New Community Paradigms

Without access to sustainable energy, there can be no sustainable development. One person in five on the planet still lacks access to modern electricity. Twice that number, three billion people, rely on wood, coal, charcoal or animal waste for cooking and heating. In a global economy, this is inequitable - and unsustainable.

"Rio+20" is the short name for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development to take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2012 - twenty years after the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. Rio+20 is also an opportunity to look ahead to the world we want in 20 years. At the Rio+20 Conference, world leaders, along with thousands of participants from the private sector, NGOs and other groups, will come together to shape how we can reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection on an ever more crowded planet.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. Most examples involve city governments that have opened up decisions around municipal budgets, such as overall priorities and choice of new investments, to citizen assemblies. In other cases, states, counties, schools, universities, housing authorities, and coalitions of community groups have used participatory budgeting to open up spending decisions to democratic participation.

We all know that there are a lot of us that are out there doing good in our world. Unfortunately, those doing the good work don't always have the resources to take advantage of technologies that can make the good that they do operate more efficiently, more easily, and more coordinated. That's where we come in. We want you to take the good that you already do, and provide you with the solutions to accomplish it the way you want-great. Hence the name of our company. Your good works, done great.

Honest Buildings has created a profile for any building in the world with an address. This platform is the first place that connects occupants, service providers and owners to each other and the buildings where they live, work and spend their time. Type in an address, and the free service instantly finds information about any commercial or residential building in the U.S., including pictures, reviews, Honesty Ratings(TM), open and completed projects, and the people associated with that building, including service providers, managers and owners.

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases. Version 2.0 introduces a new extensions architecture, a reconciliation framework for linking records to other databases (like Freebase), and a ton of new transformation commands and expressions.

Eleven diverse regions across California have come together to launch the California Stewardship Network, developing innovative regional solutions to the state's most pressing economic, environmental, and community challenges. These solutions require "breakthrough innovation" driven by a "new generation" of civic entrepreneurs-diverse regional teams composed of both established and emerging leaders.

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.

A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Although the term disruptive technology is widely used, disruptive innovation seems a more appropriate term in many contexts since few technologies are intrinsically disruptive; rather, it is the business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact.

Knowledge wants to be free! 1We've decided to produce world-class educational materials by elite professors and elite designers. And give them to you for free. 2 We think you deserve free access to materials written by the world's foremost authorities - worth thousands of dollars - whether you are from New York or New Delhi. In fact, we wrote a mission statement about what we want to continue to do for you and the rest of the world. 3 In short, we do it as a labour of love and because we know you will help us in return!

The Centre for Civil Society is a social innovation and public policy institute for the empowerment of ordinary people and strengthening of civil society.

The term 'civil society' refers to the relationships and associations that make up our life at grass-roots levels of society, in families, neighbourhoods and voluntary associations, independent of both government and the commercial world. Our aim is to strengthen civil society and empower people within it. 

Collectively, we have it backwards. The vast majority of our amassed intelligence and imagination is consumed by commerce, from grand efforts to build wealth to granular activities like selling movie tickets and deodorant. While we donate some time and treasure, efforts that serve the greater good are severely undermanned.

This publication draws on examples of public engagement in city and county budgeting throughout California and describes six general approaches that local agencies use, often in strategic combination, to involve residents in the budget process.

We support public sector and community groups in developing participatory budgeting processes in their local areas within the UK. We are working with the Department for Communities and Local Government in rolling out and supporting their programme of participatory budgeting pilots.

The reality is that technology and innovations in business and service delivery are everywhere.  But often, because of the day-to-day pressure within local government to simply keep things running and improve in the most conventional areas, new approaches and cutting edge technology is not being used in the optimal way, to benefit those living within cities, towns, counties and so forth.  This is not the fault of local governments.  Cities , towns, counties and universities have huge demands on limited resources, and day-today operations are all-consuming and critical. So it can be difficult to learn what is available that would make the biggest difference.

In a world where things too often don't work, GOOD seeks a path that does. Left, right. In, out. Greed, altruism. Us, them. These are the defaults and they are broken. We are the alternative model. We are the reasonable people who give a damn. No dogma. No party lines. No borders. We care about what works--what is sustainable, prosperous, productive, creative, and just--for all of us and each of us. This isn't easy, but we are not afraid to fail. We'll figure it out as we go. Call it a new party, call it a 21st century collaboration, call it an army, call it your new home. Or just call it GOOD.

One Community: A Grassroots Think Tank began as One Pasadena in 2008. One Pasadena was a grassroots nonprofit aimed at building liaisons and increasing communication within the city's neighborhoods and communities.

Movement for the People provides a framework for trans-partisan cooperation among people and organizations who believe that corporate involvement with politics is drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans. We believe that so much money is pouring into our political system that it is no longer capable of serving or representing We the People. We wish to change this.

SharedPurpose.Net is an internet system and framework for community and political organizing. We are building bridges between demographic groups, following a holistic vision of social cohesion.