ATHENS: Every night some 2 billion humans go to bed with chronic pangs of hunger and the despair of knowing they will face yet another day with little or no hope. The recent World Summit on Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, was about alleviating the misery of those people by promoting sustainable economic growth, ending hunger and malnutrition, ensuring safe drinking water and conquering dread diseases already vanquished in Europe, Japan and North America.

Yet, sadly, few of the world's poor were among the 100,000 or so people present for the summit. There were thousands of government officials and politicians. Representatives from nongovernmental organizations concerned with the environment, the rights of women, labor conditions and trade and globalization abounded. It was almost impossible to walk more than a few steps without confronting a reporter or a television crew.

But the people who were not in Johannesburg weighed heavily on the gathering. We could use some personal input from those missing that we are working to help.

I am thinking about the schoolteacher fighting illiteracy in a Vietnamese village, the farmer from Costa Rica seeking new agricultural techniques to improve his crop yield, the herder in sub-Saharan Africa whose child desperately needs medical treatment and the Chinese university student worried about the environmental impact of industrialization.

Sometimes the best solutions to Earth's problems come from the people who are forced to deal with them, or dodge them, on a daily basis. That is why I am looking forward to the results of the first ever Online Glo-bal Poll on the Environment, which is being conducted in conjunction with the summit. Accessible worldwide at www.NetPulseGlobalPoll.com, the poll is a historic opportunity for the globe's 6.2 billion citizens to register opinions and advance ideas on a wide range of crucial issues facing a shrinking planet.

The results of the poll, when released soon, will give Johannesburg summit delegates and government officials across the world a better idea of how people view environmental conditions in their own countries and regions, and one hopes it will suggest workable ways to improve them.

The feedback we get from this unprecedented Earth poll, or E-poll, obviously will not be a perfect reflection of public opinion about important environmental issues, since only a small percentage of the world's people have access to a telephone, let alone the Internet.

But it is an important beginning - a way to usher in a new era of instantaneously gauging, measuring and better understanding public opinion on a global level.

The Internet and e-mail have the potential to radically change the world. In every aspect of our lives, from commerce to entertainment and from education to government, they are opening up exciting new possibilities.

All too often, however, they open windows for the world's poor without opening doors. People can see the affluence of the rich nations and the rapidly developing ones, but they are frustrated in communicating with us about their own quest for a better life.

The Online Global Poll is really about creating a universal flow of communication among peoples and thus giving government officials a constant stream of new ideas for solving persisting problems.

The International Marketing Council of South Africa is sponsoring the poll. The overall project was organized by the Andreas Papandreou Foundation of Greece.

As a Greek, I take great pride in knowing that the basic principles of democracy were first developed in the Golden Age of Greece, some 2,500 years ago. Our inspiration for this Online Global Poll draws on the forms of direct democracy that enabled those Greek citizens to take part in the shaping of their destiny.

The great promise of digital democracy is that we can find new ways to strengthen and reinvigorate our current democratic institutions and processes, and extend them to all peoples everywhere.

I hope you will join me in going to www.NetPulseGlobalPoll.com and taking part in a new form of participatory democracy that not even an Aristotle or a Socrates could have envisioned. Together we can use our technological advances to build a better future for everyone on this planet.

The writer is the foreign minister of Greece. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.