Group items tagged

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.

Built on the idea that every past is a place, HyperCities is a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces. Developed though collaboration between UCLA and USC, the fundamental idea behind HyperCities is that all stories take place somewhere and sometime; they become meaningful when they interact and intersect with other stories. Using Google Maps and Google Earth, HyperCities essentially allows users to go back in time to create and explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.

PEC primarily serves homeless families consisting of single mothers and their young children. Many of these families are headed by young mothers with little or no work experience and some history of personal or familial trauma. The work of PEC is to support these families through a complement of social services that are intended to chip away at their barriers to success. Families at PEC are supported through emergency and transitional housing, employment and job training, computer skills development, GED and workplace literacy, as well as case management and counseling services. Through its efforts, PEC enables the families it serves to achieve long-term economic and personal self-sufficiency.

We are a newly formed Social Enterprise established to improve the way that service providers stimulate and support the development of the Big Society concept. By Big Society we mean everything from building the capacity of volunteers to supporting organisations to work better together with the community. We have a strong history in participatory democracy and have developed out of a commitment to 'practice what we preach'. Our raisen d'etre is to empower organisations and communities to reconnect within the social space that lies between the state and the individual. Ultimately, we aim to promote participatory democracy and increase social capital, for the mutual benefit of all.

Heartland Democracy engages directly with Midwestern youth, independent thinkers, centrists, and folks who are uninvolved in their community and politics.  Using shared values and critical issues as the bases and sparks for discussion, Heartland Democracy targets specific participants, institutions, demographic segments, and geographic areas for exchanges in which we weave together a coherent set of values, stories, history, facts, and ideas to reach the emotional factors so decisive in the shaping of mindsets. 

The Art Genome Project is the classification system and technological framework that powers Artsy. It maps the characteristics (we call them "genes") that connect artists, artworks, architecture, and design objects across history. There are currently over 1,000 characteristics in The Art Genome Project, including art historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities.

ClimateWizard enables technical and non-technical audiences alike to access leading climate change information and visualize the impacts anywhere on Earth. The first generation of this web-based program allows the user to choose a state or country and both assess how climate has changed over time and to project what future changes are predicted to occur in a given area. ClimateWizard represents the first time ever the full range of climate history and impacts for a landscape have been brought together in a user-friendly format.

The State of California's large and diverse economy and its history of progressive innovation in the United States make it an ideal leader in the well-being economy movement. A WEAll California Hub is now in development, led by the California-based Institute for Ecological Civilization.

"When it comes to political co-determination by citizens, Switzerland is the undisputed world champion. More than one third of all referendums ever held at national level worldwide have taken place in Switzerland. The historical origins of direct democracy in Switzerland are just as interesting as the continuing topical nature of citizens' rights themselves. We provide below an overview. "

This blog is part of the economics project of the London Mathematical Laboratory. We're re-deriving formal economics without making the ergodicity assumption. That means questioning 350 years of scientific history, and of course much it is quite technical. But beyond the technical side, we've found that this generates a broad perspective, a culture maybe, that seems worth sharing.

These blogs begin with the basics; no previous knowledge of MMT-or even of economics-is required. The blogs are sequential; each subsequent blog builds on previous blogs. The blogs will be at the level of theory, with only limited reference to specific cases, histories, and policies.

Systems change on a huge scale is needed at this point in history. Many of our institutions, industries, organizations and professions were built in a very different context. A context where for example we believed that we could have constant economic growth, without fear of running out of natural resources. The concept of white supremacy was accepted. Women had clearly defined roles and were not seen as capable as men in the workplace.

These principles were initially derived by Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist by training, for groups that were attempting to manage common-pool resources. The fact that groups possessing these design features were capable of managing their own affairs was so new against the background of received economic wisdom that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. The design principles were later generalized by David Sloan Wilson, Ostrom, and Michael Cox in two respects. First, they follow from the basic evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and our own evolutionary history as a highly cooperative species. Second, because of their theoretical generality, they apply to a much broader range of human groups than those attempting to manage common-pool resources. That is why they provide a practical framework for improving the efficacy groups, which is the objective of PROSOCIAL." (http://alanhonick.com/prosocial/)

CACS is the first organization in history to mine California's vast records and successfully construct an organizational mapping of the several thousand agencies, departments, councils, committees, branches, sections, divisions, and subdivisions-many of them redundant-within California's executive branch. This research base and user-friendly online map will enable CACS to create the clearest case for establishing better governance.

Strategic Doing has developed over more than two decades of work with people trying to strengthen their organizations, communities and regions. Here's Ed Morrison, the developer of Strategic Doing, reflecting on its origins: