First I met with Alexa O'Brien, one of the brilliant minds behind U.S. Day of Rage and its focus on Electoral Reform and non-violence as an absolute. [My memo that Fox news still has not read is here.]
Although they are also focused on a Constitutional Convention, as Lawrence Lessig has been, I reiterated the point that Electoral Reform is the one thing that can be demanded today (no later than 6 November, one year prior to Election Day), with severe consequences for every elected person if Congress fails to pass Electoral Reform by President's Day (February 2012), to include recall or impeachment, and camp-outs at their offices and in public spaces near their homes through to Election Day 2012.
Below are the working papers that have been posted for discussion in New York City, first with the Day of Rage team (it is neither a Day nor a Rage and it is all about electoral reform), then with the General Assembly at OccupyWallStreet, beginning with a handful of self-selected facilitators.
I will be driving a 1964 MGB, red in color, license VA MGB 64. If we do the human megaphone, it should be around 1700 (5 pm) Thursday or 1100 Friday.
[This is an excerpt taken from Chapter 1 of my dissertation]
Activists are not only turning to social media to document unfolding events, they are increasingly mapping these events for the world to bear witness. We’ve seen this happen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and beyond. My colleague Alexey Sidorenko describes this new phenomenon as a “mapping reflex.” When student activists from Khartoum got in touch earlier this year, they specifically asked for a map, one that would display their pro-democracy protests and the government crackdown. Why? They wanted the world to see that the Arab Spring extended to the Sudan.
The Ushahidi platform is increasingly used to map information generated by crowds in near-real time like the picture depicted above. Why is this important? Because live public maps can help synchronize shared awareness, an important catalyzing factor of social movements, according to Jürgen Habermas. Recall Habermas’s treaties that “those who take on the tools of open expression become a public, and the presence of a synchronized public increasingly constrains un-democratic rulers while expanding the right of that public.”
The next 90-180 days may well bring the creative destruction of predatory immoral capitalism and the emergence of resilient moral capitalism.
“We are on the verge of an economic collapse which starts, let’s say, in Greece. The financial system remains extremely vulnerable.” (George Soros, 2011)
What is collapsing is the predatory Western system of financial terrorism against governments and publics. This is an opportunity for creative destruction and the renaissance of the Greek economy as well as the restoration of integrity – trust – as a foundation for a prosperous world at peace. In the process, capitalism will morph from top-down manipulative finance to bottom-up resilient community capitalism. It will also be redirected from a focus on making toxic things for the one billion rich to making useful lasting things for the five billion poor whose annual income is four times that of the one billion rich, four trillion dollars a year. Those governments that adapt to reality-based hybrid collaborative resilience will prosper–those that persist in trying to micro-manage that which they do not understand and those whom they cannot control, will fail.
Below are two current articles and two of the most popular book reviews on this web site, as well as an updated Reflections on Integrity.
The Obama administration has demonstrated once again, as it did in Libya and as it’s done in a variety of surveillance cases, that its view of executive power in the arena of national security is hardly any less expansive than Dick Cheney’s was. The fact that this was predictable makes it no less alarming.
WHO PARTICIPATES IN “WHOLE SYSTEM” CONVERSATIONS? – PARTISANS, STAKEHOLDERS, DOMAINS, AND CITIZENS
by Tom Atlee
Consciously convened conversations have many functions. Many seek simply to get people talking with each other. Others try to bring together what they call “the whole system” to address that system's collective issues or dreams. Who is involved in these “whole system” conversations?
A “whole system”, in this case, involves all the parties who play – or could play – roles in some social unit or situation. The social unit could be a family or relationship, a group or organization, a community or a whole society. A situation might be, on the one hand, an issue, a problem, or a conflict – or, on the other hand, an inquiry, an opportunity, a shift, or simply a periodic reflection about what's happening. We can convene conversations around any of these things.
So how do we decide who the parties or players are? How do we “cut the pie” of the whole system? And, if we're ambitious, how do we elicit a “voice of the whole”?
I see four different approaches to defining who “a whole system” includes. Each approach has its own rationale and appropriate usages. They are not mutually exclusive, but are usually used more or less separately. Perhaps being aware of them and building synergies between them would enhance the power and wisdom of our conversations. These approaches include:
Phi Beta Iota: Tom Atlee is in our view the living founding father of Epoch B–there have been others before him, and there are other now, but for us, he is the spiritual center of gravity for doing the right thing now, here, in America. Please support his work on behalf of all of us.
