once enjoyed in times when say, science and academia were held universally in higher regard, may not be so great now. Under these circumstances, building connections with the community through Web 2.0 devices is a sensible strategy for their own sustainable development.
Web 2.0 will eventually lead to something that people are starting to call Web 3.0. Under Web 3.0, web content is much more structured, or able to be interpreted by intelligent applications, that it can be used smartly by applications other than browsers. Just think, under Web 2.0, we can create a global network of websites that "know" about the health, well-being, and sustainability of their respective reporting entities, and can be made to send messages to other websites that need to know whether an entity is changing, unhealthy, under threat, or whatever. And these receiving websites, because they "know" what is important to their own health (because of their use of the NZ2100 health model), can determine what that information means to them, and their own component entities. So, information zipping around, entities looking out for their own health and well-being, responding intelligently, ... will we have created a new form of intelligent life, dedicated to common good? What then??
