The Gov 2.0 movement, centered on open public data and low cost communications tools, is making an impact on public life in the US and UK. To what extent do these tools matter for the increasing proportion of the world's population living in urban poverty? This talk explores the case of Map Kibera, a project in Nairobi's largest slum, that utilizes open data combined with new and traditional advocacy tools, to fight for improved social services and increased accountability for public officials. Map Kibera helps us think about the role a robust Gov 2.0 eco-system can play in supporting grassroots leaders as the fight for the future of their communities. 

Joshua Goldstein (@african_minute) is a PhD candidate at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, where he works with the Center for Information Technology Policy. He serves on the Board of the Ugandan software consultancy Appfrica Labs, and has worked extensively in East Africa, most recently consulting with UNICEF Innovations, and working on projects such as Map Kibera and Apps4Africa.

While completing his masters degree at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, he interned with Google Inc. on technology policy in Africa and with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, exploring the effect of Internet on democracy. Before graduate school he worked extensively in Uganda.

Join us for a discussion on human rights and environmental justice implications surrounding the BP oil spill from regulatory, litigation and conceptual perspectives.

Introduced and moderated by Dr. Helen Stacy, Co-ordinator, Program on Human Rights in the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute.

Panelists:

Meg Caldwell, Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program; Executive Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Woods Institute for the Environment. Professor Caldwell's scholarship focuses on the environmental effects of local land use decisions, the use of science in environmental and marine resource policy development and implementation, and developing private and public incentives for natural resource conservation.

Deborah Sivas, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law and Director, Environmental Law Clinic. Professor Sivas's current research is focused on the interaction of law and science in the arena of climate change and coastal/marine policy and the ability of the public to hold policymakers accountable.

Ursula Heise, Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Professor of English; member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society; Affiliated Faculty of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, (forthcoming) and The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature (in progress).