Cross-posted from the Good Ideas Blog:

David Witzel has spent a lot of time thinking about online collaborative approaches to solving social issues. He co-founded (with me) Forum One, a web development group which works on topics of social importance; he ran the Live Interviews Online series involving policymakers; and he now directs the Innovation Exchange at the Environmental Defense Fund. We asked his thoughts on interesting ideas for new approaches to social challenges. Here are five:

1) Develop a Shared Infrastructure for Local Budget Decisions

Every town in the US (the world?) will have problems budgeting for years to come. But figuring out what to do about budgets is tricky. An infrastructure that would support collaborative decision-making could improve both decision-making & buy-in. The infrastructure will provide historical data about the town budget as well as comparative data across towns. It will help facilitate contributions to data collection, data analysis, and preference identification. All we need is someone to build it.

2) A Global Infrastructure for a Sustainable Economy

Let’s create an infrastructure that supports a sustainable economy like the internet is an infrastructure that supports information & collaboration. What does the “sustainability stack” look like? What open source tools and standards do we need to make all businesses perform more sustainably?

3) The Sustainability Consortium

A group of academics, businesses, and non-profits working together to figure out how to define “sustainability” in our economy is an idea with real legs. Their mission is “work collaboratively to build a scientific foundation that drives innovation to improve consumer product sustainability.” The sustainability consortium was initiated by Walmart and is coordinated by Arizona State U and U of Arkansas. Safeway and L’Oreal are 2 recent members. http://www.sustainabilityconsortium.org/

4) Open Source to Promote Health Data Exchange

(The federal government, no less) creating an open source project to promote electronic health data exchange is a great idea. Building a community around the project is one of the ways to make it not only a good idea, but one that works. http://www.connectopensource.org/about/what-is-CONNECT

5) Volunteer-Driven Local News Services

Call it citizen journalism, collaborative journalism, user generated content, or try to deprecate it by calling it “blogging” – organizing volunteer-driven, collaborative, news collection and sharing in local communities is a great and doable idea. The software and infrastructure are inexpensive (e.g., wordpress on a cloud server) and easy enough to use that loosely knit groups of volunteers can do amazing thing. The Falls Church Times has managed over 1000 posts since it launched and is attracting growing numbers of readers and contributors. http://fallschurchtimes.com/

You can vote for and comment on these (and other) ideas on Good Ideas.