This is brilliant:

Some clever, clever person has mapped who was going to the White House, to visit with whom, on a given day. And made public that information.

This is the kind of thing that can shine sunlight into government. This kind of network awareness can help us track the thinking of our leaders, and help us decide if a given representative is too beholden to special interests or not.  One of the comments on the website even suggested color-coding the names based on what meeting they were attending and what the official topic of discussion was.

This kind of thing could happen in our schools, too.  This is the kind of data-map that could change what our students did.  Imagine if, instead of Rahm Emmanuel, it said “Johnny in the fourth row of History class”.  Imagine if the arrows showed the people visiting his blog; the number of edits he made on his wiki pages; the number of comments he left on other people’s pages; the number of YouTube videos he’d watched; the number of Tweets he’d contributed with the hash tag associated with his current research project.

Transparency in government.  And ultimately, transparency in schools.   “What do they teach them in these schools?” the Professor wonders in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. With this kind of visual network technology, making explicit the formerly implicit might be how we tell who is “educated” and who is merely “going through the motions.”  Hmmm.  It’s both scary in a panopticon sort of way, and rather interesting.

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