Talk:Welcome to Opasnet
Contents
Short history of Opasnet
The work started in the late 1990's from an idea that decisions in the society are made with poorer information than what actually exists. Several reasons were identified, including the disperse and siloed nature of information, lack of practices among information owners to make the information available for others, and lack of informed decision-making ability in society in general. The work to improve the situation started in early 2000's by utilising and improving impact assessment and decision analysis in environmental health which deals with the interplay of human health and the environmental factors that affect it.
Opasnet is hosted by THL (National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland) by The Department of Environmental Health whose motto underlies the original focus of Opasnet: Man must be able to breathe, drink, eat and live in the environment trusting on its safety. This is both an individual's civil right and a prerequisite for a functioning society and economy. This requirement constitutes a major information generation exercise as well as policy planning and implementation task at a societal level.
Opasnet has grown beyond the original boundaries of environmental health in the recent years. Yet, most of the original motivations still hold. Now, as then, Opasnet provides understanding on societal problems and offers guidance for decision making regarding them. The problems are usually very complex and they tend to cross administrative, geographical, and scientific boundaries. Therefore information and contributions from many different disciplines and areas of societal action are needed.
What is Opasnet?
Opasnet is a wiki-based website for supporting societal decision-making. The website collects, synthesizes, and communicates people's values and scientific information. We believe that wise decision-making is based on both expressing our values about what things are important and understanding how decisions affect those things. This is why we need to consider both values and science in decision making.
This website is built in a way that hopefully makes it easy for anyone to add their information and values. These are the basic inputs of the Opasnet. Values and scientific facts are used as inputs for open assessments. Open assessment is basically a collaborative study of any question of interest, typically applied to common societal problems. As its output, the assessment process produces knowledge for informed decision-making, that can be utilized by institutional and individual decision-makers. More specifically, the outputs can be policy suggestions, solution strategies and recommendations.
The Opasnet service has also been built in a way that attempts to mimic the real world. The pages describe things that are usually real, measurable quantities. And if something affects something else, these two things should also be linked within this website.
Suggestions for an illustrative figure
Below there are three different variations of a figure to be embedded either on the front page or on the Welcome to Opasnet - page. Suggestions for colors, labels etc. are welcome. Which one summarizes the purpose of Opasnet best? Other ideas? How should the figure be drawn?
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Earlier comments
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Comment: Disputes should follow a standardized structure, including argumentation why the commented statement in an article is under dispute. Including the reasoning behind the dispute will make the dispute better to understand and therefore easier to attack or support. The link to the article is helpful, but not always sufficient to understand why the statement is under dispute. Disputes are per definition individual points of view, supported by one or more individuals or groups.
--Gdool 11:09, 20 February 2008 (EET)
Please do not remove this text. It is part of an explanation on this wikipage.
