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About Us Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine that tells the story of sharing. We cover the people, places, and projects bringing a shareable world to life. And we share how-tos so you can make a shareable world real in your life. In a shareable world, things like car sharing, clothing swaps, childcare coops, potlucks, and cohousing make life more fun, green, and affordable. When we share, not only is a better life possible, but so is a better world. The remarkable successes of Zipcar, Wikipedia, Kiva, open source software, Freecycle, and Creative Commons show this. They tell a hopeful story about human nature and our future, one we don't hear enough in the mainstream media. They show what's possible when we share. They show that we don't act merely for our own good, but go out of our way to contribute to the common good. They show that we can solve the social and environmental crises we face, and thrive as never before. They show that a new world is emerging where the more you share the more respect you get, and where life works because everyone is motivated to help each other. We tell this story because a shareable world might be just what's needed to enjoy life to the fullest today while creating a better tomorrow. And it's being built by people from all walks of life right now. Shareable is your invitation to join these innovators today. Want to start sharing? Check out our top 20 how-to share posts and our complete index of how-to share posts. Want to get involved in Shareable? You can contribute stories, feedback, and money. You can follow us on Twitter Facebook, and Identi.ca and share our stories with friends. You can register and join discussions about your favorite posts. You can subscribe to our e-mail list. We have more ideas for getting involved here. Want to know more about sharing? For the big picture on sharing, check out the following features: "Four Degrees of Sharing," by Janelle Orsi; "Ten Ways our World is Becoming More Share

"Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard. Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices. Global Voices is incorporated in the Netherlands as Stichting Global Voices, a nonprofit foundation. We do not have an office, but work as a virtual community across multiple time zones, meeting in person only when the opportunity arises (usually during our Summits). We rely on grants, sponsorships, editorial commissions, and donations to cover our costs. Our Projects Global Voices is translated into more than 30 languages by volunteer translators, who have formed the Lingua project. Additionally, Global Voices has an Advocacy website and network to help people speak out online in places where their voices are censored. We also have an outreach project called Rising Voices to help marginalized communities use citizen media to be heard, with an emphasis on the developing world. Read more about our projects. Our History Global Voices was founded in 2005 by former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief, Rebecca MacKinnon and technologist and Africa expert, Ethan Zuckerman while they were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The idea for the project grew out of an internat

Sourcing uncomfortable knowledge, buried under the avalange of info overload, or repressed from appearing??? To be verified

" I am hoping that the result of this tedious, difficult, uneven, sometimes triumphant, sometime despairing transition time will be a fresh new way of looking at the world, now that so much of the world I took for granted, so many of the collaborations and processes and bureaucracies and patterns and expertise is so vividly transparent."

"Reason and Purpose Learning by Doing Designed to support the digital lives of young people and their capacity for learning, Quest to Learn is a school committed to graduating strong, engaged, literate citizens of a globally networked world. Through an innovative pedagogy that immerses students in differentiated, challenge-based contexts, the school acknowledges design, collaboration, and systems thinking as key literacies of the 21st century. Within an integrated, rigorous Regents-based curriculum students work with teachers to gain the skills necessary to meet these requirements, and even surpass them. On-going evaluation and feedback create opportunities for students to plan, revise, and reflect on their own learning. The overall curriculum is rooted in mathematical practices and the use of smart tools, with an explicit intent to innovate at the level of how students are assessed in context. Most importantly, teachers work with students to build individual and academic competencies and enrich youth identity development within contexts that are relevant and meaningful. The school has been designed to help students to bridge old and new literacies through learning about the world as a set of interconnected systems. Design and complex problem-solving are two big ideas of the school, as is a commitment to deep content learning with a strong focus on learning in rigorous, engaging, and relevant ways. It is a place where digital media meets books and students learn to think like designers, inventors, mathematicians, writers, and more. Q2L brings together teachers with a passion for content, a vision for helping kids to learn best, and a commitment to changing the way students will grow in the world. Quest to Learn has purposely responded not only to the growing evidence that digital media and games offer powerful models for reconsidering how and where young people learn, but also to the belief that access for all students to these opportunities is critical. We beli

Following the links ifrom ted's post in the gamification forum item... I bounced on this school. Always interesting to discover new ways of looking at traditional things...

Stavros S. Niarchos Lecture Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspective on Current Predicaments Ninth Annual Niarchos Lecture Niall Ferguson, Harvard University Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC May 13, 2010 « Previous | Index | Next » Summary 1 of 3 Niall Ferguson, Harvard University, delivered the Peterson Institute's ninth annual Niarchos Lecture on May 13, 2010, on the topic "Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspectives on Current Predicaments." Niall Ferguson is one of the world's leading thinkers and writers on geoeconomic, global systemic, and other key international strategic issues. Time has named him one of the world's 100 most influential people, and two of his books, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2003) and The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2008) have been converted into television series. His most recent book is the best-selling Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2008), from which he has drawn numerous lessons for analyzing and responding to the current global crisis. His earlier The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History.

"The Media Foundation We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century. Adbusters Magazine Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Adbusters is a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces. Our work has been embraced by organizations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, has been featured in hundreds of alternative and mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television and radio shows around the world. Adbusters offers incisive philosophical articles as well as activist commentary from around the world addressing issues ranging from genetically modified foods to media concentration. In addition, our annual social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and Digital Detox Week have made us an important activist networking group. Ultimately, though, Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. We try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons. Culturejammer's Headquarters"

That's the kind of group I wanted to get to know... Thanks marlelo Santos for leading me to them...

"ISEE is a not-for-profit, member-governed, organization dedicated to advancing understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and economic systems for the mutual well-being of nature and people. Ecological economics exists because a hundred years of disciplinary specialization in scientific inquiry has left us unable to understand or to manage the interactions between the human and environmental components of our world. While none would dispute the insights that disciplinary specialization has brought, many now recognize that it has also turned out to be our Achilles heel. In an interconnected evolving world, reductionist science has pushed out the envelope of knowledge in many different directions, but it has left us bereft of ideas as to how to formulate and solve problems that stem from the interactions between humans and the natural world. How is human behaviour connected to changes in hydrological, nutrient or carbon cycles? What are the feedbacks between the social and natural systems, and how do these influence the services we get from ecosystems? Ecological economics as a field attempts to answer questions such as these."

ISEE's Dedication: Advancing understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and economic systems for the mutual well-being of nature and people: My question: Did this understanding ever exist. If yes, why was this understanding lost ??? If not: How come?

There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data), but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you. The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don't care about.

"The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn't there."

Research at IONS From its inception, the Institute of Noetic Sciences has blazed new trails in exploring big questions: Who are we? What is consciousness, and how does it impact the physical world? What are our human potentials, and how can we achieve those potentials? What leads to personal and societal healing and transformation? Because limitations in our human consciousness underlie many of the problems we face as a global community, research at IONS focuses on exploring the fundamental nature of consciousness, investigating how it interacts with the physical world, and studying how consciousness can dramatically transform in beneficial ways.

Consciousness research with impact on societal and personal healing, worldview transformation with what personal and sociatal transformation effects and how extended human capoacities interact with the physical world... all good themes in our thinking about mind amplification, learning communities, and cooperation... What would you think?

I was the staff writer for IONS in the earl 1980s. An interesting outfit.

" Now that Margulis has died, it remains our choice to catch up with what she and her life's work have set in motion.  To do so, we must bring together the many fields of knowledge she embodied.  Biologists must talk to physicists, virologists must talk to geologists, cosmologists must talk to microbiologists, and scientists musty talk to non-scientists.  This motion of meeting and exchanging ideas, if we act with it, will evolve our thinking. "

"The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There's always been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn't be a program. There has been a domineering subculture-that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world-that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us."

[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it.

The first chapter of what is for me a fundamental book that complements our learning here, and hints at how Social Media might contribute to creating a better World. The article elaborates on how new Social Theory brings new perspectives to finding and implementing solutions to the intractable problems of our time. These ideas originally developped by Mary Douglas, an antropologist, and have been further refined and developped into a fully integrated Social Theory, called Theory of Socio-Cultural Viability, anso sometimes called "Cultural Theory". The lead researcher in this field is Michael Thompson, co-author of this book and chapter. Here are some highlights I have jotted down: Why do well-intended attempts to alleviate pressing social ills too often derail? How can effective and efficient and broadly acceptable solutions to social problems be found? By making sure no voices are excluded. Contrary to the ideas on which current social thinking is based, new research has lead to new theory explaining social systems, showing how deliberative quality is key to sustainable policy-making and implementation. It shows that endlessly changing and complex social worlds consist of ceaseless interactions between four mutually opposed organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations. Each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making, governance failure inevitably results. Successful solutions are therefore creative combinations of four opposing ways of organizing and thinking. They always seem clumsy compared to any of the 4 voices' elegant solutions. Yet being broadly acceptable to all they are sustainable and implementable A new way to look at pluralism in organizations, institutions, policy-making, democracy, technology, geo-politics and many other social fields is offered to us by multidisciplinary research and practice by leading political scientists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, sociologists, geographers, engineer

Hi guys, this might be stuff that is of interest to you...

IThis article, written at the end of her life, presents the Historical Origins of The theory of Socio-cultural Viability by Mary Douglas, who is to be seen as the inspirator of the theory, and to have established the foundational ideas who have been further developped by her students, and later further developped and applied by many scholars across a wide range of disciplines. The first paragraph will hopefully provide some incentive to dig further: Introduction: What is Grid and Group Cultural Theory? How Useful can it be in the Modern World? It is a pleasure for me to reflect on the history of Grid-Group. I first described the idea in Natural Symbols ( Douglas 1970), a kind of necessary sequel to Purity and Danger (1966). I now realise that it was a simple idea presented in a complicated way. After a late start it has been radically redesigned by creative collaborators whose work I will describe. Back in the 1960's social anthropologists still felt it was necessary to vindicate the intelligence of colonial peoples, then known as "natives" or "primitives." A major objective of teaching and writing in anthropology was to attack something described by Levy Bruhl as "primitive mentality," which seemed to mean "primitive irrationality." Malinowski had started in the 1920's showing that the Trobrianders had rational customs and laws. In the 1930's Raymond Firth was original in focusing on the "primitive economics" of the Polynesians and found that the basic laws of supply, demand, and price applied in the rustic economies he studied. Evans-Pritchard made a frontal defence of Azande rationality. After World War II, Nadel and Gluckman followed up with the complexities of Nubian and Barotse legal systems. The very idea that the concept of "jurisprudence" could apply to "the natives" was innovative. In the 1950's and 60's we continued to dismantle intellectual barriers assumed to distinguish "Them" from "Us." The following ex

I believe this to be a helpfull introduction to the study od the Theory od Socio-cultural viability, which, it seems to me, is a usefull framework to look from a new angle to cooperation theory, institutional decision making, democracy and many other fields of social sciences

"Some kids learn by listening; others learn by doing. Geoff Mulgan gives a short introduction to the Studio School, a new kind of school in the UK where small teams of kids learn by working on projects that are, as Mulgan puts it, "for real." TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Category: People & Blogs Tags: TED TEDTalks TEDGlobal Geoff Mulgan Creativity Culture Design Education Work learning learn Studio School projects active learning participatory License: Standard YouTube License 223 likes, 4 dislikes Top Comments 1) 0:15 (to skip intro) 2) I'm sending this to my all my professors and even my old high school teachers too! More people need to hear about this idea! It may not be perfect now, but with more minds working together, it can be fine-tuned into something to suite ALL students (not just those in Media and Arts). Thanks TED! jerrylittlemars 14 hours ago 28 @merkowaty1 additional: just about ANYTHING is going to be more fun than traditional school as we have them today. ion010101 13 hours ago 6 see all All Comments (58) Reactions (2) Respond to this video... we do indeed learn by doing yet we are watchin

This is a really great initiative, worth watching. Sometimes I feel a bit unsettled, so much things happening in every corner of society at large... accelerating at such a fast pace... Whare, When, will this lead us towards... What can I do?

transcript of my blog Tim Wu author of Master Swtch, interviewed http://ow.ly/5G0ry . No doubt a must read book, and if you doubt, view this video. The one thing that bothers me in Tim Wu's speech is his deep belief that the two things that will NOT change are economics and human nature … Food for thought, questions for deep dialogue and inquiry. I belief we can come up with solutions to these two "invariables", who seem more "metaphores" or "myths" than inescapable fatalities. Should these deep beliefs remain however , inconsciously hidden in our minds, they might prevent us to look at things from other, more hopefull underlying beliefs systems. New ways of looking at things bring with them other possibilities for the future of the World. Let's hope we can achieve a stage of mental capacity so that we allow a World to emerge without Wars all-over, without undignified living conditions for the majority of Humans, without unequality all-over even in so called advanced economies, without destruction of nature. Let's aim instead on Freedom and Self-Determination for all, a belief in Homan endowment and possibility, a change in mental capacity, a return to conditions for our Systems Intelligenge to express itself. This might allow us all to raise our consciousness and to cooperate collectively to solving the intractable problems our ongoing mental models have created.

I believe this interview says a lot about what might happen if the proponents of open and free social media and internet loose their battle. It also shows that this battle is broader, is it inescapable that human nature and economic paradigms are invariable? Are we doomed to see unchanged economic pursuits (meaning money and concentration of wealth) combine with unchanged human nature (incessant and exclusive pursuit of more wealth and power). I believe not, this is the whole point of new paradigms for cooperation combined with the effects of Mind Amplification and social media