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Kurt Laitner

Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being.pdf - 0 views

  • such as interest,engagement and meaning,
  • subjective well-being is taken to be:2Good mental states, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that peoplemake of their lives, and the affective reactions of people to their experiences
  • “subjective well-being is an umbrella term for the different valuationspeople make regarding their lives, the events happening to them, their bodies and minds,and the circumstances in which they live”.
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  • In measuring overall human well-being then, subjective well-being should be placedalongside measures of non-subjective outcomes, such as income, health, knowledge andskills, safety, environmental quality and social connections
  • Inparticular, a distinction is commonly made between life evaluations, which involve acognitive evaluation of the respondent’s life as a whole (or aspects of it), and measures ofaffect, which capture the feelings experienced by the respondent at a particular point in time(Diener, 1984; Kahneman et al., 1999
  • eudaimonic aspect ofsubjective well-being, reflecting people’s sense of purpose and engagement
  • The framework used here covers all three concepts of well-being:●Life evaluation.●Affect.●Eudaimonia (psychological “flourishing”)
  • the result of a judgement by the individual rather than thedescription of an emotional state.
  • Elements of subjective well-beingLife evaluation
  • making an evaluation of this sort as involving the individual constructing a “standard” thatthey perceive as appropriate for themselves, and then comparing the circumstances oftheir life to that standard
  • Life evaluations are based on how people remember their experiences (Kahneman et al.,1999) and can differ significantly from how they actually experienced things at the time
  • It is for this reason that life evaluations are sometimes characterised as measures of“decision utility” in contrast to “experienced utility”
  • One of the mostwell documented measures of life evaluation – thePersonal Wellbeing Index– consists of eightquestions, covering satisfactions with eight different aspects of life, which are summedusing equal weights to calculate an overall index (International Wellbeing Group, 2006)
  • (job satisfaction, financial satisfaction, house satisfaction, healthsatisfaction, leisure satisfaction and environmental satisfaction),
  • AffectAffect is the term psychologists use to describe a person’s feelings. Measures of affectcan be thought of as measures of particular feelings or emotional states, and they aretypically measured with reference to a particular point in time.
  • Such measures capturehow people experience life rather than how they remember it (Kahneman and Krueger,2006
  • While an overall evaluation of life can be captured in a single measure, affect has atleast two distinct hedonic dimensions: positive affect and negative affect (Kahneman et al.,1999; Diener et al., 1999
  • positive affect is thought to be largely uni-dimensional
  • negative affect may be more multi-dimensional.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The commons law project: A vision of green governance - 0 views

  • “commons law” (not to be confused with common law)
  • Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources
  • Ever since the rise of the nation-state and especially industrialized markets, however, commons law has been marginalized if not eclipsed by contemporary forms of market-based law
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  • individual property rights and market exchange have been elevated over most everything else, and this has only eroded the rights of commoners,
  • reframe the very notion of “the economy” to incorporate non-market sharing and collaboration.
  • we had concluded that incremental efforts to expand human rights and environmental protection within the framework of the State/Market duopoly were simply not going to achieve much
  • the existing system of regulation and international treaties has been a horrendous failure over the past forty years. Neoliberal economics has corrupted and compromised law and regulation, slashing away at responsible stewardship of our shared inheritance while hastening a steady decline of the world’s ecosystems
  • We concluded that new forms of ecological governance that respect human rights, draw upon commons models and reframe our understanding of economic value, hold great promise
  • An economics and supporting civic polity that valorizes growth and material development as the precondition for virtually everything else is ultimately a dead end—literally.
  • Achieving a clean, healthy and ecologically balanced environment requires that we cultivate a practical governance paradigm based on, first, a logic of respect for nature, sufficiency, interdependence, shared responsibility and fairness among all human beings; and, second, an ethic of integrated global and local citizenship that insists upon transparency and accountability in all activities affecting the integrity of the environment.
  • We believe that commons- and rights-based ecological governance—green governance—can fulfill this logic and ethic. Properly done, it can move us beyond the neoliberal State and Market alliance—what we call the ‘State/Market’—which is chiefly responsible for the current, failed paradigm of ecological governance.
  • The basic problem is that the price system, seen as the ultimate governance mechanism of our polity, falls short in its ability to represent notions of value that are subtle, qualitative, long-term and complicated.
  • These are, however, precisely the attributes of natural systems.
  • Exchange value is the primary if not the exclusive concern.
  • anything that does not have a price and exists ‘outside’ the market is regarded (for the purposes of policy-making) as having subordinate or no value.
  • industry lobbies have captured if not corrupted the legislative process
  • regulation has become ever more insulated from citizen influence and accountability as scientific expertise and technical proceduralism have come to be more and more the exclusive determinants of who may credibly participate in the process
  • we have reached the limits of leadership and innovation within existing institutions and policy structures
  • it will not be an easy task to make the transition from State/Market ecological governance to commons- and rights-based ecological governance
  • It requires that we enlarge our understanding of ‘value’ in economic thought to account for nature and social well-being; that we expand our sense of human rights and how they can serve strategic as well as moral purposes; that we liberate ourselves from the limitations of State-centric models of legal process; and that we honor the power of non-market participation, local context and social diversity in structuring economic activity and addressing environmental problems.
  • articulate and foster a coherent new paradigm
  • deficiencies of centralized governments (corruption, lack of transparency, rigidity, a marginalized citizenry)
Steve Bosserman

Meg Munn MP - Sheffield Heeley's voice in Parliament | Welcome - 0 views

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    Figures recently issued by Co-operativesUK show that co-operative business grew by 1.5% in 2011, twice the rate of the UK economy as a whole. This is the fourth consecutive year that the co-operative sector has outperformed the rest of UK business. The figures also show that it is not only in growth that co-operative businesses do better, they are also much more reliant - 98% are still in operation after three years compared to 65% of all businesses. Also 88% try to minimize the environmental impact of their activities compared to 44% of all businesses who state they do not take any action in this regard at all. Membership of trading co-operatives from 2010 to 2011 grew by 5.5% to 13.5 million people - the increase from 2008 to 2011 is 19.7%. Currently the number of co-operatives in the UK is around 5,900 - a growth of 23% from 2008. The largest growth by sector was in the renewable energy sector, and there are now 242 co-operative schools across the country.
sebastianklemm

Acren - platform empowers collaborative approach between agri-environmental actors - 0 views

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    "Our platform empowers the collaborative approach between contributor and agri-environmental actors to protect our environment." https://github.com/AcrenEnv
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

About - Safecast - 0 views

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    "create useful, accessible, and granular environmental data. All Safecast data is published, free of charge, into the public domain under a CC0 designation"
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Engaging For the Commons - Global Pull Platform - Helene Finidori - 0 views

  • "activating" human agency and political will and addressing the root causes for power unbalance and resistance to change is at the heart of tomorrow's paradigm shift.
  • action-oriented strategy and process methodology for generating engagement, accountability and outcomes in the political, economic, social and environmental spheres, which may contribute to enable this activation.
  • empowering individuals and communities, nurturing public wisdom
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  • The platform is structured around commons, issues of social, environmental, economic nature,
  • treated as social objects: the nodes around which social networks are created, conversations and repeated interactions are initiated, new territories explored, meaning and intents shared, learning achieved.
  • ‘pinging of actors’ by ‘citizen-followers’ creates a pull dynamic
  • will yield conversations, knowledge flow, and feedback loops beneficial to learning, progress visualization, and evaluation
  • reate a context favorable to collaboration, exchange of ideas and know-how.
  • The process consists in letting people/organizations:
  • Select, follow,
  • Keep informed and track progress
  • Self assign actor role and communicate/report on self-activity and impact and status of issue.
  • Share
  • Find solutions and potential collaborators for action
  • Select or refer designated actors to acknowledge or request their engagement and action at various levels
  • participate in the conversation, report on activity and impact
  • evaluate and rate activity/impact of and trust toward actors' activity, impact and progress.
  • organize for collective action
  • garner follower participation
  • Initiate and participate in conversations, debates, deliberations
  • The ecosystem is composed of
  • Common’s spaces
  • Common’s graph
  • Progress & Impact or Situation Dashboard
  • The platform creates a context for the following
  • Curate the knowledge flow and increase learning
  • Connect and interrelate people, stakeholders, issues, and knowledge.
  • Help situate an issue
  • Define boundaries
  • Help situate self and others
  • Identify roles and interdependence between actors and issues.
  • Visualize the emergent bigger picture
Justin McCollen

Top Quality Spill Control Products and Services - 2 views

Bunding

started by Justin McCollen on 01 Mar 13 no follow-up yet
Yasir Siddiqui

Open Innovation in Cities - 0 views

  • The collaborative economy, driven by a convergence of numerous factors including the global economic recession, growing environmental consciousness and the growing ubiquity of information communication technologies (ICTs) is booming, with more than $2 billion in investment raised from venture capitalists 5  and $3.5 billion generated for users in P2P models in 2013. 6  
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Is Shame Necessary? | Conversation | Edge - 0 views

  • What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary?
  • Shame is what is supposed to occur after an individual fails to cooperate with the group.
  • Whereas guilt is evoked by an individual's standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in the context of other people.
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  • Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.
  • humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.
  • The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human
  • Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system
  • Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.
  • Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.
  • Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas
  • It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt
  • Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.
  • The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.
  • The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.
  • Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action
  • Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.
  • five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing
  • Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,
  • shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.
  • What if government is not involved in the shaming?
  • Is this a fair use of shaming? Is it effective?
  • Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant
  • vertical agitation
  • Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely
  • But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.
  • corporate brand reputation outranked financial performance as the most important measure of success
  • shame and reputation interact
  • in our early evolution we could gauge cooperation only firsthand
  • Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?
  • why we learned to speak.1
  • Language
  • The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be
  • allowed for gossip, a vector of social information.
  • in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.
  • Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.
  • Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains.
  • What tool could help us gossip in a group this size?
  • We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.
  • what is stopping shame from catalyzing social change? I see three main drawbacks:
  • Today's world is rife with ephemeral, or "one-off," interactions.
  • Research shows, however, that if people know they will interact again, cooperation improves
  • Shame works better if the potential for future interaction is high
  • In a world of one-off interactions, we can try to compensate for anonymity with an image score,
  • which sends a signal to the group about an individual's or institution's degree of cooperation.
  • Today's world allows for amorphous identities
  • It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring
  • Shaming's biggest drawback is its insufficiency.
  • Some people have no shame
  • shame does not always encourage cooperation from players who are least cooperative
  • a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly
  • if the payoff is high enough
  • There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame
  • shame is not enough to catalyze major social change
  • This is why punishment remains imperative.
  • Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.
  • Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.
  •  
    The role of non-rational mechanisms in convergence - social emotions like shame and guilt 
sebastianklemm

Oikocredit Canada - 0 views

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    "INVESTING IN PEOPLE": Oikocredit is a worldwide co-operative, socially responsible investor, and one of the largest private funders of microfinance in the world. "PEOPLE, PLANET AND PROFIT": Oikocredit does three simple things. We help people create their own path out of poverty. We do so in a way that leaves a positive impact on the planet. And we deliver a modest financial return back to investors like you. We call it a 'triple bottom line'. "SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE": Another major prioity of Oikocredit is to provide financing to farmer co-operatives, fair trade organizations and agri-processing companies working with smallholder farmers. This helps to boost rural incomes, increase food security and strengthen communities hit by global competition and environmental changes brought about by climate change. (...) "PARTNERS": Oikocredit invests in hundreds of partners, ranging from microfinance institutions and co-operatives to producer organizations. Our online partner overview shows you where we operate and with whom we currently invest.
Kurt Laitner

The basic orientation of p2p theory towards societal reform: transforming civil society... - 1 views

  • under the ‘leadership’ of corporations and those members of our society who have access to capital.
  • Despite all democratic advances, the state forms have clearly been captured by private interests.
  • in a capitalist system, ‘civil society’ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive
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  • everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place
  • continuous interchange and dialogue of citizens as they determine their collective life
  • Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.
  • consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons
  • infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’
  • democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      hmm
  • which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.
  • civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.
  • democratically decide
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      ? our values need be expressed in every action within the matrix, not just when a 'vote' is held, in fact general democratic 'voting' should probably disappear
  • the ‘common good’ of society as a whole
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      there is no such thing
  • The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      !!!
  • Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.
  • true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      really?
  • Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.
  • Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.
  • designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders
  • mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.
  • surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners
  • ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.
  • because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .
  • A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.
  • mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract
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    Good synopsis of the big picture by Michel
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

PublicLabs - 0 views

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    "Pursuing environmental justice through community science and open technology"
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