We think and talk a lot here about the word "engagement" (see how big it is on our tag cloud?): How can social entrepreneurs use information to better engage people in and with their world? How does information drive action?

There was a terrific discussion around this question this week on Dowire's news-online group — focused not just on the questions above, but on the relationship between engagement and value, both economic and social. It's excerpted below, and well worth reading to the end. Your thoughts?

"Online news hasn't crossed over to citizens moving from talk to solving problems. Is there any good reason that news organizations shouldn't try to foster that?"

We're intrigued by the soft-launch of Climate Central, a self-described "think tank with a production studio" that's focused on delivering "timely, relevant, high-quality climate information through a variety of channels."

Climate Central's founding team represents a strategic mix of science and media: Berrien Moore III, former director of the University of New Hampshire's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space; scientist and Weather Channel correspondent Heidi Cullen; physicist Philip Duffy from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; veteran science writer Michael Lemonick; and so on. The plan is to launch later this year.

Climate Change is a 501(c)(3) organization, started with funding from the Flora Family Foundation and the 11th Hour Project. That's interesting enough, further evidence (see "Public, Pro") that non-profits are at least winning investment traction in an otherwise brutal media market.

I was really intrigued by the third annual "Take Back the Tech" campaign, which ended yesterday. It's a 16-day online action, sponsored by the Association of Progressive Communications, Women's Networking and Support Programmes, that's meant to harness the power of information technology to combat violence against women.

Hard to tell how effective the campaign was. But it's interesting on at least two counts:

• The range of proposed activities mirrors the explosion of media platforms that have become accessible to everyone in the last few years. Got something to say? Blog it, Twitter it, mob it. Create a tag cloud, an online game, a widget, a video. Control of media has devolved to anyone with a message.

• It's an example of a phenomenon we've seen emerging elsewhere: the creation of opportunistic crowd-sourcing platforms that assemble and engage communities more or less on the fly in the creation and distribution of targeted information. Ushahidi, obviously, is another prime example, though more explicitly news-driven.