General Comments
From PugetSoundMashup
Use this page to contribute your general comments. This will help us to understand what comments you have without necessarily trying to categorize them or put them on the right page. Others can moderate the content that is generated to get to the right page, this page will help people contribute that otherwise do not know where to contribute or even what to contribute.
To get us started, I share the following observations:
This is a tremendous thing that is being done and I do not know why everyone in the Puget Sound would not want to participate in some way. In fact, as I type this in Evans, GA, I am compelled to contribute because the cause is good and I see great value coming from a collaboration of this type across organizations, agencies, public and industry. One way of doing that is to identify all of the stakeholders in the area and give them a page to share what they are doing and what they intend to do to contribute to this activity. Initially you may get just a couple to contribute but over time, I would expect the list to grow as more and more feel the peer pressure to do the right thing. This will allow further collaboration to occur as each organization identifies points of interest that would allow them to contribute and grow individually and collectively.
Next, I would suggest that you provide a spot for something that I have heard referenced as "Brutal Facts." This is giving voice to something that everyone knows but all are too scared to talk about. People need to face the fear and act anyway. By getting things out on the table, it will allow others to provide insights that would make the impossible possible.
For example - we are all busy and none of us have the time to make this work. However, each of us has a little bit of time to contribute or know one thing that we could share that would make it easier for each of the rest of us to advance this cause to make success real.
Another brutal fact, we do not know what is required to make these goals real. We each have to share what we learn so that others can learn. Each action we take may actually make the problem worse. How do we allow for experimentation and monitor results to see what might happen without causing something catastrophic to occur? We have to try and we need a safe environment to try things out. In that regard, we need access to some detailed computer simulations that would allow us to experiment without doing something to actually change the environment until we are sure it will help. On the flip side we need to be proactive. If we do not take action today, then when we know exactly what to do it may be too late to do what really needs to be done.
There are already a lot of actions being taken to improve things. What are they? Who is doing them? Can we add a little bit of effort to make what they are already doing more successful instead of starting something from scratch? We need to reach out and make it easy for people to share what they are doing and what is working and what appears to not be working. For example establishing a network of remote sensors could quickly tell us if any of our changes are creating cleaner air or water. Establshing a public water sampling program to supplement current sampling water programs could help us gather a large amount of water data in a short period of time. I understand the concerns that will be raised regarding sample purity, lab constraints, data ownership, etc. We have to work through these issues one at a time and make it easy to get the data we need to figure out next steps.
Who else has some general comments to share?Mneff 17:14, 15 November 2007 (EST)
