PolicyAtlas

Mapping and crowdsourcing the universe of public policy solutions.

Background

New public policy is made every day by local, national and international government institutions. Although governments operate in different contexts across the world, they nonetheless face very similar governance challenges--for example, educating their populations or increasing their public’s safety. Due to this significant overlap in governmental missions, tremendous potential exists for societies to pool together their collective knowledge and learn from each other’s successes and failures.

Description

PolicyAtlas is a growing, non-­partisan project to develop a user-contributed encyclopedia of known public policy solutions (the “Atlas”). The Atlas will cover all major policy fields such as education, environmental, health, and transportation policy. For example, when a local government official seeks to reduce pedestrian deaths from automobile accidents, they can search the Atlas for policies that aim to achieve this goal and be presented with options such as traffic calming devices, pedestrian bridges and complete street designations. Dedicated articles cover each featured policy concept with a summary of its goals, implementation considerations, research studies, and supporters and opponents.

Impact

Ultimately, the goal of PolicyAtlas is to improve the quality of public policymaking--and the lives of all who are governed--by providing more public policy options, informing better choices among public policies, and improving the design of policies in order to increase their likely political viability and effectiveness. PolicyAtlas is to become the most useful public policy resource in the world. Specific types of people who should find the Atlas useful include government officials, election candidates, journalists, advocates and researchers.

Location

New York City United States North America

Categories

Crowdsourcing Collective Intelligence Citizen Engagement

Team

Partners

  • Occupy Sandy Spokescouncil
  • Staten Island Long Term Recovery Group
  • Brooklyn Long Term Recovery Groups
  • LES Ready
  • NYC Long Term Recovery Coalition
  • Sahana Software Foundation

Region: North America

includes kosovo