Month: November 2010

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Poverty Is Not a Game (PING) – A game about poverty

01 Poverty, 04 Education, Technologies
link

PING is an online game made for secondary schools, forming a starting point to discuss the subject ‘poverty’ and what it means to be poor. Ping is aimed at the students of the secondary and third degree. The students become the main characters in the game. They can choose between Jim or Sofia, who, due to certain circumstances, end up on the street and need to find their own path.

PING shows that games can help to introduce complex social subjects like poverty in the class room.

The partners of the PING project want to contribute to the social debate encouraging the use of games at school as a tool to open the difficult discussion about poverty.

PING was made possible with the help of The King Baudouin Foundation (Belgium), IBBT (Belgium), with The Network of European Foundations, the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Germany) , the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal/UK) and Fondation Bernheim (Belgium).

Play the game on line or download PING.

For the development of the game there was an intensive collaboration with the European Schoolnet (umbrella organization consisting of 31 ministries of education from the European member states) and the European Poverty Network (umbrella organization of poverty organizations from the European member states) to make games discussable in an educational context. The manual and game will be distributed in all secondary schools in Belgium with the support of the Belgian government.

PING was internationally launched on October 20th 2010 at the European convention “Poverty is not a game. Serious Games as a mean to discuss complex societal issues” in Brussels.

The game and manual are now available on the website.

Also available in Nederlands,  Français, and Deutsch

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Journal: Voting, Markets, and Conversations

11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence

Jon Lebkowsky Home

Data, Markets, and Power

There’s an election Tuesday, and you’re probably going to vote – whether your vote is meaningful or not. Some call voting a “ritual,” which is not at all to say that it’s not meaningful – rituals do have meaning. But the word is that it’s a symbolic rather than functional, practical event. The actual eddies and currents of power feel little or no impact from your single vote.

Where can you have a real impact? Doc Searls and colleagues working through Project VRM and the Internet Identity Workshop are catalyzing a redefinition of the computer-mediated vendor/consumer relationship, with the potential to transform power relationships in markets rather than in the political sphere. However market experiences dominate so much of our daily commitment of attention and thinking, a redefinition of marketplace relationships could be a redefinition of relationship and power more broadly. If we assume symmetry in vendor/consumer relationshiops, we will also assume that the relationship of an elected official to her constituents will be more symmetrical.

I’m reading Doc Searls’ “The Data Bubble II,” which includes a lot of homework – links to other articles and posts I might read to get deeper into the subjects of online identity and relationship as they pertain to marketing and the redefinition of vendor/consumer relationships. Doc quotes John Battelle, who discusses how emerging conversational media inspired an economic model he calls conversational marketing, “simply the tip of a very large iceberg, representative of a sea change in how all businesses converse with their constituents – be they customers, partners, or employees.” Battelle calls it “The Conversation Economy,” for which Doc says “we’re going to need individuals who are independent and self-empowered.”

Back to voting: the vote is symbolic of your share as a citizen within a power structure that is supposedly of, for, and by the people, though it’s increasingly obvious that votes and voters are manipulable and nodes within power structures are corruptible. In arguing for a more participatory or democratic set of structures, it’s important to know that supposed majorities are also corruptible and can be crazy as hell. We need structures that empower and that also include checks and balances on those empowered. We want to build sanity into the architecture of power, and ease dependence on the ethics and logic of mere mortals. If we build such structures for markets, they will have an impact on governance as well.

(Also interesting: Doc refers to David Siegel on “The Social Networking Bubble.” Siegel says “We’ve overstated and overemphasized the utility of social networking and are now in a marketer’s ‘greater fool’ territory.”)

Phi Beta Iota: Jim Turner coined the term “buycott.”  Thomas Jefferson and James Madison understood that an informed public was a nation's best defense against enemies both domestic and foreign.  Brother Lebrowsky was a contributing editor to Extreme Democracy, and lives on the bleeding edge where democracy, information, and public minds converge.

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Journal: To Vote or Not to Vote, That Is The Question…

Cultural Intelligence

Seth Godin Home

Voting, misunderstood

This year, fewer than 40% of voting age Americans will actually vote.

A serious glitch in self-marketing, I think.

If you don't vote because you're trying to teach politicians a lesson, you're tragically misguided in your strategy. The very politicians you're trying to send a message to don't want you to vote. Since 1960, voting turnouts in mid-term elections are down significantly, and there's one reason: because of TV advertising.

Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent's supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote (“they're all bums”) then their strategy has succeeded.

The astonishing thing is that voters haven't figured this out. As the scumminess and nastiness of campaigning and governing has escalated and the flakiness of candidates appears to have escalated as well, we've largely abdicated the high ground and permitted selfish partisans on both sides to hijack the system.

Voting is free. It's fairly fast. It doesn't make you responsible for the outcome, but it sure has an impact on what we have to live with going forward. The only thing that would make it better is free snacks.

Even if you're disgusted, vote. Vote for your least unfavorite choice. But go vote.

Phi Beta Iota: In the Presidential election year, 54.6% or so voted, meaning that the majority within that number that barely elected the incumbent President represented 30% of the eligible voters.  Incumbents are now the clear majority non-party in the USA, but because of decades of “bi-partisan” criminal conspiracy against the public, open ballot access, instant run-off, and liberal absentee ballot use by the poor that cannot juggle work, buses, and voting, have been denied–there are nine specific things that must be done in the way of Electoral Reform.  That is the public challenge between now and 2012.

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Journal: Anonymous Propaganda Against Incumbents

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corporations, Cultural Intelligence, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Open Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

This clearly defines the stakes on 2 NOV

American Hero (YouTube)

Phi Beta Iota: The Editorial Board reviewed this.  This site is strictly non-partisan; political propaganda is pointed out not to endorse it, but to highlight the depth of what one author calls Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.  This short film demonizes the Democratic incumbent majority while avoiding any reference to the Republican era in which the economy was destroyed (1981 forward), elective wars were started, Dick Cheney performed 23 unnatural impeachable acts and led the telling of 935 lies to the public, and the Wall Street bail-out was foisted on the public, first by the Republicans then by their look-alike lite Democratic partners in crime.  BOTH parties are antithetical to the public interest; BOTH parties must be “put down” by an informed public as NEITHER party has the integrity to represent the public interest.