Group items tagged

As I’ve mentioned before, it is up to online communities to disrupt the oppressive status quo at conventional institutions. The same applies to our conception of currency, and how we form online “transactions.” Now that the focus among the technorati is shifting from how to monetize social media toward how to use it to create social impact, we have an opportunity to harness the meaning economy

“Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.”

PickupPal, a ride-sharing service in Ottawa that was providing information for commuters to more easily use the service. It became so easy to use that the City of Ottawa, whose public transportation system was at risk of loosing market share, passed a law making carpooling and ridesharing unreasonably difficult to do. PickupPal was deemed “too efficient.” A local movement to save the rideshare company began and the uproar in the community caused the city to rewrite the law.

Kevin Donovan had an ambition to build an open-courseware Web site, this one amid the "not-so-free culture" of Georgetown University, as one blog put it. Mr. Donovan, a junior in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, wants to see first-class education available to the third world. He argues that open courses make sense, given Georgetown's Jesuit tradition of social responsibility. The dean of his school bought his pitch, which carries a valuable lesson for fellow student organizers: once you obtain that kind of high-level support, things get a lot easier. The open-courseware project became Mr. Donovan's summer job. Working with faculty and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Mr. Donovan helped put six courses online last year. He hopes to build on that start in the coming semester.