8
VANTAGE POINTS
VOL.5 ISSUE 84 • JUNE 29 - 30, 2012
EDGEDAVAO
Training a generation of citizen-journalists Commentary By Naomi Wolf
W
EDITORIAL
Serendipity
D
AVAo CItY started yesterday enforcing the ban on non-biodegradable plastic bags and polystyrene foam food containers. Initial reports filtering to the newsrooms the whole day yesterday indicated smooth implementation with nary an untoward incident due to defiant stakeholders. Credit this to the vigorous pre-implementation information campaign led no less than by mayor sara Duterte-Carpio, with her usual hands-on style. truth is, the city government had started discussing the plastic ban since two years ago soon after the approval of the solid Waste and ecological management ordinance carrying the prohibition as one of its salient provisions. this proves once more the primacy
EDGEDAVAO
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OLIVIA D. VELASCO General Manager
ALBERTO DALILAN Managing
NEILWIN L. BRAVO Sports and Motoring ARLENE D. PASAJE Cartoons
of information, education and communication (IeC) as a component of any significant program that government or the private sector embarks on. By coincidence, the enforcement of the ban came just hours before the city marked the first anniversary of the killer flashflood at matina-Pangi wherein 30 lives were wasted and millions of pesos worth of property were lost. the horrifying deluge was blamed partly on the clogging of waterways caused by their siltation due to all forms of plastic materials. Who knows, the hype on the role of plastics in the clogging of drainage canals and other waterways might have helped enhance public acceptance of the ban. ANTONIO M. AJERO Editor in Chief
RAMON M. MAXEY Consultant
GREGORIO G. DELIGERO CARLO P. MALLO Associate Features and Lifestyle KENNETH IRVING K. ONG KARLOS C. MANLUPIG • JOSEPH LAWRENCE P. GARCIA LEANDRO S. DAVAL JR., Creative Solutions Photography LORIE ANN A. CASCARO • JADE C. ZALDIVAR • MOSES C. BILLACURA Staff Writers
Columnists: MA. TERESA L. UNGSON • EDCER C. ESCUDERO • AURELIO A. PEñA • ZHAUN ORTEGA • BERNADETTE “ADDIE” B. BORBON • MARY ANN “ADI” C. QUISIDO • LEANDRO B. DAVAL SR., • NIKKI GOTIANSE-TAN • NICASIO ANGELO AGUSTIN • EMILY ZEN CHUA • CARLOS MUNDA Economic Analyst: ENRICO “GICO” G. DAYANGIRANG
JOCELYN S. PANES Director of Sales
SOLANI D. MARATAS Finance
RICHARD C. EBONA IMELDA P. LEE Advertising Specialists
AGUSTIN V. MIAGAN JR Circulation
CAGAYAN DE ORO MARKETING OFFICE
LEIZEL A. DELOSO | Marketing Manager Unit 6, Southbank Plaza Velez-Yacapin Sts. Cagayan de Oro City Tel: (088) 852-4894
MANILA MARKETING OFFICE
ANGELICA R. GARCIA | Marketing Manager Blk. 1, Lot 10, La Mar Townhomes, Apitong St., Marikina Heights, Marikina City Tel: (02) 942-1503
(Conclusion)
e live in a world in which gatekeepers and governments try to spin and control the flow of information, and the Internet is thus under continual attack. But democracy is strongest everywhere when nothing can happen anywhere that an army of citizens can’t fully document to a global audience – and then organize around. Add training for “ordinary” people around the world and here at home to write and source op-eds and news, and you get a powerful new mix. Already we have heard on DailyCloudt.com the kinds of voices you rarely hear in mainstream opinion pages: A stayat-home mom, Celeste Hayes,rebutted Hilary Rosen’s comments about motherhood; a prolife feminist challenged her own movement to support contraception – that is, if it really cared about lowering abortion rates; a music teacher, Joseph Ciolino, defended the second Amendment; a teacher and mother of a special-needs child revealed that the school testing mania is actually a gift to the lobbyists of test administrator Pearson; and a realtor, Christine mann, explained why obama’s much-ballyhooed Green Jobs initiative is really a gift to the vinyl industry – with toxic results for us. Autumn smith of michigan did some eyewitness reporting and photographing of state legislator lisa Brown and playwright eve ensler’s peformance of The Vagina Monologues on Michigan’s statehouse steps after Brown made her famous comment about anti-abortion legislation. A citizen reporting that made it in turn into the Guardian this week. And smith helped unearth, in a Q&A with Representative Brown on that site, that legislation has been introduced in michigan’s statehouse to prevent conflicts of interest allowing legislators to profit personally – but that the bill has not been signed. All in all, training citizens to shine this kind of light has already made for a better couple of weeks in the effort to strengthen democracy. We’ve layered on top of all of this some software that kicks up remarkable results every day: Developer Greg Podunovich’s legislative search engine crawls the Internet 24/7, scraping data about upcoming bills and presenting them searchably by issue; I call it the “headline factory.” most laws are passed in darkness, since bills like the national Defense Authorization Act weigh in at 1,600 pages, and, while lobbyists and their lawyers are looped in, most people are left out of the discussion. But the comment function on the search engine lets organizations and users explain what a bill means in real english – giving voters, organizations, legislators and journalists a way to actually comprehend what is being done on the Hill – before it is too late. other functions let people start their own political movements, draft and crowdsource their own legislation (24 states have referendums available for citizens to do so) and confront their own legislators’ district offices with their group of (registered, we hope) voters and their own proposed bills in hand. soon, we will offer grassroots fundraising too. Is DailyCloudt.com new, rough and a work in progress? Yes. Can it make a dent in the entrenched obstacles to real democracy? In raising new voices, we think we have already begun. Can it potentially help explain bills whose true meaning is now coded in legalese, possibly help people stop bad laws and launch good ones, and help shift the levers of democracy back into the hands of the people? Yes, yes, and that is up to you.