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Brian G. Dowling

MIT Media Lab - 0 views

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    Actively promoting a unique, antidisciplinary culture, the MIT Media Lab goes beyond known boundaries and disciplines, encouraging the most unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate research areas. It creates disruptive technologies that happen at the edges, pioneering such areas as wearable com- puting, tangible interfaces, and affective computing. Today, faculty members, research staff, and students at the Lab work in 23 research groups on more than 350 projects that range from digital approaches for treating neurological disorders, to advanced imaging technologies that can "see around a corner," to the world's first "smart" powered ankle-foot prosthesis. The Lab is committed to looking beyond the obvious to ask the questions not yet asked-questions whose answers could radically improve the way people live, learn, express themselves, work, and play.
Brian G. Dowling

Right Question Institute - A Catalyst for Microdemocracy - 0 views

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    The robustness of the Right Question Strategy is demonstrated in how it is used to address such a wide range of challenges in so many communities around the country and the world. Here are just a few examples of what happens when the RQ Strategy is taught to people who have never had the opportunity to learn to ask their own questions and focus on key decisions that affect them.
Brian G. Dowling

Why Must We Design Our Bioregions? - Joe Brewer - Medium - 0 views

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    In the business world, there is an obsession with scaling. Investors repeatedly ask "How are you going to bring your idea to scale?" Environmentalists often ask a related question by seeking to change the minds of large audiences - by increasing awareness of ecological problems in the hope that this will lead to policy actions in the future.
Brian G. Dowling

Systems Changers - Homepage - 1 views

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    The failure of many of the systems that underpin modern life is increasingly difficult to avoid, so it's not surprising that interest in 'systems innovation' is growing fast. At the Point People, we've seen pioneers emerging in this field from different sectors, leading very different kinds of organisations and speaking very different professional languages. We had a hunch that these frontrunners could tell a compelling story about what systemic innovation looks and feels like in practice. So we put them in front of a camera and asked them a handful of questions.
Brian Dowling

Making Cities Work / newcommunityparadigms [licensed for non-commercial use only] - 7 views

    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      Economics and creating livable cities notes and comments on the video. Related blog post http://bit.ly/qXggrn    related wiki post http://bit.ly/nKYXWt 
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      The future of communities promises to be austere with less public funding available.  This means other means need to be used to create new community paradigms but the challenge is that any major change must take hold in the first 6 months or the existing organizational culture will put the brakes on the effort in self survival.
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      Major efforts also take 3 requirements. Leadership, Vision and Funding. I suspect for community paradigms the most important is Vision around which Leadership can be organized around to attain funding. One important focus for the community as a whole will be job creation.
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      These efforts need to work with outside usually private agencies and finding avenues of mutual benefit.  Having a cooperative government entity to work though can therefore be a plus.
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      Universities are changing their role in the working with communities.  They can be great resources without necessarily trying to establish political control. Students are also a great resource for community change. Different disciplines design, technology and business can be brought together to help create innovative ideas. They can, as should community paradigm organizations, challenge the status quo. At the same time there is a necessity for structure. The question is how to community paradigm groups achieve structure?
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      In creating community paradigms outcomes are as important as outputs.  Outputs is the metric by which an effort is judged and usually quantitative but outcomes are the changes to the community that come from implementing the effort. You leave behind something sustainable in new partnerships, new ways of working, new ideas.
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      The challenge is working with experts for innovative ideas without being snare by ideas that are politically or economically motivated to give another advantage or because they are expedient.
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      The very idea of endeavoring to bring about new community paradigms means creating an environment with more social capital from which to draw to achieve the desired shift in community paradigm requires a good deal of volunteering where the participants actively pursue their role as producers of democracy. Volunteering is not limited to formal volunteering but all altruistic forms of social interaction. It helps to increase democratic participation. Robert Putnam's work demonstrates that it also has positive economic benefit as well. See wiki page for more info. There does however need to be something more to the effort of creating a new community paradigm beyond volunteering. What that is not clear but it seems to rise out of the act of creating a viable community paradigm shift.
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      Danger of disconnect brought about by austerity measures cutting people of from the community. Thousand flowers wll bloom without government theory is without merit
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      Communities should do more than provide shelter they should provide opportunities and fundamentally economic opportunities. 
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      Need a more holistic view, local competency, asking private sector to work in totally different way from traditional way but business still wants government to get out of the way. 
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      Government can be overly reactive going for the flavor of the minute.
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      What is the relationship of virtual communities to real communities through the enabling of programs such as car sharing.  Can it reinforce the connections of communities?
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      Volunteering at its best is a face to face proposition
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      Liveable is not merely a means of economic advantage but also must include other factors including environmental. We seek what cities give us culturally and aesthetically 
    • Brian G. Dowling
       
      This part of the discussion mirrors the work of Soul of the Community blog post http://bit.ly/qfZtt2 wiki post http://bit.ly/mXp0sF
Brian G. Dowling

The World Cafe Community - Hosting Conversations about Questions that Matter - 1 views

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    Welcome to the World Cafe Community of Practice! This is a place where World Cafe practitioners and supporters can share their experiences and learn from each other, a place for those new to the World Cafe to ask questions, and a place for us all to experience deep and meaningful conversations about those things that really matter to us. Pull up a chair at the World Cafe Community table that calls to you.
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