citizens

Nike sells shoes and wants you to buy them. To get you to buy their shoes, Nike will get its marketing experts to design a colourful advert, with attractive pictures and with some information about the quality of the shoe, its price and where you can get it.

The government provides services and wants you to use them. Of course that is a very optimistic assumption, but lets stick with it for a while. One of the services the governments provides is the publishing information about its work and inviting citizens to engage. City councils publish information about new building zone and about public investment plans. Government ministries publish information about their policy or their annual budget. In theory the idea is, that you and I access this information provided by the government and make use of it. Read more »

Many people in Pakistan are in trouble. Aid agencies are calling for more public and private donations. In the context of the current crisis in Pakistan a high-ranking staff member of the UN explains in the German weekly Die Zeit the context the complexity and the strategic importance of humanitarian aid as well as the need for global cooperation and for an increase in funding for humanitarian aid. What is really interesting about this, is the number and the kind of reader comments sparked by the relatively uncontroversial article.