In an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, former White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein calls for a web-based tool for measuring society, saying that yearly “State of the Union” addresses don’t go nearly far enough to provide transparency and accountability of our national government. The idea is to stand up an authoritative and accessible set of economic and social indicators so that every citizen is able to continually assess the state of the union for themselves.

And we learn that just such a measure will soon be introduced:

“Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Michael Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, plan to soon introduce a bill that would allocate about $7.5 million a year for such a comprehensive database of key national indicators, and the idea already has wide bipartisan support. The data, selected by the National Academy of Sciences, would come from public and private sources of information on issues like education, the environment, the economy, energy use, housing, health care and the state of our roads and other public works.”

With the National Academy of Sciences involved, certainly such a system would rely heavily on geospatial data and systems as a means of aggregating, analyzing and normalizing this data.

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