Imagine…carrots in concert

And some interviews in German:

Source: Ode Magazine Article

The Taliban Hostage Challenge: how one org is taking this on and what we can learn from that

Dear Imaginers

A new crisis is on the table with the women taken hostage by the Taliban

I wanted to communicate a great example of how some people and organisations are taking on this kind of challenge.

Have a look below at the email that I got in my inbox today, (from avaaz.org) and how it carefuly and powerfully presents the challenge, draws you in to the story and shows you exactly how you can contribute AND the potential impact of that contribution.

Of course, I am also asking that you sign the petition (it took me 22 seconds) but have a look and I am pretty sure you will want to do so after reading this below…

But apart from the petition, I think that anyone close to avaaz.org will learn about what it takes to engage poeple. I have heard the founder Ricken Patel speak and he inspired me greatly as to how to go about campaining in general and also how the new technologies have great potential to be used in countries of the south. I think we are often in a state of campaigning about the things we believe about, whether we are an activist or simply someone within an organisation that wants to make something happen and would like to do this with other people.

——————– BEGINNING OF EMAIL I GOT IN MY INBOX TODAY

Dear friends,

23 South Korean aid workers, most of them young women, have just been taken hostage by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, who are threatening to execute them this week. Not only are these aid workers’ lives at stake, but their execution could trigger a mass evacuation of life-giving humanitarian aid from all of Afghanistan.

The situation is desperate, but there is hope. The Taliban are all from the ‘Pashtun’ ethnic group, and observe a strict code called Pashtunwali – the “way of the Pashtuns”. This code demands, above all else: “hospitality to all, especially guests and strangers”. There are rumours of infighting among the Taliban over these kidnappings, because they clearly violate the code.

A global outcry for the Taliban to follow their own code would certainly be covered by media in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the Taliban are based – creating more local pressure on them to free their prisoners. But these hostages are living under a 24 hour death sentence. We have seconds not minutes to act. Sign the petition below, forward this email, and let’s report a truly powerful outcry to local journalists:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/honour_the_afghan_code

Pashtunwali has real power among ordinary people in Afghanistan. In 2003 Bettina Goislard, 29, was shot by Taliban gunmen while she was working for the UN High Commission for Refugees in the town of Ghazni, near where the Korean aid workers were kidnapped. Incensed by her murder, local people chased down the gunmen and beat them before handing them over to the police — then they gathered up her body and marched several hundred miles to Kabul to show their sorrow to the world.

Recently, global pressure helped free BBC reporter Alan Johnston from his captivity in Gaza. It can be amazing what happens when we speak together around the world. So let’s try our best, for these 23 young people and their families, and the millions of Afghans who need their aid — With hope,

Ricken, Iain, Graziela, Tom, Paul and the rest of the Avaaz Team
——————– END OF EMAIL

Have a great day,

Sofia

AIESEC Alumni who IMAGINEd: Jens Trotzky

Jens writes about the path he’s taken:
“I am from a Finnish-German family and I am a very logical and somewhat practical person. My interest has always been in information retrieval and general science and engineering. However, I always felt the need for something on top of all the technical things and that’s why I always spend time in voluntary organizations like AIESEC, Oxfam or UNICEF. I believe in constant learning and I enjoy gaining new perspectives from talks. I love to listen to other people and telling stories is somewhat second nature to me. I’ve travelled the world during several internships and even though the ride was bumpy at times I enjoyed every moment. I am currently finishing off my four different university degrees and am looking out for the great challenges and opportunities to come. In Pioneers of Change I started to look out for new ideas in the field of technology and I enjoy reading about people and their ideas I didn’t know existed a few years ago. So I provide support when technical questions arise and I am happy to share my thoughts on new technologies as well as their pros and cons. So feel free to contact me to talk about those things. If you like to explore new technologies with me, let me know and I am happy to start something.”

Jens invites your input on the Pioneers’ web presence at jens dot trotzky at gmail dot com.

LinkedIn PoC group

On Facebook
On Xing
And on the fledgling Wiser Earth

We Think - Innovation by the masses not for the masses

Google is paying close on £900m for Youtube, a profitless business little more than a year old. Wikipedia continues to draw more traffic than much more established media brands, employing hundreds more people. Open source programmes such as Linux insistently chip away at corporate providers of proprietary software. Immersive multi user computer games, such as Second Life, which depend on high levels of user participation and creativity are booming. Craigslist a self help approach to searching for jobs and other useful stuff is eating into the ad revenues of newspapers. Youth magazines such as Smash Hits have been overwhelmed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. What is going on?

We-Think: the power of mass creativity is about what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. My argument is that these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work. People want to be players not just spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines.

Charles Leadbeater has released his book prior to formal publication in 2007 so that people can comment upon the text, add to it, disagree with it. This open approach to peer review is in itself an experiment in collaborative creativity and will help to create new ways for people to write books and share ideas.

All comments people make will be acknowledged in the text, through footnotes or in the acknowledgements of the published book in 2007.

You can go to ‘Read & Comment’ to look at chapters on-screen and leave your immediate feedback. Alternatively, you can download and print the draft text here, before returning to the site to let me know what you think:
http://www.wethinkthebook.net/home.aspx

Are you blogging this?

I have just been to the statistics page of our blog and have noticed that Sofia’s and Kirsten’s sites continiously produce traffic to the IMAGINE blog!!!

Check out this entry on Kirsten’s blog

And Sofia writes on her website:
Turn Up the Courage blogging comes to life

I am also now blogging!

For the last few months I have held back on the newsletter and have been wanting to start blogging but had not got round to initiating this. As is so beautiful when one sets an intention without needing to know HOW it will happen, along came along the perfect opportunity to do this in community.

I will be sending a newsletter out again in the next couple of months but in the meantime feel free to check out this blog that I am contributing to.
It is great to be contributing to a blog with a few other committed people. It feels like we pass the hosting stick around. See how we do:

IDEA FOR YOUR COMMUNITY?
52 weeks in the year and more than 52 people in this network. So each person can agree to host the blog for one week of the year. Sharing, inspiring or informing. All are valid contributions to a community.

This concept emerged out of the vibrant community: IMAGINE Network

So, a few of us (myself included) have agreed to host this process, inviting people into it; cultivating the community. Ie we are editors but it is a very open system anyone can be an editor if they register on the blog and if they dont want to they can always send posting to us and we will upload it for them. I really have to acknowledge Frauke Godat from the We Are What We Do organisation for her incredible drive here.

Here is the link!”

Keep blogging
FRAUKE
P.S.: If you want to join the editors team just send me an email to fgodat@aol.com

Methods of (driving [Change) (Management], Networking and some Events

KommunikationVeränderungsprozesse
Networking
Action Research

What methods are there to support Change? How can one drive change through awareness creation? What methods are used in this field?

We had the U-Process on the conference and read great inputs about reflection and finding out “what our trees are”. I would now love to take these up and start a discussion and collection of methods on Change Management. I am currently researching on methods of personal and institutional Change Management and came across some approaches (first inputs, happy to get more of them) that I 1. would like to share and 2. would love to get some comments and methods you know to share them here.

Learning and Change through Action Research

Action research has a long history, going back to social scientists’ attempts to help solve practical problems in wartime situations in both Europe and America. Greenwood and Levin trace its origins to the work of Kurt Lewin in the 1940s to design social experiments that could take place in natural settings. Lewin is credited with the phrases “Nothing is as practical and a good theory” and the suggestion that if you want to understand an organization the best thing to do is try to change it. The participatory Action Research has a double objective. One aim is to produce knowledge and action directly useful to a group of people—through research, through adult education, and through sociopolitical action. The second aim is to empower people at a second and deeper level through the process of constructing and using their own knowledge: they “see through” the ways in which the establishment monopolizes the production and use of knowledge for the benefit of its members. This is the meaning of consciousness raising or conscientization, a term popularized by Freire for a “process of self-awareness through collective self-inquiry and reflection”. The tradition of participatory rural appraisal similarly is concerned with “putting the first last” and creating practical knowledge of use to the underpriviledged members of our world.

Find more about Action Research here and in the document attached:

http://www.4managers.de/themen/action-research/

Change Compass

The Change Compass is a collection of 30 decision matrices to support: Personal, Organizational, and Market Choices. The matrices promote a learning culture in strategy formulation, organizational development and interpersonal relationships. Explore options and make decisions based on sound principles and explicit assumptions.

http://www.changecompass.com/

Apart from this, I came across two events I feel are quite interesting:

Workshop Kommunikation in Veränderungsprozessen (sorry, this one will be in German):

This event is organized by an AIESEC Alumni using an interesting method: Simulations. Please refer to the introduction of the event below and the description attached.

“Das Gestalten und Umsetzen von Veränderungen gehört heute zum Standard-Aufgabengebiet eines jeden Managers und vieler Berater in Unternehmen, Organisation, unserer Gesellschaft insgesamt. Die Kommunikation hat im Change-Prozess eine herausgehobene Bedeutung. Sie ist es, die – wenn sie gelingt – aus einem gut geplanten Veränderungsprojekt ein erfolgreiches Veränderungsprojekt macht. Während man die Inhalte der Botschaften nur in Abhängigkeit vom tatsächlichen Projekt festlegen kann, sind die Art der einzusetzenden Kommunikationsmittel, die Reihenfolge ihres Einsatzes und ihre Wirksamkeit weitgehend unabhängig vom tatsächlichen Veränderungsgegenstand planbar. Grund genug, den Kommunikationsprozess vor Projektbeginn zu simulieren, anstelle nach dem „trial and error“- Prinzip am „offenen Herzen einer Organisation“ zu experimentieren.”

“Idealist.org Start-up Meeting, Berlin” (already took place, but interesting to know anyways)

We hope to welcome local activists and international visitors to our meeting to share thoughts, discuss sustainable solutions and inspire and connect communities of action. dropping knowledge as the host tries to connect local projects and people through modern-age media.
This is the German meeting from about 80 sessions worldwide motivated by idealist.org, a community that presents more than 66.000 nonprofit and community organizations in 165 countries. It is in fact the best Nonprofit Career Center on the web, with hundreds of job and internship listings.
The parallel meetings aim to help launch a global network of people who want to change their communities and the world by connecting people, ideas, and resources in every possible way. If you´re dedicated to social change, we hope to welcome you in the dropping knowledge office.

Find out more about here:

https://www.xing.com/app/events?op=detail&id=108244

http://www.idealist.org/if/idealist/en/MyIdealist/PeopleDetail/default?country=Germany&sid=86105153-159-WcE

Last thing from my side right now is the documentation of our Networking Cards we all wrote on IMAGINE that I typed down and finally will upload here for all of us.

Going through them I realized that there are a lot of common topics and its great that some of them (e.g. finding the tree) are already actively discussed here in the blog.

Well, before ending, one last inspiration that reached my inbox some day ago:

The Invitation
by Oriah Mountain Dreamer (A Native American Elder)

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your hearts longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine and your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine and your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself: if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul: if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes!’
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you can stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Happy bloging, looking forward to your comments,

Nina

Build your own social network: Ning

Cram Tokyo, Seoul, New York City, Mexico City, and Mumbai together into a single megalopolis, and its population would still be smaller than that of MySpace, the online social-networking juggernaut. And for a newbie, joining MySpace can feel much like being lost in a city with 120 million inhabitants. There are thousands of people around you who share your interests and could become your friends–but how to connect with them?

For Internet users who want to network with like-minded people without being subsumed into the madding crowd, there is now an alternative. Last week Ning, a Palo Alto, CA, startup cofounded in 2004 by online marketing executive Gina Bianchini and Netscape founder Marc Andreesen, launched a free Web application for creating and customizing boutique social networks–in effect, mini-MySpaces, or “social niche-works,” as some are calling this new genre.

Read the whole article here

Second Life Just Like The First

And another Spiegel-Online article on Second Life:

“Second Life, the four-million-strong online community, is turning more and more into a pixelated copy of reality and its institutions, complete with rampant consumerism, political candidates and lawsuits. Whatever happened to the brave new virtual world?
(…)
Goodbye cyberpunks, hello traditionalists. Four years after US company Linden Lab created Second Life, the virtual utopia is resembling the real world and its mechanisms more and more. And as the population booms — the number of registered avatars has risen 600 percent in the last six months to four million — the on- and offline worlds are beginning to wonder whether Second Life should be run by institutions of civil society rather than a benevolent corporate dictatorship.
(…)
Social change through Second Life?
Still, Loic Le Mer believes that the real world could change for the better because of Second Life. In his opinion, the online game is at the vanguard of globalization, “but globalization as an opportunity, not a threat.”

He predicts that more and more people from all over the world will earn a living through Second Life in the future. “The great thing about Second Life is that it brings together people from all countries, and everybody can make money by creating an object and selling it,” he says, adding that an acquaintance of his makes €1,000 a month from selling virtual glasses to avatars.
(…)
Social change through Second Life?

Still, Loic Le Mer believes that the real world could change for the better because of Second Life. In his opinion, the online game is at the vanguard of globalization, “but globalization as an opportunity, not a threat.”

He predicts that more and more people from all over the world will earn a living through Second Life in the future. “The great thing about Second Life is that it brings together people from all countries, and everybody can make money by creating an object and selling it,” he says, adding that an acquaintance of his makes €1,000 a month from selling virtual glasses to avatars.”

How the power balance is (slowly) shifting to the collective

This trend-watching site is worth keeping an eye on. Each month there is a free report. One of such reports that caught my eye was last December’s Output, as shown in the image above.

The concept of Generation Cash meeting Generation Consumer (Dec 06 Version)

Now that we are all potential content providers ( producing our own blogs, news (citizen journalism), videos and more), there is a move within the corporate community to harness this. For example, companies have for a while started to offer the customer community the chance to win a prize for coming up with the next innovation. Procter and Gamble even set the target that 50% of their innovations were to come from the customer community.

For a while, ‘us’, the collective have been largely happy to settle for a small reward (relative to the market value of that intelligence). We are however wisening up slowly, and corparates are becoming aware that they may have to start paying/rewarding content providers more substantiantially for their content provision.

With the onset of a myriad of peer-2-peer payment systems (e-bay, pay-pal, barter currencies etc) , it is possible the content be paid for, even if it is small and pretty invisible in the large scheme of things.

Where there is economic reward for smaller actions, power is transferred to the collective.

This has implications for those consumers that produce content for free ‘for the love and not for the money’. They may gradually be more substantially rewarded. With the systems in place to reward small contributions, this means that it could be easier to build your career on what you do as your hobby/your passion, if you can see a market value for it.

It is early days but this is a definite trend to watch.

Have a read of the briefings produced for the incisive monthly reports so far;

http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/

New p2p Paradigm: If there is one must-read for 2007…

Following on the themes of technical development from Frauke and Stefan, I wanted to introduce a concept that opened my a year ago, at a conference on P2P.

The people at this event were all practitioners of some aspect of p2p, from working with ‘collective intelligence’ concepts to ‘enabling p2p process technology developments’. Most of us came to actually understand- what is this p2p thing? Prior to the event we were encouraged to read a certain 10-Page essay. In this last year I have seen many applications in my work and in society of the principles that I have gleaned from that one essay.

P2P does not just mean just Napster and file sharing. P2P as was indicated to me at this eventng ab, is beiout a paradigm shift as significant as when Marxism entered the political landscape. (wow, that caught my attention, and I listened on!)

One example of this shift is something that you may have noticed about how options/choices are screened within a group. In the old paradigm, within a community, new suggestions are first screened by some kind of small representative select group, and then only those selected suggestions will be put forward for voting/discussion to the wider community.

In a peer to peer paradigm, new suggestions are bubbling up all the time, and they are ’screened’ by the collective only AFTER they have been put forward. It is almost impossible to know which ones will carry more ‘weight’ with the community; which ones the community will select.

This has a HUGE impact for the way we govern, make decisions as a community, and for grassroots to have more powerful channels to be heard.

Introducing Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens has set up the Foundation for Peer 2 Peer Alternatives and was the keynote speaker at the conference last year. Aside from several years of research on this topic, Michel and his team have maintainted a blog, online resource centre and more.

see more at http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Main_Page

Key Must-Read for 2007:

What I recommend you to read at some point during 2007 (no pressure!) is Michel’s foundational article. (Yes that 10-page essay was his). I am convinced every person in this network will have at least one ‘aha!’ from this excellent piece of work.

This is not a lightweight article, it is in fact very comprehensive analysis. But persevere; because of the impact of this paradigm shift, I believe it will help you to be aware of one of the most significant shifts in our culture in this decade. It is an utterly fascinating read.

Link to article

Here is a link to the shorter (10 page) version of this article:

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499

Synopsis

“The Political Economy of Peer to Peer Production.

Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As political, economic, and social systems transform themselves into distributed networks, a new human dynamic is emerging: peer to peer (P2P). As P2P gives rise to the emergence of a third mode of production, a third mode of governance, and a third mode of property, it is poised to overhaul our political economy in unprecedented ways. This essay aims to develop a conceptual framework (’P2P theory’) capable of explaining these new social processes.”