New Community Paradigms

Forum for the Future US brings all of Forum's system innovation, futures and sustainable business tools and expertise to solve sustainability challenges across North America. Working with major businesses including Target, Walmart and McDonald's, smaller companies like Method and Annie's, and NGOs such as The Rainforest Alliance, we have helped reshape the business models and convene the coalitions capable of creating lasting change. We believe that only by keeping a keen eye on what the future might hold can we make sound decisions for the longer term. We also believe that the key systems that we rely on, like food and energy, are broken and in need of complete transformation. Forum equips its Network members with the knowledge, training and practical tools to innovate. We provide them with a platform for collaboration where they can test solutions and make their successes bigger and better.

The most important work on EA and applied System Theory today."  "Makes EA more powerful, coherent and usable." "I read and regularly refer… way beyond any other EA/system engineering/human factors/systems theory resource." "I just want to tell you how much I appreciate your musings on systems…  exceptionally useful".

The financial health of a city is closely intertwined with that of its residents. Financially healthy residents are better able to weather difficult times, are less likely to need city supports and services, and can contribute more to the local economy by supporting property, sales, and income taxes. Our data dashboard provides a unique snapshot of residents' financial health, including credit bureau data, to tell the story of city financial health. Recognizing that cities differ and their residents' needs are diverse, we construct city peer groups to highlight shared challenges and promising interventions. What's your city's picture of financial health?

Based in Fuzzy-logic Cognitive Mapping (FCM), users can easily develop semi-quantitative models of environmental issues, social concerns or social-ecological systems in Mental Modeler by:  Defining the important components of a system  Defining the relationships between these components  Running "what if" scenarios to determine how the system might react under a range of possible changes.

In a world filled with ever-more-complex technological, sociological, ecological, political & economic systems... a tool to make interactive simulations may not be that much help. But it can certainly try.

Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) is an approach to sustainable community-driven development. Beyond the mobilisation of a particular community, it is concerned with how to link micro-assets to the macro-environment. Asset Based Community Development's premise is that communities can drive the development process themselves by identifying and mobilizing existing, but often unrecognised assets. Thereby responding to challenges and creating local social improvement and economic development. This page will describe ABCD through five key aspects.

ABCD stands for Asset-Based Community Development and it refers to a type of community development based on the work of Professors Jody Kretzmann and John McKnight. ABCD challenges the traditional deficit-based approach that tries to solve urban and rural development problems by focusing on the needs and deficiencies of individuals, neighbourhoods, towns, villages, etc.

Barnwood Trust's vision is to create the best possible environment in Gloucestershire for disabled people and people with mental health problems to make the most of their lives.

It's not hard to make most things work. A little common sense goes a long way. People take responsibility. They're judged on results.  Our government doesn't work that way anymore. We all know that government is broken. But Washington insiders will never fix it, unless we join together to demand a historic overhaul. The solutions are relatively easy-remaking government into simple frameworks that allow people to take charge again. What's hard is overthrowing the Washington status quo. It will only happen with your help.

Murmurations showcases innovative and leading-edge professional and research practice and methodology. The journal treats writing and visual media as opportunities for dialogue, as forms of relational practice, as a form of reflexive inquiry where the writer, artist or film maker holds the audience in mind. 

Community Circles work by following a step-by-step process that fosters creative, fun meetings that result in ideas and actions.

While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Traditionally, such highbrow nonsense has come couched in big words and fancy rhetoric, but more and more we see it presented instead in the guise of big data and fancy algorithms - and these quantitative, statistical, and computational forms of bullshit are those that we will be addressing in the present course.

Arts and culture are a deep and intrinsic part of every community. Across the United States there are over 113,000 organizations dedicated to many aspects of cultural life. This activity encompasses a broad range of disciplines that ranges from performing arts production and presentation, to visual arts exhibition, to arts education and arts in healthcare, to preservation and interpretation of our collective heritage.

How does it work? We give you 602 million dollars. It's your job to balance the budget while funding the many important responsibilities of city government. We'll give you some guidelines - what do the departments do? What happens if you give them more-or less - money?

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. Studying these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Santa Fe Institute is a nonprofit, independent research center that leads global research in complexity science. SFI scientists seek the shared patterns and regularities across physical, biological, social, and technological systems that give rise to complexity-in any system in which its collective, system-wide behaviors cannot be understood merely by studying its parts or individuals in isolation. Insights from complexity science are increasingly useful in understanding questions far beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines-urban sustainability, disease networks, and financial risk, to name a few.