Talk:Welcome to Opasnet

What is Opasnet?

Opasnet - what is it?

Opasnet is a wiki-based website for supporting societal decision-making. The website collects, synthesizes, and communicates people's values and scientific information. We believe that wise decision-making is based on both expressing our values about what the things are important and understanding how decisions affect those things. This is why we need to consider both values and science.

Short history of Opasnet

Since the end of 90's about human health, and environmental factors that affect it.

Opasnet is hosted by THL (National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland). The Department of Environmental Health has a motto that also underlies the purpose of Opasnet:

Man must be able to breathe, drink, eat and live in the environment trusting on its safety. This is both an individual's civil right and a prerequisite for a functioning society and economy.

This is a major challenge. Firstly, we must try to ensure that the environment is safe in general. Secondly, we must provide people the means for avoiding things in the environment that put their health at risk. Thirdly, we must be alert and try to identify emerging hazards and be prepared when needed. Finally, when all this has been done, we must also manage to communicate to the people that they do not need to have unnecessary worries.

With this website, we hope to provide understanding on and guidance for environmental health issues and decision making regarding them. The issues are usually very complex and they tend to cross administrative, geographical, and scientific boundaries. Therefore information and contributions from many different disciplines and areas of societal action are needed. This website is built in a way that hopefully makes it easy for anyone to add their information and values. It is also built in a way that attempts to mimic the real world. The pages describe things that are usually real, measurable quantities. And if something affects something else, these two things should also be linked within this website. It is a challenging task to describe even the most crucial things affecting human health, but that is what this website aims to do. We have started this work by carrying out practical case studies in order to make this effort somewhat manageable.

Suggestions for an illustrative figure

Below there are three different variations of a figure to be embedded either on the front page or on the Welcome to Opasnet - page. Suggestions for colors, labels etc. are welcome. Which one summarizes the purpose of Opasnet best? Other ideas? How should the figure be drawn?

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Earlier comments

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Comment: Disputes should follow a standardized structure, including argumentation why the commented statement in an article is under dispute. Including the reasoning behind the dispute will make the dispute better to understand and therefore easier to attack or support. The link to the article is helpful, but not always sufficient to understand why the statement is under dispute. Disputes are per definition individual points of view, supported by one or more individuals or groups.

--Gdool 11:09, 20 February 2008 (EET)

Please do not remove this text. It is part of an explanation on this wikipage.