Since 1993 we’ve been experimenting with a strategy for convening this kind of large-‐system conversation and we are excited at how well our approach is working, and the prospect for how it can work at the national and global levels. Our approach is different than the one described in the Project paper, however. And it’s different from “Deliberative Democracy” approaches in general because it aims for a creative conversation, rather than one that is deliberative. This requires a different set of facilitation skills and understandings about group process.
Nathan Schneider is one of the best chroniclers of the emergence of the new solutions. This piece places places a lot of innovations into context, connecting various movements and ideologies together to give the reader a picture of what's next.
“We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.” … There are many ways to own. Simply giving up on ownership, however, will mean that those who actually do own the tools that we rely on to share will control them. People who want an economy of genuine sharing are coming to recognize that they must embrace ownership — and, as they do, they're changing what owning means altogether.
Here is a beautiful example of how a community — Nashville — can embrace the Compassion Games to raise the spirit and commitment to compassion in action. Check out the TV coverage, the theme song and how they are embracing putting compassion into action. This is a dream we share coming true. There are over 175 teams participating in this years games!
This challenges the Compassion Games in new ways — be in appreciation and amplification of what these communities are doing…. people like Dina Capitani are the Compassion All-Stars that we serve…. please give this some thought…. building a platform like this opens up tremendous possibilities for collective impact. What do you think about this? Are you are working on Mission Two as a Secret Agent? Game on!
“What if, to solve our problems, we simply need to rise above them?” CartONG and France’s OpenStreetMap (OSM) community recently teamed up to support OSM Haiti’s disaster risk reduction efforts by deploying a small UAV, “which proved very useful for participatory mapping.” The video documentary below provides an excellent summary of this humanitarian UAV mission which took place just a few weeks ago.
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As I noted in this earlier blog post on grassroots UAVs, the use of UAVs at the community level can be viewed as an extension of community and participatory mapping, which is why community engagement is pivotal for humanitarian UAV deployments. In many ways, a micro-UAV can actually bring a community together; can catalyze conversations & participation, which should be taken as more than simply a positive externality. Public Participatory GIS Projects (PPGIS) have long been used as a means to catalyze community conversations and even conflict resolution and mediation. So one should not overlook the positive uses of UAVs as a way to convene a community. Indeed, as CartONG and partners rightly note in the above video documentary, “The UAV is the uniting tool that brings the community together.”
The open software movement is a reaction to the corporate dominance over participation and exclusion.
Corporations today are deciding who is allowed to participate in building the future and who is not. The process of choosing who is included and who is excluded is far from a perfect. Once a choice is made, though it was made in one context, it remains in force for the duration of employment in whatever context may arise.
The National Plan of Ecuador recognizes and stresses that the global transformation towards knowledge-based societies and economies requires a new form for the creation and distribution of value in society. The National Plan's central concept is the achievement of ‘Buen Vivir' (Sumak Kawsay) or ‘good living'; but good living is impossible without the availability of ‘good knowledge', i.e. ‘Buen Conocer' (‘Sumak Yachay'). The third national plan for 2013-2017 explicitly calls for a open-commons based knowledge society[1].
President Correa himself exhorted young people to achieve and fight for this open knowledge society[2].
The FLOK Society is a joint research effort by the Coordinating Ministry of Knowledge and Human Talent, the SENESCYT (Secretaría Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación) and the IAEN (Instituto de Altos Estudios del Estado) to develop transition and policy proposals to achieve such an open commons-based knowledge society.
I’ve long been interested in disaster resilience particularly when considered through the lens of self-organization. To be sure, the capacity to self-organize is an important feature of resilient societies. So what facilitates self-organization? There are several factors, of course, but the two I’m most interested in are social capital and communication technologies. My interest in disaster resilience also explains why one of our Social Innovation Tracks at QCRI is specifically focused on resilience. So I’m always on the lookout for new research on resilience. The purpose of this blog post is to summarize the latest insights.
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This new report (PDF) on Burma assesses the influence of social capital on disaster resilience. More specifically, the report focuses on the influence of bonding, bridging and linking social capital on disaster resilience in remote rural communities in the Ayerwaddy Region of Myanmar. Bonding capital refers to ties that are shared between individuals with common characteristics characteristics such as religion or ethnicity. Bridging capital relates to ties that connect individuals with those outside their immediate communities. These ties could be the result of shared geographical space, for example. Linking capital refers to vertical links between a community and individuals or groups outside said community. The relationship between a village and the government or a donor and recipients, for example.
As the report notes, “a balance of bonding, bridging and linking capitals is important of social and economic stability as well as resilience. It will also play a large role in a community’s ability to reduce their risk of disaster and cope with external shocks as they play a role in resource management, sustainable livelihoods and coping strategies.” In fact, “social capital can be a substitute for a lack of government intervention in disaster planning, early warning and recovery.” The study also notes that “rural communities tend to have stronger social capital due to their geographical distance from government and decision-making structures necessitating them being more self-sufficient.”
