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Google version of the digital revolution. Far from being a bad thing, he argues that the potential for creativity, the ability to connect and communicate and the ability to have ones voice heard is driving fundamental societal change. So, is the digital revolution leading us to a more democratic, more environmentally and socially conscious future? And better business models?

"Community governance" refers to the processes for making all the decisions and plans that affect life in the community, whether made by public or private organizations or by citizens. For community governance to be effective, it must be about more than process, it also must be about getting things done in the community. And what gets done must make a difference. So, it is crucial to measure results. But what should be done, and what results should be measured? There is no standard answer. The most important results vary from one community to another, and different people within a community have different perceptions about what the community should try to improve and how success should be measured. So, it is vital to engage citizens in deciding what to do and to engage them in deciding what results to measure or what performance goals or targets to measure against. Then, when targeted results are achieved, they will be results that matter to the people of the community.

Code for America hosted Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu for a discussion of their recent book, "Gardens of the Democracy." In it, they challenge Americans to approach the world not as a machinery that needs to be perfected but as a garden that needs constant attention, discretion, and periodic weeding. The book argues that since society and technology have fundamentally changed, so must our notions of citizenship and democracy: turning "the machine" into a garden. 

Family Independence Initiative (FII) is a national nonprofit which leverages the power of information to illuminate and accelerate the initiative low-income families take to improve their lives. Using hard data and compelling stories, we are sparking a movement to transform the stereotypes, beliefs, practices, and policies that undermine families' efforts to get ahead. FII believes that our country is greatly underestimating the ability of low-income families to lead their own change. FII has tracked the progress of hundreds of families over the last decade and found that the lack of upward mobility is not the result of a lack of initiative but can be traced to two other factors: 1. Lack of information, and therefore lack of investment, in the initiatives low-income families take on their own or collectively. In order to access services and programs, families have to show neediness instead of initiative(bolstering already prevalent negative stereotyping). 2. Negative stereotypes and the focus on individualism have led to government and charitable practices that discourage families from turning to one another and developing the mutuality that historically built America's middle class.

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.

TurboVote helps you vote - nothing more. We're committed to protecting your data, so it's only ever used to provide you with voting information and services. To that end, we encrypt your connection to our site, so your sign-up information stays just between us. We take precautionary measures to restrict access to only those partners and services we need to make TurboVote run. And we deliberately don't collect or store ID numbers. We also don't sell your information, or share any more than is strictly necessary to power the TurboVote services you know and love. And we're happy to answer any questions you have about our data and security practices.

Open Competency Models Ibbaka-TeamFit will be contributing a series of Open Competency Models to its communities over the coming year. Working with our customers and partner, we have seen the power that a skill and competency model brings to individuals and organizations. Good competency models bring clarity to the capabilities that an organization needs to evolve and adapt. They are central to the execution of strategic plans. For the individual, a competency model acts as a lens, allowing individuals to look into their skill profile and find hidden opportunities or gaps.

We are a group of passionate and proven leaders from the non-profit sector that saw a way to share a basic best practice with everyone: how to exponentially grow your organization using unique online strategies. Empowered.org was thoughtfully developed to tangibly empower you to take a decentralized approach to online fundraising, volunteer recruitment and marketing to accelerate your mission while maintaining oversight, brand and culture. Empowered has the unique ability to grow with you from a single group of volunteers in one location to a multi-national organization with hundreds of groups.

All Minnesotans should have the opportunity to make choices that allow them to live a long, healthy life, regardless of their income, education, or ethnic background. Everyone wants good health in order to be productive at work and to succeed in school, and to have affordable medical and housing costs. To make this opportunity a choice for all Minnesotans, we all have to do our part in creating and maintaining healthy homes and communities. Every person and every organization has a role to play, small or large.

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.

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.

California Forward's mission is to work with Californians to help create a "smart" government - one that's small enough to listen, big enough to tackle real problems, smart enough to spend our money wisely in good times and bad, and honest enough to be held accountable for results. We're different from other efforts to reform our state, because we believe in the importance of working together and understand that only robust public discussion and the creation of broad coalitions can move solutions forward. California's state and local governments must work better together for everyone. If Californians can come together to restructure the relationships between state and local governments, the experience of other states indicates that in five to seven years, we will begin to see the benefits of better governance and renewed private investment.

We're very inspired by Ezio Manzini, the Italian design strategist and founder of DESIS network, who says: When we design, we search for problems to solve. If you take the capability approach, you search for capabilities to support. He continues, "You don't ask what you can do to make people behave differently. You ask what you can do to recognize people's capabilities and help people use those to solve the problems they face." In the social sector, problems and unmet needs are almost too easy to find. Rather, we look for assets-the people, resources, behaviors, relationships, and systems-that are already working well. Our designs leverage those assets to create more and better life. A structured process We believe strongly that design is a process, and we've often found the design process to be transformative for both students and clients. Ours can be represented by a "double diamond," a two-part sequence of broadening and narrowing.

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.

The closing keynote at the Economist Conferences Event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", presented byProfessor Jan Gehl, founding partner of Gehl Architects,Copenhagen. This video provides a good deal of information on the benefits bicycling and walking have on a livable community when integrated into the community landscape.

At IDEO.org, we believe that the most potent weapon against global poverty is design. The solutions, systems, and social innovation that arise from truly understanding and designing alongside the poor are the most likely to offer hope and improve lives. And for us, if we can't see real impact, we haven't done our jobs.   Born in 2011 out of the global design and innovation firm IDEO, IDEO.org is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to applying human-centered design to alleviate poverty. We partner with nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, and foundations, to directly address the needs of the poor in sectors like health, water and sanitation, financial inclusion, agriculture, and gender equity. We employ top-notch designers, an elite class of businesspeople, and development experts, making IDEO.org a flexible and creative organization uniquely situated to tackle poverty through design.   A key pillar of our mission is to spread human-centered design. Though we believe that our design process is crucial to arriving at innovative solutions, we don't think that we're the only ones who should be using it. We want everyone on board. By sharing, teaching, and empowering social-sector workers to practice human-centered design, we're elevating design as a poverty-fighting tool.   We work at home and abroad, on our own projects and promoting and supporting the work of others, spreading the practice and promise of human-centered design. IDEO.org is dedicated innovation, great design, and changing lives

People Pioneers is a new concept being tested in the 2015 UK general election. Whatever their political interests or Party affiliation,  Stephen will be encouraging people from all walks of life to listen systematically to each other across communities, to identify collective strengths, common concerns and key aspirations from within the whole constituency.   Stephen will work with People Pioneers to shape a broad based, independent organisation able to inform and support elected members - and hold them to account.   If elected to Westminster, Stephen pledges to meet regularly with the Pioneers for reflection, conversation, dialogue, discussion and action planning. 

Systems thinking, according to HU, has two important dimensions. One is the establishment of a new paradigm that understands global issues as inherently complex, multi-dimensional, conflictive and open to outside influence and intervention. A problem like slavery, for example, may seem intractable because of the economic interests it serves; in fact, the institutional and organizational linkages-the supply chains-that comprise slavery's power structure are vulnerable. The first step in system thinking is to map those linkages to better understand how they fit together and pinpoint their likely weak points. The next step is to devise a strategy that combines public advocacy, coalition building, insider lobbying, and investigative journalism to target those linkages, forcing those implicated in slavery, wittingly or unwittingly, to reform, and weakening the larger circuit of power over time.

Democracy Beyond Elections is a collaborative, national campaign dedicated to transformative democracy rooted in community led decision making.  It is not enough to get the right person elected or to know that those closest to the issues are closest to the solutions - we must act on this knowledge and put real decision making power in community hands. This means equipping community-members often ignored, pushed out, or marginalized by our current democratic systems with the tools, resources, and opportunities to deeply engage in democratic processes. This means committing to radically reimagine what participation and civic engagement really entail - including tangible and consequential power sharing. And this means expanding our definition of democracy to extend between and beyond elections in participatory practices that include everyone.