7.0 Citizen and Manager Proxy
"We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community" (Franklin D. Roosevelt).
Increasingly in even the most remote and inaccessible regions of the world people are becoming globally aware. While democracy spreads throughout the world it becomes readily apparent that good government depends on an educated and experienced civil society. This quality is generally understood as the "social capital" of the region that is governed.
"Sometimes we use the term governance very broadly to describe not just the process of decision-making, but the actual management actions—where and when to log, or how to limit fishing or distribute grazing permits—that result. In other words, in our day-to-day experience we intertwine environmental governance and ecosystem management, which is where the real impact of decisions becomes visible. In truth, environmental governance goes beyond the actual decisions on how to manage natural resources to include the decision making framework—the laws, policies, regulations, bureaucracies, and formal procedures—within which managers make their decisions. It sets the larger context that either enables or constrains management."
There are many initiatives in the current era to spread knowledge to the citizens of the globe so that they are empowered to have a voice in their own affairs. While basic education is a priority item the full awareness of environment, economics and human development has failed to reach about one third of the population of the planet.
This website hopes to deliver both the knowledge base for sustainability and the systems to monitor and regulate ecosystems and natural resources by region or nation. Such knowledge provides a sound basis for proxy representation down to the individual level. Thus governors or lawmakers will have mandates based on a well tuned and active civil society.
2 Tacit knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information and expert insights that provides an individual with a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. Tacit knowledge is information combined with experience, context, interpretation and judgment. It is acquired through one’s own experience or reflections on the experiences of others. It is intangible, without boundaries and dynamic. It is highly personal and hard to formalize, making it difficult to communicate or share with others. Subjective insights, intuitions and hunches all fall into the category of tacit knowledge
Those with tacit knowledge are like the soccer player.
3 Explicit knowledge (information) refers to “justified (true) belief” that is codified in formal, systemic language. It can be combined, stored, retrieved and transmitted with relative ease and through various means, including modern ICT.
Those with explicit knowledge are more like the commentator on the game.
Both kinds of knowledge are required for a build up of "human capital." What is particularly desirable is the accumulation of hands-on experience with monitoring, maintaining and building both "natural capital" and "social capital." To do this we need to build observational data over time and to lay down an adequate statistical base. In the developing world statistics are becoming very important and the United Nations has fostered programs to enhance national reporting. With this enhanced reporting and monitoring base one can generate the tacit knowledge needed to properly govern ecosystems and outputs.