08/24/2021
PolicyAtlas.org is now officially retired, but you can still review all of our archived policy articles at the Internet Archive link in our bio.
PolicyAtlas was a nonpartisan project to develop an encyclopedia of public policy solutions. The goal of PolicyAtlas was to improve the information available to all levels of public policymakers, thereby leading to the adoption and design of superior public policies and better lives for all who are governed.
PolicyAtlas was created out of a belief that all governments around the world share many common policy goals - such as educating their populations or improving their public's health - and, as a result, could significantly benefit from sharing each other's public policies and the results. Unfortunately, because there is no such centralized resource of all public policy ideas, it is impractical for individual policymakers to identify the full range of policies that might be implemented by their jurisdiction, or to access the most relevant research on different policies' effectiveness.
The consequence of this lack of information access and sharing across governments is that public policy is often made in ad hoc, reactive and siloed ways, without benefitting from the ideas and hard-won lessons of other governments. As a result, policymaking is more likely to result in suboptimal, or even counterproductive public policies being implemented, even if a body of evidence from another jurisdiction might demonstrate a superior alternative or the historical ineffectiveness of the policy being considered.
With this in mind, we launched PolicyAtlas as a platform that could serve as a centralized repository of local, state or national public policy ideas from around the world. We designed PolicyAtlas as a community that could accept user-contributed articles, so we built it with MediaWiki, the same software used to power Wikipedia, as well as a more sophisticated extension called SemanticMediaWiki, which allowed users to search for policy ideas that met certain criteria - for example, all policies that were intended to address a specific policy goal to "Increase the efficiency of automobile traffic."
Building PolicyAtlas was not an easy path to follow. When we began this pro bono civic journey, we possessed zero experience with computer programming, web hosting, wikis, or any of the myriad other technical skills we would need along the way - and, candidly, limited policy expertise! The fact that we successfully launched a website that fulfilled even our most basic aspirational function was a minor miracle made possible only thanks to the support of an entire online community. On a technical level, we benefited enormously from the occasional but vital volunteer input of several friends, the open source software community, and a whole lot of Googling. In developing and testing our public policy content, we received invaluable contributions from numerous volunteer advisers, professors, and dozens of whip-smart students at the University of Virginia and NYU Wagner.
We have retired PolicyAtlas for the time being because, without the devotion of significant new resources and partners, we do not believe it can attract the level of user participation necessary to be sustainable. However, we still believe in the tremendous opportunity for governments across the world to better share their ideas and the evidence from their policies, and, in the process, improve people's lives. To this end, we hope that PolicyAtlas can be a prototype for the right solution that we all believe is still necessary and someday coming.
As this chapter closes, new ones are beginning. For now, goodbye, and thank you to everyone who helped us along the way.
Sincerely,
Kevin, Matt and Neil
Co-Founders, PolicyAtlas
05/10/2017
03/04/2017
01/11/2017
12/21/2016
11/12/2016