“Crowdseeding brings the population (the crowd) from only A (what you get with crowdsourcing) to A+B+C+D: because you give phones & credit and you go to and inform the phoneholds about the project. So the crowd increases from A to A+B+C+D. And then from A+B+C+D one takes a representative sample. So two important benefits. And then a third: the relationship with the phone holder: stronger incentive to tell the truth, and no bad people hacking into the system.”
Businesses create and distribute goods and services that enhance our quality of life, promote growth, and generate prosperity. They spur innovation, reward entrepreneurial effort, provide a return on investment and constantly improve their performance responding to market feedbacks. They draw on the skills, effort and ingenuity of individual workers, and share with them the economic value created by the enterprise.
Non-profit organizations give us ways to celebrate, build and protect the many human values that give rise to healthy, thriving communities. They have worked to ensure that all people have adequate necessities of life, including clean air, water, food and shelter; an equitable share of wealth and resources; and opportunity to develop their full physical, mental and spiritual potential. They create spaces to celebrate the joy of culture and artistic expression, and reveal opportunities for generosity. They have helped protect the environment, working to ensure that human capacities, technologies and organizations sustain and support, not systemically alter, degrade or destroy, the Earth, its diversity of life or the ecological systems that support life. They remind us that many species share this planet and depend on each other, and that humanity must not only care for itself, but must steward an entire world.
1. For years there have been Declarations of INTERdependence and suggestions and organizing for INTERdependence day. I first learned about this 8 years ago and wrote it up at http://www.co-intelligence.org/interdependenceday.html Googling it today I see the movement has flourished – and it seems that the debate about when to celebrate “Interdependence Day” is shaking out in favor of September 12 (or September 10-12) – when the US's interdependence with the rest of the world came home in a painfully vivid way – rather than on July 4th. As far as I'm concerned, it would be very appropriate to celebrate Interdependence Day every month, or every week, or even every day. After all, interdependence could be considered the most important concept – I should say reality – in our world today. In his essay below, Shane Claiborne proclaims July 4th Interdependence Day and offers actions you can take to manifest your awareness of interdependence. I would add to his list: “Take some action to change the systems that so powerfully shape our interdependence, so that those systems help everyone – including our grandchildren – have high quality lives.”
2. A recent Bill Moyers' essay http://bit.ly/MRmQnZ notes that Independence Day is rooted in the famous words of Thomas Jefferson that all men are created equal, which Moyers sees as a betrayal, since Jefferson held slaves till the day he died and his will decreed they be sold to pay off his debts. On the other hand, Sharif Abdullah argues in an email to his network that Jefferson's failure was a weakness rather than a betrayal – a kind of weakness most of us share: “The reason Jefferson did not free his slaves is the same reason I drive a car that runs on gasoline — it would be very inconvenient not to do so. Just as we, two centuries later, look down on Jefferson for not living his values, how will our descendants treat me, the author of ‘Creating a World That Works for All', and my ‘weakness' of spewing tons of carbon into the atmosphere, because I want the convenience of not getting wet while traveling. While we may criticize Jefferson, we should do so with compassion — because we all share the same ‘weakness' for expediency and convenience.” As Matthew writes in the Bible, “first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.” Verily, verily, perhaps we should focus some serious resources and attention on both castings, and do it soon, since we are all interdependent and co-creating the much better or much worse world our grandchildren will live in.
Most of our credit system does not support economic growth in the sense of supporting transactions in goods and services,” he explains. “Most of our finance system, most bank loans, support increased asset prices, which have a number of detrimental effects on the economy.”
Debt going to asset markets can be helpful at a low level of debt (when overall debt is about 100% of GDP, Bezemer suggests. The U.S., by comparison, is now at more than 400%.). But when debt gets too high, servicing it becomes a big drain on the real economy. And this means lower economic growth.
But orthodox macroeconomic models won’t tell you any of this. “There are no models tracing credit, so a credit crisis will come out the blue,” Bezemer says. “We can do better than that.”
Bezemer shows that “on average, at higher levels of credit going to asset markets, there is a negative, inverse relation between international financial flows and fixed capital formation. And therefore you have lower growth.”
Supporting this credit addiction has very obvious symptoms. “It’s not a coincidence that we have excessive speculation in food prices right now,” he says. “All that money is still around.”
The solution, according to Bezemer, is pretty simple. We must greatly shrink the financial sector, while preserving the essential functions of credit allocation to the real economy. As Bezemer writes in his recent article for Eurointelligence, “The threat to growth today is not a shrinking of the financial sector, but it enormous size.”
Traditional approaches to this problem – austerity and quantitative easing (QE) – won’t work for precisely this reason, he suggests. Austerity starves the real sector while QE-like measures flood asset markets with credit. “We are doing the exact opposite of what we are supposed to do,” Bezemer says. “We need to get more credit to the real sector and less to the financial sector.”
“The mantra is that if we let banks go bankrupt, that will ruin the economy,” he adds. Yet, “this is a nifty inversion of the truth: it is precisely the support for banks’ balance sheets that will prolong our economic woes. But to see this, you need to think about balance sheets – which macroeconomics almost forbids one to do.
Within weeks of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, I published this blog post entitled “How to Royally Mess Up Disaster Response in Haiti.” A month later, I published another post on “Haiti and the Tyranny of Technology.” I also called for an SMS Code of Conduct as described here. Some of the needs and shortcomings expressed in these blog posts have finally been answered by InfoAsAid‘s excellent Message Library, “an online searchable database of messages that acts as a reference for those wanting to disseminate critical information to affected populations in an emergency.”
“If used in the correct way, the library should help improve communication with crisis-affected populations.” As my colleague Anahi Ayala explains with respect to the disaster response in Haiti,
“One of the main problem that emerged was not only the need to communicate but the need for a coordinated and homogeneous message to be delivered to the affected communities. The problem was posed by the fact that as agencies and organizations were growing in number and size, all of them were trying in different ways to deliver messages to the beneficiaries of aid, with the result of many messages, sometimes contradicting each other, delivered to many people, sometimes not the right receiver for that message.”
The web is a powerful resource that can easily help you learn new skills. You just have to know where to look. Sure, you can use Google, Yahoo, or Bing to search for sites where you can learn new skills, but I figured I’d save you some time.
Here are the top 40 sites I have personally used over the last few years when I want to learn something new.
Hack a Day – Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks (short tutorials) every day from around the web and one in-depth ‘How-To hack’ guide each week.
eHow – eHow is an online community dedicated to providing visitors the ability to research, share, and discuss solutions and tips for completing day-to-day tasks and projects.
Wired How-To Wiki – Collaborate with Wired editors and help them build their extensive library of projects, hacks, tricks and tips. Browse through hundreds how-to articles and then add to them, or start a new one.
MAKE Magazine – Brings the do-it-yourself (DIY) mindset to all of the technology in your life. MAKE is loaded with cool DIY projects that help you make the most of the technology you already own.
50 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do – While not totally comprehensive, here is a list of 50 things everyone should know how to do. It’s a great starting point to learn new skills.
wikiHow – A user based collaboration to build and share the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual.
Lifehacker – An award-winning daily blog that features tips, shortcuts, and downloads that help you get things done smarter and more efficiently.
100+ Google Tricks That Will Save You Time – Today, knowing how to use Google effectively is a vital skill. This list links out to enough Google related resources to make you an elite Google hacker.
Instructables – Similar to MAKE, Instructables is a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others as the tackle new projects and learn new skills.
Merriam-Webster Online – In this digital age, your ability to communicate with written English is paramount skill. And M-W.com is the perfect resource to improve your English now.
, but I figured I’d save you some time.