Road Body Count

FROM: Julian Todd

What NEED does this meet?
Friends and relatives of all road victims have a strong common interest to see justice done, and for the deaths to not be in vain. This website would serve three purposes:
(1) As a catharsis for the relatives to have an on-line memorial;
(2) As a emailing-list forum for the group of acquaintances of each victim to share news and pressure on the progress of the official investigation, the court case, and the lenient sentencing;
(3) As a count-meter which people can put onto their web-pages to keep track of the rate of road deaths as they occur -- the results of part (1) gives the faces behind the statistics.
Input can also be filed on the basis of cited official press releases where no family has come forward.

What is the APPROACH?
It's iraqibodycount.com brought back home.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
It's a virtual cemetary where bodies are buried in cyberspace in a meaningful manner that builds a memorial like the WW1 graveyards in France that were supposed to remind us not to do that kind of slaughter again.

What is the COMPETITION?
It's already been done, of course.
http://www.roadpeace.org/internetmemorials/index.html

Unfortunately, they're bound by the libel laws to behave responsibly in the eyes of the official society. The government is seen as the rightful body for collating and taking the passion out of the statistics, so all this would be duplicating their work, on the basis of which they set their enlightened and optimal policy.

This concept extends to other fields, such as smoking deaths.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
This takes commitment and energy of the kind some people get when their best friend gets killed.

Technically, the most important factor is an extensible data-format which records what the public knows about the death and the subsequent legal procedings. Everything from the cost of the burial, to the name of the defending legal counsel, to a diary of tactics they use to reduce the charges could be included in such a way that it is easy to compile a database that is of substantial campaign value.