Deeplinking

Cynicism is dead in 2008. What are you doing to help the world? The least you can do is check out some forward-thinking websites.

Meetup Alliance attempts to take the meetup concept to the next logical level. If meetups are about the power of local groups that meet regularly, Meetup Alliance is about the power of groups of local groups coordinating efforts and communicating. It’s platform-agnostic so groups that use Meetup, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Facebook, Myspace and other sites to organize themselves are welcome, which is key. An exciting idea, though judging from the activity on alliance pages and the feedback on the developer list, there’s still a lot of executing to do. They’re currently in invite-only preview mode.

GiveWell’s tagline may as well be “kicking ass and gathering data in the nonprofit world.” Started by a couple of hedge-fund managers, they drill charities for information, analyze the numbers, rate charities for effectiveness and efficiency and then put all their research online for free. Charities answer their questions as part of the application process for a GiveWell grant. Their research results are valuable and can be extremely helpful for discriminating donors who want to solve problems. They just need to stop with the fake forum posting. [UPDATE, via Rufus in the comments: Beyond the fake posts on sites like MNspeak.com, GiveWell founders have also caused a ruckus on Metafilter and upset a good portion of the internet. I like their idea and welcome all the discussion of charity effectiveness, but this is no way to lead a charge for transparency.]

I used to look enviously upon the U.K.’s pioneering government activity aggregator TheyWorkForYou.com (their parliamentary debates are a lot more fun to watch than ours, too), but now I’m too busy digging into OpenCongress. It allows you to easily track U.S. bills, committees, issues affected by bills and committees, and the voting histories and activities of senators and reps. Of course they’ve got widgets to help you keep an eye on Washington. New Zealand has a site like this, too. 191 countries to go and then we’ll need a global TheyWorkForYou aggregator.

MAPLight.org illuminates the connection between money and politics in America, specifically the U.S. Congress and the State of California. Through the magic of tabs and graphs, MAPLight deftly lays bare the influence of money on government in a way a thousand news stories and rants cannot. Watch the screencast to quickly see how deep you can go with this site.

Wikileaks is backing up a belief in the importance of transparency in government with an “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.” Some call them naive, some call them irresponsible, conspiracy theorists worry that they’re a front for the CIA—you can read their passionate rebuttals on their about page. They certainly want to change the world. The same kind of skepticism you bring to Wikipedia should be brought to their articles and analyses.