Now that the team of expert judges (including yours truly) have sorted through heaps of excellent submissions and narrowed them down to a manageable 81, the contest voting has opened up to the general public. And that’s where you come in. Head on over to OD/1, take a gander at the submissions and vote up the ones you like.

The idea with the most votes not only gets presented to the Obama transition team, but the winning submitter also wins a trip to Washington D.C. for January’s presidential inauguration.

Today begins a week-long panel event I am participating in sponsored by grist.org and UN Dispatch. One new environmentally-themed idea will be covered each day with the panelists weighing-in with their thoughts to kick things off. Readers are then invited to engage and discuss the topic, with the goal being to help shape the environmental agenda of the incoming president. I strongly encourage and invite your participation in this important event because it should definitely spark some quality political discussion.

From grist.org and UN Dispatch:

More posts about setting the environmental agenda:

“Want to Help Set the Agenda for the Next President?”
“Help Set the Environmental Agenda for the 44th President”

Photo: dougww via flickr under a Creative Commons License

Now, On Day One is honing-in on the critical environmental issues of today in an upcoming five-day online debate co-sponsored with Grist.org’’s Gristmill, and UN Dispatch. And I am excited that I’ve been invited, along with Dave Roberts and Kate Sheppard from Grist, Nigel Purvis from the Brookings Institute and Resources for the Future, to be one of four online panelists invited to debate and discuss the user-submitted ideas - one idea a day throughout the week.

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Tim Hurst: What is the Better World Foundation and how did you get involved with the organization?

Mark Leon Goldberg: I should say at the outset that I am not a spokesperson for the Better World Campaign (BWC). I am a consultant to the BWC, which is a sister organization to the United Nations Foundation. But a good description of UNF can be found here. And BWC here.

I am well qualified to speak about how I got involved with them. From 2004 to 2006 I was a writer for the American Prospect magazine, a political monthly here in DC. At the prospect, I wrote about international affairs, specifically the United Nations and other institutions like the International Criminal Court. I’ve been fascinated with these subjects and have followed these issues closely for a long time. As my stint at the prospect was coming to a close, the United Nations Foundation contacted me and asked if I would help them write UN Dispatch, their new blog about the United Nations and international affairs. I readily accepted.

TH: Perhaps you could explain more about what your mission is at On Day One and the UN Dispatch blog. Who is your target audience?

The target audiences of UN Dispatch and On Day One are slightly different, though there is probably much overlap. UN Dispatch was started to fill what was a void in commentary about the United Nations. In general, when blogs mentioned the UN, the commentary tended to be fairly misinformed. UN Dispatch was founded to try and correct some of the misinformation out there about the UN. Our audience tends to be drawn from the advocacy, think tank, international organization and philanthropic communities.

We are very much part of the on-going foreign policy debate that is forever raging in the political blogosphere. We tend to be slightly wonky, but strive to be accessible to a wider audience. We also aggregate global news in a daily round-up we call “Morning Coffee.”

On Day One is slightly different. For a good description of On Day One’s history, goals and audience I will turn this over to On Day One’s leader, Travis Moore of the Better World Campaign.

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