Information Portals
The Security and Sustainability GuideThe Security & Sustainability (S&S) Guide focuses on organizations, and thus serves as a portal.
But many of these organizations are also portals to information about security and/or sustainability matters. And thus the Guide serves as a “portal to portals.”
There are two types of portals. In-House Portals assemble information produced by organization staff or members only. Scanning Portals collect information from outside of their organization.
Nearly all organizations listed in the S&S Guide provide information of some sort: books, reports, newsletters, blogs, etc. This collection of portals focuses on organizations generally providing more than 200 items of information. It must be emphasized that looking at the larger portals creates a bias toward large and well-established organizations. Smaller and newer organizations have less to offer in a quantitative sense, but may nonetheless provide some important offerings. To correct for this bias, be sure to consult “Notable Reports,” and Essays and Reviews that contains book reviews and report collections.
Where should one begin?
Arguably, there is far too much readily available information about many aspects of security and sustainability, notably climate change and energy. In contrast, many billions of dollars are spent by government intelligence agencies to ferret out very specific information about terrorists and military capabilities. If the publicly-available information were better organized and communicated, would it improve policy-making in the long term, and thus lessen the need to collect clandestine information?
As all parts of the Guide, this is a work in progress. As mentioned, the marketplace for security and sustainability ideas is huge, but unorganized—a major barrier to pursuing both essential global goals. The S&S Guide serves to provide a proper hierarchy of resources for these ideas and information.
‘Highlights’
