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Our Theory of Change The Network is about: Building community demand for results, by mobilizing residents and stakeholders around an equity agenda creating opportunity for families and transforming neighborhoods. The Network is about higher aspirations, and about providing both the expectation of a better future as well as the connections and collective power to pursue it. Creating new connections to systems and organizations by creating new avenues and approaches for interacting with systems that otherwise pose barriers. Transforming the environment to sustain the change, creating family-centered, equitable, results-focused systems that work for all families. Holding ourselves and others accountable for what we say we are doing in community.

What interests me is how the lessons found in the article could be applied to real world community governance in relation to the public sector. Such communities are already in existence so cannot be created outside of the box to start with, however many of the other observations can be applied especially with the use of the Internet and application of direct democratic dialogue. It should be possible to create some new disruptive innovations which such an approach and resources to create some new community paradigms.

In GlobalNet21 we bring people together both online and off.  We hold many meetings from those in the House of Commons to online webinars and from larger meetings and presentations to smaller study circles. We work with others to create events that people want to engage in. In creating this virtual "public square" GlobalNet21 has emerged now as a vast social networking system that brings new audiences together to discuss and seek solutions for critical issues of the day - issues that divide and threaten the stability of our society and our planet. We also create space at meeting and online for people to connect and collaborate so that they can take further action whether that is expressing their views through our networks, learning more from others or linking with others to take action in order to make a difference.

Our Vision: When we empower underrepresented populations to effectively tell their stories, we engage communities in dialogue and positive action. This process strengthens community cohesion and provides pathways for increased communication, cooperation, and respect. Our Mission: To challenge, strengthen, and connect our diverse communities through the transformative power of the individual voice. What We Believe: Stories make change possible. Stories open minds and inspire action. Stories create pathways. Since 2003, Hidden Voices has collaborated with underrepresented communities to create award-winning works that combine narrative, mapping, performance, music, digital media, animation, and interactive exhibits to engage audiences and participants in explorations of difficult issues.  Hidden Voices creates venues where stories from those rarely seen and heard by mainstream society take center stage.  These life-changing stories provide insight about identity, place, and access.  They help us understand the unrecognized, the unfamiliar, the displaced and forgotten within and among us.  A Hidden Voices project encourages deep listening; expansive dialogue, and inspired action.  Hidden Voices believes in the power of stories to transform our communities and our policies. Hidden Voices is a registered 501 (c) 3 non-profit, with more than 100 volunteers and contributing professionals developing two to three projects annually.

The Creating Health Collaborative is a group of innovators working individually to understand and create health 'beyond the lens of health care'. The Collaborative is run by a nine-person Executive that believes our struggle to meet the growing demand for care is underpinned by an inability to see health as more than just 'the absence of disease'.

"Rethinking the Automobile" is a project created by livable streets advocate Mark Gorton. Its goal is to raise awareness around the negative impact of the automobile on our world. Through public events and media campaigns, Rethinking the Automobile reveals how policies that prioritize the automobile destroy public space in our cities and towns and have created a dangerous and unsustainable world.

The Street Plans Collaborative is an urban planning, design, and research-advocacy firm. We strive to create high-quality public spaces, and believe that the key to reversing the harmfulmn effects of suburban sprawl is to promote compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. We thrive on working with our clients, partners, and other likeminded organizations to improve the quality and function of the built environment. We seek to increase the effectiveness of multi-modal transportation as a means to creating more competitive and sustainable 21st century towns and cities.

The "Los Angeles Research Collection" empowers citizens and researchers to use the tools of interactive "time mapping." With HyperCities, you can explore social, cultural, and political history in Los Angeles over time. The site can be accessed from a web-browser in any school, community center, government office, home, and academic setting, allowing citizens to delve into and create their own collections of mappable knowledge and cultural heritage. Community-generated content exists side-by-side with scholar-produced research data, thereby creating new interactions between traditionally separated domains of knowledge.

The way we work is changing forever. A host of technologies-from automation to digital platforms for coordination of tasks-are reinventing not just what people do to earn a living but at a much deeper level how we organize to create value. The landscape of labor economics is in upheaval. Solutions won't come from any one agency, discipline, or company. It will take collaboration, broad public engagement, smart policy, and an openness to reinventing old economic models. The IFTF Workable Futures Initiative is a call-to-action for policymakers, platform developers, corporate strategists, activists, and of course other workers of all kinds, to join us in blueprinting these positive platforms for the future of work. The time is now to grapple with the challenges ahead, develop sustainable solutions, and create a future of work that is workable for everyone.

The 50 State Solution was conceived in early 2016 by California Forward (CA Fwd) as a transpartisan effort to build supportive infrastructure--and a platform for sharing information and ideas--among those working on political reform at the state level. While CA Fwd has served as the initiator and early catalyst of the effort, the vision for 50 State Solution is that it becomes an ongoing effort with shared leadership from the political reform community. The goal of the effort is explicitly not to make sure every organization is doing the same work or working on the same issue. Instead, the goal is create a learning community where reformers can share stories of success and failure, find allies, create coalitions and build community.

There is, however, one small problem with this. Governments cannot create community, no matter how hard they try, and they cannot build social capital. At best they can create policy environments which assist individuals and institutions in civil society to do these things, or at least, do not stifle their efforts or make their task more difficult. To acknowledge this is not to suggest that governments should simply sit back and hope social capital will grow before them. On the contrary, it is to advocate a radical re-invention of government and a wholesale move away from the old service delivery paradigm in the human services so as to remove some of the key governmental obstacles to civic engagement, responsibility and reciprocity at grass-roots levels of our society.

The mission of the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities is to create strong, sustainable communities by helping communities connect housing to jobs, foster local innovation, and build a clean energy economy. Through its work and in partnership with other federal agencies, local communities and regions, the Office of Sustainable Communities is supporting cutting edge research, innovative and inclusive planning practices, and new strategies for improving energy efficiency in new and existing housing. Underlying this work is an emphasis on leveraging federal investments to create jobs, achieve multiple tax payer benefits for each dollar invested, and support local ingenuity, innovation and partnership.

The University of Illinois at Chicago's Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement (IPCE) is committed to transforming democracy by creating a more fully engaged community with more effective leaders. We create opportunities for scholars, concerned citizens, students, community leaders, elected officials, and the public to actively participate in social discourse, research and educational programs on policy issues and social trends.

Democracy made Athens a dynamic, creative force 2500 years ago. Even then, however, democracy was fragile, sometimes stupid, and short-lived. Plato held it in low esteem and Aristotle likened it to "mob rule." Why, then, do we want to create 21st Century Agoras. What we want to create are communities energized by vibrant participative democracy. In our Information Age as old hierarchies prove dysfunctional, it is imperative that human communities have flexible ways to tap their wisdom and power. We do not believe that unstructured discussion on the Athenian model is adequate for dealing with the complexities of the Information Age. It was not adequate even for the simpler (by an order of magnitude as determined by a metric called Situational Complexity Index) situations of that bygone age. The Information Age challenges us to make participative democracy a liberating force in the world today. Research and proven methodology, aided by networked computing, has resolved at least one basic dilemma of democracy:   How can we hear perspectives of all the stakeholders, make collective sense of them, and reach decisions and act on pressing issues? The approach that overcomes this dilemma and multiple other hindrances to dialogic democracy is called the Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). The Agoras Institute convenes these dialogues as Co-Laboratories of Democracy. This process is a fusion of the theory of Generic Design Science and the consultative practice of Interactive Management, both developed over the last 30 years by Dr. John Warfield and our founder, Aleco Christakis.

Kumu is a visual data platform that allows you to map your relationships. Get started today by visiting kumu.io. Relationships matter to everyone - whether you're mapping your competitive landscape, developing networks of people, or creating system maps to change the world. Store your most important relationship information in Kumu and create maps that bring the big picture to life.

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab) is a community -- supported by a 501(c)3 non-profit -- which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible Do-It-Yourself techniques, Public Lab creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment. The core Public Lab program is focused on "civic science" in which we research open source hardware and software tools and methods to generate knowledge and share data about community environmental health. Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. Public Lab achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally-relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding.

What does Transition Network do? Transition Network is a charitable organisation whose role is to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities as they self-organise around the Transition model, creating initiatives that rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions. Ultimately it's about creating a healthy human culture, one that meets our needs for community, livelihoods and fun. We're here to support you.

The P2P Foundation is an international organization focused on studying, researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices in a very broad sense. This wiki is our knowledge commons. Our motto is "Together we know everything, together we have everything", i.e. pooling our resources through commons, creates prosperity for all. We document thousands of initiatives going in that direction on order to create "Hope with evidence".

P2PU is a grassroots network of individuals who seek to create an equitable, empowering, and liberating alternative to mainstream higher education. We work towards this vision by creating and sustaining learning communities in public spaces around the world. As librarians and community organizers, we bring neighborhoods together to learn with one another. As educators, we train facilitators to organize their own networks and we develop/curate open educational resources. As developers and designers, we build open source software tools that support flourishing learning communities. And as learners, we work together to improve upon and disseminate methods and practices for peer learning to flourish.