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The Creative Learning Exchange was founded as a non-profit in 1991 to encourage the development of systems citizens who use systems thinking and system dynamics to meet the interconnected challenges that face them at personal, community, and global levels.

Designers, programmers, data scientists, and artists alike are invited to take up the challenge: merge and compare mobility data sets from three cities-San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich-and draw meaningful insights. Winning projects will showcase the power of open governmental data and facilitate the knowledge exchange between cities. Juried prizes include round-trip airfare to one of the participating cities and funding from Fusepool, the European / Swiss Datapool, for developing the project into an app.

Citizen uptake to date has been, however less than was hoped. Part of it is the normal delay in innovation uptake, and part is linked to poor internet penetration and low connectivity in aid intensive countries. But the time has come to analyze more closely the reasons for this tepid demand side response or its lack of sustainability after an initial peak of interest. What may well be missing is the human element and the ability of people potentially interested in using this information to work together in conducive venues where they could exchange ideas, develop joint approaches, and train citizens and CSO organizations.

ABOUT THE CALIFORNIA STEWARDSHIP NETWORK In 2008, the Morgan Family Foundation launched the California Stewardship Network as a civic venture, investing $ 1.5 million over 2 years in matching grants to 10 economic regions that agreed to focus on breakthroughs led by stewardship teams composed of business, community and government civic entrepreneurs. While each regional team has developed its own stewardship strategy, all share a common approach. Typically, these strategies are: (1) Data-driven, (2) Based on economic regions and industry clusters, (3) Successful in sustaining the engagement of business, (4) Effective at integrating economic, social, and environmental considerations, and (5) Innovative in their approach to public-private partnerships in implementation. The teams represent the diversity of California ranging from San Diego and Los Angeles in the South to Sacramento Valley, the Fresno Region and the Central Coast to the Sierra Region, Sonoma and Butte Counties and the Redwood Coast near the Oregon Border. These regional groups meet on regular basis and exchange best practices.

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. 

Surely, people could be empowered to share and exchange their opinions, particularly if they knew their views would be taken seriously and result in better services, better products and better facilities for themselves, their family, and their friends. In a nutshell, people could become real 'communities of influence'. Imagine the savings, imagine the efficiencies, and imagine the returns. Couldn't greater gains also be made if the providers and commissioners of services were prepared to work together? Rather than feeling uncomfortable about sharing information, why not make collaboration the norm.

The League of California Cities is an association of California city officials who work together to enhance their knowledge and skills, exchange information, and combine resources so that they may influence policy decisions that affect cities.

Resident-Centered Community Building - What Makes It Different? In June 2012, forty-one leaders of community building efforts came together to share strategies and discuss lessons they have learned about how to improve conditions in disadvantaged communities. While gatherings like these happen regularly, this one was unusual; it was designed by and for community residents.

Here's why: the internet offers virtual spaces where citizens, in absolute equality, can reclaim an active role in the political process. In essence, these virtual rooms today have the same function as the public squares in ancient times, where citizens gathered to exchange ideas and jointly agree to common solutions. So ironically, it is only through sophisticated information and communication technology that we will succesfully revive the fundamental principles of democracy and citizenship, and confront the global issues of our time.

The League of California Cities is an association of California city officials who work together to enhance their knowledge and skills, exchange information, and combine resources so that they may influence policy decisions that affect cities.

Description It is part of an initiative to expand and strengthen an international network of data journalists, designers, developers, and others to encourage collaboration and to exchange expertise and best practices.

Economic historians long reckoned that enclosure, though unjust and brutal, spurred progress and laid the groundwork for industrialisation. Large tracts could be farmed more productively, freeing labourers to work in urban factories while also providing food to support them. "The break-up of the peasantry was the price England paid…to feed her growing population," wrote Peter Mathias, an economic historian, in 1983. The Industrial Revolution seemed to bury the concept of the commons for good.