Activism: Early Tuesday morning, the petition to the U.S. Administration to fire Carmen Ortiz reached the prerequisite 25,000 signatures. Carmen Ortiz was the prosecutor that drove the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, which many mean contributed or led to his tragic suicide. The U.S. Administration, by its own rules, must now take the petition seriously and respond to it.
Back in the mid-90's I discovered Jim Rough's Wisdom Council formathttp://www.co-intelligence.org/P-wisdomcouncil.html and began promoting it through my network as a way to increase the co-intelligence of a community. I loved the design of it – every 3-12 months randomly selecting one or two dozen ordinary people to reflect for a few days on what their community needed and to bring their conclusions back to their community. It is promoted today by Jim's Center for Wise Democracy
There are many different initiatives that are using the term “Wisdom Council” these days, and all of them have their own gifts to offer. What I particularly appreciate about Jim's approach, is that instead of tapping the wisdom of a group of elders, it is about tapping the wisdom of ordinary people, on behalf of the larger whole. The basic idea is to gather together a diverse microcosm of that larger whole. This microcosm is then invited into a conversational “greenhouse” environment, where they are supported to engage their best creative efforts toward understanding and addressing the needs of that larger whole.
By 1999, however, I was becoming concerned that I knew little about Dynamic Facilitation (DF), the process used in the Wisdom Council. I decided to take one of Jim Rough's workshops, which happened to be during the same week of the big 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. It was an exciting week, during which I realized that DF could have transformed people's efforts to deal with the WTO.
I came away extremely impressed with DF's potential. Over the following years I took a few other DF courses and was involved in some gatherings using DF, including a Wisdom Council in Ashland, Oregon. I came to the conclusion that DF was the most powerful process I'd ever seen for transforming conflict into breakthroughs – a skill sorely needed in our world today.
I've written my own description of the process here. I invite you to explore it and the descriptions on Jim's website. In this video interview, UK consultant Alex Nairn offers an excellent description of DF. If you want to delve further into it, check out the DF manual by Rosa Zubizarreta. She's agreed to offer my readers a free pdf of the 2008 version, for which you can contact her through her website. (I coaxed Rosa to a DF training early in 2000 – and it changed her life. She returned the favor by helping me create The Tao of Democracy.)
The University of Maryland has just published an important report on “Social Media Use During Disasters: A Review of the Knowledge Base and Gaps” (PDF). The report summarizes what is empirically known and yet to be determined about social media use pertaining to disasters. The research found that members of the public use social media for many different reasons during disasters:
Phi Beta Iota: It has come to Phi Beta Iota's attention that too many people are searching for Mini-Me daily, rather than reading that day's postings.
Mini-Me is just one of over 25 contributing editors, each committed to the truth — public intelligence in the public interest.
Below are a couple of posts not by Mini-Mi that are Mini-Me-esque in nature. Bottom line: Mini-Me is one of many important contributors, do not neglect the others, please. We will no longer use Mini-Me to improve dissemination of Mongoose, Owl, or others, they are each a “brand” in their own right.
Editor's note: Van Jones, a CNN contributor, is president and founder of Rebuild the Dream, an online platform focusingon policy, economics and media. He was President Obama's green jobs adviser in 2009. He is also founder of Green for All, a national organization working to build a green economy.
(CNN) — We are not living up to the promise of the American Dream.
Even now, our leaders are talking about cutting, instead of creating jobs to grow our way out of the deficit. Congress is ignoring big problems, congratulating itself on avoiding a fiscal cliff of its own creation. The federal budget props up broken parts of our economic system — big banks, big polluters and big defense contractors — instead of investing in areas such as education and infrastructure that would benefit everyone.
Now, a new breed of companies is leveraging the power of networks and sharing — and showing us what a more sustainable, prosperous future can look like.
One of the most well-known examples is Zipcar. Its tagline, “wheels when you want them,” pretty much sums up the company. Zipcar was just bought by rental giant Avis Budget Group for nearly $500 million as part of Avis' push to compete with Hertz's and Enterprise's new car-sharing services. The demographics of car-sharing customers holds promise for future growth as younger, tech-savvy consumers tend to prefer sharing services.
Then there is Mosaic, a new addition to the share economy. Mosaic just launched the first online clean energy investment marketplace.
In 2010, I published this blog post entitled “Calling 911: What Humanitarians Can Learn from 50 Years of Crowdsourcing.” Since then, humanitarian colleagues have become increasingly open to the use of crowdsourcing as a methodology to both collect and process information during disasters. I’ve been studying the use of twitter in crisis situations and have been particularly interested in the quality, actionability and credibility of such tweets. My findings, however, ought to be placed in context and compared to other, more traditional, reporting channels, such as the use of official emergency telephone numbers.
So I did some digging and found the following statistics on 911 (US) & 999 (UK) emergency calls:
“An astounding 38% of some 10.4 million calls to 911 [in New York City] during 2010 involved such accidental or false alarm ‘short calls’ of 19 seconds or less — that’s an average of 10,700 false calls a day”. – Daily News
“Last year, seven and a half million emergency calls were made to the police in Britain. But fewer than a quarter of them turned out to be real emergencies, and many were pranks or fakes. Some were just plain stupid.” – ABC News
I also came across the table below in this official report (PDF) published in 2011 by the European Emergency Number Association (EENA). The Greeks top the chart with a staggering 99% of all emergency calls turning out to be false/hoaxes, while Estonians appear to be holier than the Pope with less than 1% of such calls.
