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Climate Interactive is building a community that creates, shares, and uses credible models, accessible simulations, and related media in order to improve the way leaders and citizens around the world think about the climate. Our purpose is to get these sims and insights into the world as accessible products so they can be tweaked, enhanced, translated, distributed and used to power change around the world. We're building sims that are easy to use by climate analysts, communicators, and leaders of many types, and that provide immediate feedback, so users can see the results of different scenarios on atmospheric carbon levels and temperature. And we're sharing our own analysis so that leaders have access to powerful insights. In particular, the "Climate Action Initiative" which includes policy leaders such as Dr. Robert Corell is using our simulations to make change at the highest levels of governments.

" Generate sales leads Campaign participants are high-conversion leads (potential customers) whom you can follow up with via emails. Receive customer insights Learn about the segments supporting each idea, including information about age, gender, education, occupation, city and interests Erdem Ovacik, Direktor Tine Wedell, Project Manager Cengiz Bayram, Technical Lead We serve clients internationally We are based in Copenhagen, and serve clients in Europe and abroad. Wedecide already support 6 languages. Wedecide platform is a Facebook application, where you ask specific questions to your audience, ans support your question with a video or slideshow.  Users develop ideas together and win points for being part of successful ideas. All of this is integrated with Facebook and Twitter with a slick UI.  Click here to check out the platform. "Using Wedecide, we engaged hundreds of Europeans to debate energy efficiency policies which resulted in dozens of valuable policy ideas. With this innovative method, we greatly improved the collaboration of our audience on policy proposals of the ALDE Party." Didrik de Schaetzen, Communications Director, ALDE Party Read our blog Call us: +45 26 37 29 96 Mail us: erdem [at] wedecide.com CVR: 33268394 "

PUBLISHED ON: Proceedings of the 26th International System Dynamics Conference (ISDC) YEAR: 2008 ISBN: 978-1-935056-01-0 AUTHOR/s: Armenia, Perugia, Roma REFERENCE PEOPLE/ORGANISATION: digitPA LINKS: http://www.digitpa.gov.it/ USED TOOL: Powersim DESCRIPTION: This study deals with a System Dynamics analysis of the paper dematerialization problem during the transition to an all-digital society. The efforts are focused on the description of the situation in terms of the relationships between systemic variables that define the underlying structure of the problem. The referring context is the Italian Public Administration. The central spots of the analysis are the diffusion of the "new technology" and the problem of the archives' dimensions, which have been formalized, by means of the creation and the study of a casual loop diagram, into a dynamical hypothesis. The systemic approach that we used through the whole study, allowed us to consider many collateral aspects that are crucial in this issue, and provide a rich analysis that also shows how social and psychological factors may in the end determine policy resistance and great obstacles to organizational change.

Catastrophic events have raised numerous issues concerning how effectively the built environment accommodates the evacuation needs of individuals with disabilities. Individuals with disabilities represent a significant, yet often overlooked, portion of the population disproportionately affected in emergency situations. Incorporating disability considerations into emergency evacuation planning, preparation, and other activities is critical. The most widely applied method used to evaluate how effectively the built environment accommodates emergency evacuations is agent-based or microsimulation modeling. However, current evacuation models do not adequately address individuals with disabilities in their simulated populations. This manuscript describes the BUMMPEE model, an agent-based simulation capable of classifying the built environment according to environmental characteristics and simulating a heterogeneous population according to variation in individual criteria. The method allows for simulated behaviors which more aptly represent the diversity and prevalence of disabilities in the population and their interaction with the built environment. Comparison of the results of an evacuation simulated using the BUMMPEE model is comparable to a physical evacuation with a similar population and setting. The results of the comparison indicate that the BUMMPEE model is a reasonable approach for simulating evacuations representing the diversity and prevalence of disability in the population.

This research note provides a general introduction to REsCape: an agent-based computational framework for studying the relationship between natural resources, ethnicity, and civil war. By permitting the user to specify: (i) different resource profiles ranging from a purely agrarian economy to one based on the artisanal or industrial extraction of alluvial or kimberlite diamonds; (ii) different patterns of ethnic domination, ethnic polarization, and varying degrees of ethnic salience; as well as (iii) specific modes of play for key agents, the framework can be used to assess the effects of key variables - whether taken in isolation or in various combinations - on the onset and duration of civil war. Our objective is to make REsCape available as an open source toolkit in the future, one that can be used, modified, and refined by students and scholars of civil war.

Report on the first Corssover Project workshop: "Report on Using Open Data: policy modeling, citizen empowerment, data journalism" (aka PMOD)

"Traditional policy analysis approaches are characterized by a focus on system modeling and choosing among policy alternatives. While successful in many cases, this approach has been increasingly criticized for being technocratic and ignoring the behavioral and political dimensions of most policy processes. In recent decades, increased awareness of the multi-actor, multiple perspective, and poly-centric character of many policy processes has led to the development of a variety of different perspectives on the styles and roles of policy analysis, and to new analytical tools and approaches - for example, argumentative approaches, participative policy analysis, and negotiation support. As a result, the field has become multi-faceted and somewhat fragmented. Public Policy Analysis: New Developments acknowledges the variety of approaches and provides a synthesis of the traditional and new approaches to policy analysis. It provides an overview and typology of different types of policy analytic activities, characterizing them according to differences in character and leading values, and linking them to a variety of theoretical notions on policymaking. Thereby, it provides assistance to both end users and analysts in choosing an appropriate approach given a specific policy situation. By broadening the traditional approach and methods to include the analysis of actors and actor networks related to the policy issue at hand, it deepens the state of the art in certain areas. While the main focus of the book is on the cognitive dimensions of policy analysis, it also links the policy analysis process to the policymaking process, showing how to identify and involve all relevant stakeholders in the process, and how to create favorable conditions for use of the results of policy analytic efforts by the policy actors."

Disappointed: the UK Govt discovers publishing open data does not create overnight a data literate society. 

Can distributed version control be used in law making?

A quite important manifesto also for us

Google to help Italian towns to set up participatory urban planning processes. SketchUp + social software to be used.

Today sees the release of the first application built on the Argument Web that is aimed at non-specialist audiences: Argublogging. For bloggers and online commentators, argublogging offers a way of expressing agreement and disagreement in online conversations using the rich language of the argument web, but in a style that is at least as easy to use as existing online comment systems. For more information, visit argublogging.com

great staff David, thanks

It turns out you can govern in 140 characters. Social media is often accused of coarsening our public discourse and of making us stupid. But some innovative public leaders are taking to their keyboards and finding that the payoff is a direct and personal connection with their communities.

The White House Recently asked citizens to post suggestions on how to improve regulations.gov, data.gov, and the Federal web strategy. This is part two of a multi-part series on how to and more importantly, why we should consider changing the way these, (potentially) game-changing efforts could be improved. Here, we present some comments for regulations.gov and some suggestions on how changes could help improve the federal rulemaking process.

Amazing platform provided by Amazon that many web sites use to host their services. However, this can also be used by modelers and science to crunch big models that would be too big for a desktop computer. This is basically the "communization" of supercomputers for low prices.

PUBLISHED ON: Proceedings of the 22nd International System Dynamics Conference (ISDC) YEAR: 2004 ISBN: 0-9745329-0-8 AUTHOR/s: Armenia, Onori et al.- REFERENCE PEOPLE/ORGANISATION: Armenia, Onori USED TOOL: POWERSIM DESCRIPTION: The implementation of specific management control/decision support systems, based on System Dynamics models, allow first for a better learning of the environmental dynamics which influence the economic behavior of the firm, and second, for a deep understanding of the results of the decisional policies which the Chemist himself, together with his collaborating staff, may choose among a plethora of strategic choices. By ignoring that "structure influences behavior", all the actions, even the ones deemed most brilliant, may have a very different result if the very nature of the environment is not clear. A system dynamics approach has helped identifying those modeling and conflict resolution policies which may help in conducting a group model building session, towards the sharing of a common mental model and the collegiality of decisions which, in the long run, may bring economic success to the Chemist's business.