When political parties develop policies, and community and environmental groups propose policies, there's a lot of reinventing the wheel. For policies related to sustainable development in all aspects - in general, make-the-world-a-better-place policies - Appropedia aims to support that process.

Why it matters

By collating and developing the best information on the issue, and having an active community "bug-checking " the policy, and by sharing the policy documents under an open license, we contribute to raising the level of debate, giving environmental groups and parties ammunition for their arguments, but at the same time warning them when they are misguided. On a smaller scale the same principles apply to sustainable business policies. The basic idea (and this is not to rule out alternative approaches) is that we develop articles on each component of a policy, which then inform an integrated and balanced policy.

How it works

This will take time and effort. One thing that will greatly speed the process is to have access to existing policies, shared under the same open license used by Appropedia. So this is a call to political parties, businesses, lobby groups - anyone with green and/or development policies that you're proud of, please share it under an open license and submit it to the rigors of a wiki and community knowledge sharing. We can all learn from the process. Of course this does not oblige you to accept the resulting policy developed on the wiki, but we hope it will give some insights ideas.

We need policies on these issues

Appropedia is looking for policies on housing affordability, water supply, water treatment and water conservation, climate change, urban planning, international development and aid, and the list goes on, as well as hard-headed analyses such as the economic impact of climate change measures.

There is a draft guideline at Appropedia:Development of policies and manuals‎.

Practical steps

We could start by filling the category with relevant policy pages from think tanks and political parties. We can put these in the "Original" namespace, and readers can compare them easily, and editors can draw on them when developing policy templates. These can be open access pages, after checking permissions (and marking the pages with {{open access}}) but it is far preferable to have them on the wiki under an open license.

See also

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