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An initiative of Peter Block and friends, Restore Commons aims to curate the ways of thinking and practice towards the common good. The move to the commons is well underway. We simply want to document it. Restore Commons is designed to be an online gathering place for stories and radical ideas strong enough to build the social capital and engaged community required to restore the common good. The website features a variety of content including stories, articles, videos and podcasts that highlight inverted and radical thinking that is essential to an alternative economy, a connected neighborhood, and ways of dealing with the end of the so-called consumerist middle class. This is what is required to restore compassion, civility and interdependence that is disturbingly fragile in today's world. The focus is on place-based, localized and grassroots initiatives that are alternatives to the tools of empire.

The Open Government Partnership is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. In the spirit of multi-stakeholder collaboration, OGP is overseen by a Steering Committee including representatives of governments and civil society organizations.

"Now for the first time ever, we have a global plan of action - the Contract for the Web - created by experts and citizens from across the world to make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone. We invite governments, companies, civil society organizations and individuals to back the Contract and uphold its principles and clauses. "

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.

Our vision is that, given the challenges faced by our civilization, the depletion of natural resources, and the anticipated contraction of modern economies, the transformation of our societies will only be possible through positivist approaches and intrinsically guided by principles of sustainable/regenerative and ethical development of local communities, while respecting and restoring natural ecosystems and promoting diversity and inclusion.

Directors: This website is run by Jonathan Haidt at NYU-Stern, Matt Motyl at the University of Virginia, and Ravi Iyer at the University of Southern California. We exercise some light editorial oversight, but the content here is provided by a network of contributors who, we can assume, do not all agree with everything that the other contributors have written. We selected the initial contributors for the excellence of their research and the diversity of their perspectives. The content on each page can be assumed to reflect the views of the editor listed at the bottom of that page, unless the content is specifically signed by another contributor. In 2012 we will gradually develop a set of policy recommendations that are supported by the large majority of the contributors.

Welcome to Sacred Headwaters, a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come.

Pathways to equitable healthy cities is a global partnership that aims to improve population health, enhance health equity and ensure environmental sustainability in cities around the world through co-production of rigorous evidence with policy and civil society partners in cities in six countries.

Climate Interactive developed the Agriculture and Land Policy Simulator (ALPS) to allow users to see the interactions of different policy decisions on a nation's food system. As a national-scale model, country ministries and civil society groups can think about different development pathways to see if those policies could create their desired future.

It is often assumed that the public have to rely on professionals to deliver public services because in the economic jargon there is an information asymmetry: the doctor or teacher knows more than the patient or pupil. Yet the families of these children have fine grained knowledge about what they really need: when they need two carers to support them and when only one will do; what risks to take on a trip out to the zoo and so on. The In Control initiative draws out this latent, tacit knowledge of users that is largely kept dormant and suppressed by the traditional delivery approach to services in which professionals are largely in control, assumed to have all the knowledge and so consumers are largely passive because they are assumed to lack the capability of taking charge of their own care, health, learning or tax.

Across the country, and throughout the world, many large and small groups of individuals and families, in partnership with businesses and governments, are in the process of making a new system - where people know what they are entitled to and can allocate the money that is assigned for their benefit.. This system is called Self-Directed Support, or Consumer-Directed Care. Variations of these terms are used in Education and Health Care. Internationally, this trend towards personalisation of funding is well-advanced. In Australia it is beginning in disability, accident compensation, aged care and soon in technical and vocational education. But Australian governments and institutions have been very slow to pick it up. We aim to pull them into the 21st century.

Series of articles in support of the Self-Directed Services and Personal Budgets project in Australia

Nesta is an independent charity with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. We do this by providing investments and grants and mobilising research, networks and skills. Nesta doesn't work alone. We rely on the strength of the partnerships we form with other innovators, community organisations, educators and investors too. We're in the very lucky position of gaining greater independence and freedom at a time when many organisations face severe constraints.

At the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), we believe everyone has the power to make a difference in how their community and country thrive. We are a dynamic, non-partisan nonprofit working at the forefront of our nation's civic life. We continuously explore what shapes today's citizenry, define the evolving role of the individual in our democracy, and uncover ways to motivate greater participation.

Serve.gov is designed to help Americans create and find opportunities to serve their communities and our nation.

We believe that governments can make better use of scarce technology dollars by working together to solve common problems. We're helping them share their solutions, knowledge, and best practices. Civic technology experts have recognized the benefits of sharing technology among governments and institutions. However, instances of successful collaboration and sharing are still few and far between, in part because there is no easy, structured way to share knowledge about this software, let alone the software itself. There is no one place to go to look for civic software that cities need, and no roadmap to share what they have. Enter the Civic Commons. As infrastructure for the open government movement, Civic Commons is a community-edited resource to find out what's working, where. Ok, so what is it, really? Civic Commons is an information product, made up of the Marketplace, Engagement Commons, and the Wiki:

United We Serve is a nationwide service initiative that helps meet growing social needs resulting from the economic downturn. With the knowledge that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things when given the proper tools, President Obama is asking us to come together to help lay a new foundation for growth. This initiative aims to both expand the impact of existing organizations by engaging new volunteers in their work and encourage volunteers to develop their own "do-it-yourself" projects.

Our Policy and Citizen Engagement Unit works to enhance the legislative process and its outcomes by promoting representative, transparent and accountable governance. By improving the interface between citizens and decision-makers we aim at increasing civil society's input in policy-making. Because Democracy is not only about votes, it's also about deliberation.

The Motivate Cape Town Challenge: Make Cape Town a Fantastic Place to Live, Work and Play! The Plan: CHALLENGE 2012! Empower communities to turn their innovative ideas into sustainable projects. 'Communities' are any gatherings of positive and passionate Capetonians. 'Innovative ideas' are the common wisdom and ability to create the solutions we need.'Sustainable' means lasting, positive change for all the people of Cape Town. 'Projects' are any projects that contribute to positive change.

We are a public policy change organization rooted in the civil rights movement. We engineer large-scale systems change to remedy inequality, expand opportunity and open paths to upward mobility. Our goal is that members of all communities have the safety, opportunity and health they need to thrive.