Monday, July 2, 2007

Long Island WIKI (LIWIKI): Part Two

We talked some time ago about an advanced Long Island WIKI (LIWIKI) which would be a segment of our Long Island 3.0 concept and pointed to a good initial attempt to create a basic Long Island WIKI already underway.

The New York Times magazine had a good article this past weekend which I encourage you to read. It demonstrates how there is a large, mostly voluntary group of folks who constantly check facts and attempt to block inaccurate information. This, to me anyway, indicates a hunger for the "truth" and the scale of the project demonstrates a dissatisfaction with depending solely on "traditional" sources although they remain a large part of the news gathering effort (especially Google News).

What if we could take the WIKI concept and expand it to essentially create a "universal" information exchange for Long Island? What would we need to do?

As we stated before, multiple open standard data structures are required so that all Long Island data has the opportunity to be included, vetted and analyzed. This does not mean there is only one data method or one main database for the information. As we have stated before, we must make the information exchange flexible and easy to accomplish. I have no doubt we have the brainpower here on Long Island to accomplish this and I know there are models already employed that we may emulate and modify.

If we make the process flexible and easy to accomplish and we get some of the "major" players on Long Island engaged in the process (some of whom have already expressed an interest), we can create the type of synergistic model that will propel Long Island and Long Islanders to create an environment for positive change.

More in part three. Stay tuned.

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