New Community Paradigms

PublicInterestDesign.org is principally a blog about a growing movement at the intersection of design and service. In many respects, this movement is decades in the making, while it's also gained new life through a series of books, events, and exhibitions as well as the creation of new organizations and collaborations. Our hope with this new website is to share news and opportunities that the various stakeholders of the public interest design movement can take advantage of.

Housing California is the only voice in the state Capitol for children, seniors, families, people experiencing homelessness, and everyone who needs a safe, stable affordable place to call home. Mission Since 1988, Housing California has been working to prevent homelessness and increase the variety and supply of safe, stable, accessible, and permanently affordable places to live. Housing California staff accomplishes its goals through education, advocacy, and outreach.

Mission We bring together business and the arts to create a better future for both. We passionately believe that creativity can drive commercial innovation and provide consultancy, advice, research, training and events to make this happen.

In 2010 we pubished A Private Sector Policy for the Arts, which was our compelling framework of action to reboot and rewire the mixed arts funding economy being revised following extensive consultation. Using business to help realise your arts projects For the arts we offer learning and development opportunities, tailored fundraising advice and resources for organisations seeking partnerships with business Enriching the arts to help bring your business to life For business we connect brands and agencies with arts sponsorship to help bring your business to life.

The concept behind the directory is to bring together the increasing number of people needing to do some form of environmental assessment (and particularly quantification) with people that have developed tools to do these assessments and calculations. These tools vary in format - documents, spreadsheets, websites and other software programmes. The directory will be a free resource for users and practitioners in business, Government, other organisations and the general public.

INNOVATION From the Editors In this Insight Center, we'll help you identify innovation obstacles that have been hiding in plain sight and show you surprising ways to overcome them. by Andy O'Connell and Andrea Ovans

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. Through our events, research, and reports, NCoC expands our nation's contemporary understanding of what it means to be a citizen.

Housing California is the go-to organization for decision makers on housing and homeless policy and legislation. We meet directly with legislators and their staff members - those with the power to create and pass laws that have widespread, long-term stabilizing impacts on California's housing market. We support laws that make it easier for affordable homes to be built; our work results in greater variety and supply in the housing market and uplifts entire communities.

PublicInterestDesign.org is principally a blog about a growing movement at the intersection of design and service. In many respects, this movement is decades in the making, while it's also gained new life through a series of books, events, and exhibitions as well as the creation of new organizations and collaborations. Our hope with this new website is to share news and opportunities that the various stakeholders of the public interest design movement can take advantage of.

Art works to improve the lives of America's citizens in many ways. Communities across our nation are engaging design and leveraging the arts to create livable, sustainable neighborhoods with enhanced quality of life, increased creative activity, distinct identities, a sense of place, and vibrant local economies that capitalize on existing local assets. The NEA defines these efforts as Creative Placemaking:

Mayor Buckhorn is moving decisively with an economic development strategy that recognizes that its future as a vibrant, livable and sustainable community depends upon connecting its People, redefining its Places, and igniting Progress. Over the next months, AECOM and Parsons Brinckerhoff, planning and transportation experts, respectively, will work with the city and our community stakeholders and opinion leaders to develop a shared vision and give city leaders an implementable plan of action. This master plan, when complete, will form a living "workbook" of initiatives in core areas of land planning, transit, zoning, and economic development and financing strategies.

The World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank's official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products. Through the OKR, The World Bank collects, disseminates, and permanently preserves its intellectual output in digital form. The OKR is interoperable with other repositories and supports optimal discoverability and re-usability of the content by complying with Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) standards and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Development in the 21st century demands access to information. At a time of tight budgets, libraries offer a more efficient, smarter way of doing development. Most countries around the world, regardless of their size or level of development have public libraries. Beyond Access is starting a movement to make them all hubs for economic and social change. We believe that libraries power development.

Solve for X is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people. Radical in the sense that the audaciousness of the proposals makes them sound like science fiction. And radical in the sense that there is some real technology breakthrough on the horizon to give us all hope that these ideas could really be brought to life.

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that uses the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency, and provides new tools and resources for media and citizens, alike. We are committed to improving access to government information by making it available online, indeed redefining "public" information as meaning "online," and by creating new tools and websites to enable individuals and communities to better access that information and put it to use.

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.

There is, however, one small problem with this. Governments cannot create community, no matter how hard they try, and they cannot build social capital. At best they can create policy environments which assist individuals and institutions in civil society to do these things, or at least, do not stifle their efforts or make their task more difficult. To acknowledge this is not to suggest that governments should simply sit back and hope social capital will grow before them. On the contrary, it is to advocate a radical re-invention of government and a wholesale move away from the old service delivery paradigm in the human services so as to remove some of the key governmental obstacles to civic engagement, responsibility and reciprocity at grass-roots levels of our society.

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.

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

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.