Hi Marcin,

Thank you (and all) for very thoughtful letters.  I am sharing my reply here
as part of an "economy that works" - I am not able to conduct private
conversations where I can be "working openly".  I need to keep my work
visible to others so we might join or continue if funding from anywhere stops
or never comes through.  It is a way of keeping ourselves "mutually
accountable" as equals, irrelevant of which way money flows to pay for the
difference in our contributions.

I am also writing to say that Internet access is good here in Bonn where I
have come for a European gathering for interconnecting complementary
currencies.  There are about 160 people here, quite a thoughtful group.  I
spoke for perhaps an hour with Michael Linton, the founder of the first such
LETS system back in 1982.  It was great that he was already familiar with our
lab and follows my work when I participate in Michael Wolff's ki-work
http://groups.yahoogroups.com/ki-work/  I told him my ideas from "An Economy
for Giving Everything Away" and the "point system" that I want to set up for
our Open People Network to know who to support.  I am encouraged that my
ideas are very advanced and well received, quite a distance ahead of any
"state of the art" or "cutting edge".  I will organize people here who are
interested in these ideas, and then he will show us his online system for
people to exchange complementary currencies.  He is connecting with Ecademy
and there might be a role for us there because Ecademy.com needs a way for
people to "get things done" and this may ultimately depend on harnessing
"idealists" and "investigators".  Whereas a representative from Lithuania, a
social scientist working the Church and University, knows nothing about our
lab (or complementary currencies).  This is to say that I think "in-breeding"
is much more typical locally, provincially, and within power structures.

You write "that we can fulfill the promise of wise use of technology- to make
life easier".  Is that your ambition in life?  The reason I left California -
first for the Black American neighborhoods of Chicago - is that I am not
interested in the "easier life".  Marcin, please explain What do you think
interests me? so that we might find an understanding to work as equals.
Because I don't find any room for myself in your mindset.  Also, what is a
"real job"?  Do you have a real job?  Do I? and what is your reasoning?

Marcin, Yes I am interested to work for you on a "distillation process". I am
always looking for paying work.  If you can pay me $40 per hour, then I can
do primarily as you instruct.  Otherwise, I assume that we are working as
equals and so we may look for ways to help each other, and any money that you
can pay can help me work harder towards that.  I (and others) have been
working on "distillation processes" throughout the six years of our lab and
this is a subject of continuous relevance.

Marcin, I think that you are a great person, one of able mind, heart, spirit,
somebody who has grown in a loving environment.  You are perhaps a young
Gandhi (or more) and might achieve what he did (or more).

I will want to respond to all of your recent work - it will be a lot to think
about.

But I suppose all I have the energy for to unload right now:
You right that currently "you have no stories".  I disagree!  Here is a story
that I see.

A young man got a Ph.D. in nuclear fusion.  Then he went straight out of
school and worked to develop an "open source farm".  (Question: Is he a
"failure" because he did not pursue the career of a physicist?  Or was his
school a failure?  Did it deliver a "real job"?  How can you tell if a
physicist or a farmer is having a "beautiful livelihood"?)

Then this young man set up a school that is to graduate people who are
successes because they "implement their business models".  Question: What if
one of these graduates decides that instead they want to have a career as a
professor in nuclear fusion?  Are they a "failure"? Is the school a
"failure"?

Furthermore - this young man say that as of yet we have no stories to tell,
nothing is relevant yet.

Marcin, I would say that it does not matter what kinds of technical results
you get on your farm.  If you do not realize that your activity is mostly
subjective - enormously affected by your mindset - and you are not interested
to record that then I think you are not accountable to yourself or others,
you are not participating in science (you have no interest in the objective
context) and how can I be of any real use to you?  And would not such an
environment perhaps be damaging to me? Or who could be of use to?

How can you call "open source" what you are doing if the key information is
locked inside your mind and your heart?  And what kind of teacher will you
be?

And do we need our economy to produce "better results", is that our problem?
Or is it that we have not learned how to live a proper life?

I will look more at your technical ideas later, with interest.  But I think
this is a first round of questions that I hope we might all think about.  I
spoke with Franz that our ability to openly challenge ourselves is what makes
us investigators.  I want to focus my energy on developing, supporting,
encouraging our investigators.

Peace,

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@...



Data , "marcin@..." <marcin@...>:

>Andrius,
>
>I will call you 4 PM my time today.
>
>Regarding our needs:
>
>At one point about 3 years ago when i was organizing Gandhi Network, they
>invited me as a guest speaker on a statewide Wisconsin Idea Netowork talk
>show. I discussed the Gandhi Network, a local series of hands-on workshops
>that i was organizing: home made food dryer, practical healing,
>duckraising, other workshops. Then we got into all types of philosophical
>points on right livelihood and sustainability
>
>I was getting calls for the next 2 days from people all over the state,
>looking at me as some kind of leader who had the answers on a sustainable
>economy. People were hungry. However, i had no answers for them, in
>practice, just some good thoughts.
>
>The answers lie in an economy that works. And that's what i'm after. Real
>development of the means of production, rigorous development of the
>sustainable production capacity, which translates to real jobs. Such that
>we can fulfill the promise of wise use of technology- to make life easier.
>
>With respect to the needs of our organization, and for  what i would
>justify having you with us, is with a focus on the distillation process.
>That means developing the hard tools (information management tools) and
>content. For this, i see a dedicated team concentrating on creating the
>open access to knowledge. That's the ICT component. The physical
>manifestation is our research facility, which we are developing now.
>That's where we will grow plants, build experimental housing, develop
>appropriate technology, while developing economic models for the
>realization of ethical business in the areas. And, most importantly:
>having students who implement the business plans upon graduation from our
>center.
>
>Please respond to whether you'd be interested in development of such
>content. We feel locally that the quickest route to reaching the above
>goals of sustainable economics, with the deliverable of 10 jobs created by
>year end 2005, and 100 jobs by year end 2006, is a rigorous process of the
>technical skills necessary to do so. This is more than what i believe a
>global network of social enterprise can do.  Globally, the model can be
>replicated, but we here believe that a local, concerted effort is the only
>way to provide the focus for such a project to be realized. That is:
>developing and demonstrating the technical details and business strategy
>to implement the sustainable livelihoods that we all talk about.
>As OSE, we are not at a point of having any stories to offer, because we
>are developing them. I put up a log of our work, 'Progress Log,' on our
>website (souceopen.org/wiki/). The
>real stories come when we have 10 beautiful livelihoods created by year
>end 2005. That is tangible to me. Regarding WOW, i think that's a great
>tool for becoming aware of what others are doing, and i want to have OSE
>be visible on it. I think a WOW tool like for OneVillage or ERDE can be
>developed remotely, but in terms of having you stay with OSE, i'd want you
>to be developing the technical content, adaptable to other places.
>
>Correct me if i'm wrong here. WOW develops an infrastructure for WO. But i
>don't see a way that it can provide the rigorous development of organized
>content, outside of the component nodes. What OSE needs is a process for
>organizing the nodes, which i don't see in WOW. It's an assemblage, and i
>think you say that the content is reworked and reworked. But who
>masterminds the collection of the information into integrated business
>models? That is what i would like you to address for our needs. We need an
>interface, adaptable to each of our projects. The data that we need,
>just begun to be developed, is outlined at
>
>http://www.sourceopen.org/wiki/?pagename=OpenSourceEcology.OlderOutline
>
>and a rough sketch of a graphical interface is at
>
>http://www.sourceopen.org/OHMI.pdf
>
>What we need now is to add:
>
>(1) conceptual maps
>(2) a TheBrain-like system of data representation
>(3) FreeMind mindpapping (with unfolding) to represent our information
>
>and other techniques to collect and display the data in an
>instantly-accessible format. And, on top of that, a collaborative
>interface for making this happen with the support of others interested in
>similar ideas. First is the definition of the tools that are needed, which
>is what i am working on now. And that's what i would ask you for your help
>on.
>
>What i see as a real possibility is masterminding the design of the OHMI
>(OpenHouse Multimedia Interface) for collecting all the knowledge. What i
>see is a core team for implementing a skeleton. The greater OS community
>can contribute content. This is a rough sketch of the infrastructure that i
am
>interested in building. Please give me feedback on how you can assist this
>process. Yes, this is an entire social infrastructure, but i think it has
>to be thought out very explicitly, and ways of measuring attainment of
>goals have to be defined.
>
>At present here are my goals:
>
>1.Physical:  August 15, 2005. Implement first physical demonstrator of the
>modular, sustainable house. (We are pouring the foundation today)
>
>2. IT: Implement a first release of OHMI which includes: (1) Visual
>mindmap of the process (using FreeMind) with a correspongin text version,
>where only the text version has folding. (2) Implement one or few main
>topic sections of OHMI using CMapTools. (3) Implement a sample TheBrain
>representation of a part of OHMI to demonstrate how TheBrain can
>facilitate the creation of OHMI.
>
>3. September 15, 2005: Publish a white paper on 'Towards an
>Open Source Information Management Infrastructure for Organizations
>Interested in the Creation of Ethical Enterprises' outlining available and
>future-desirable software solutions for organizations such as OSE, aimed
>at the technical project implementation for integrated, ethical
>businesses.
>
>4. October 15, 2005: Have the first, full-time Open Source Fellow work
>with us. Housing, food, transportation, office provided. Term of duty:
>negotiable.
>
>5. November 15, 2004: Close on the land acquisition of 50 acres in the
>near vicinity of Madison.
>
>6. August 15, 2005: Develop an open source implementation of a
>comprehensive software package for information management. That is,
>hard-core programming by a team of 3 people for 6 months, if needed, or
>just a compilation and reworking of existing software.
>
>7. Year end 2005: graduate the first Fellow, with a startup of an
>enterprise in food, housing, or appropriate technology topics.
>
>Please let me know what you think. Please feel free to correct any
>assumptions that i have in this letter.
>
>Just one more note to summarize: we need technical support in all our
>work: from installing and running software and managing computer platforms
>(Mac and Linux), to the technicalities of corporate law and finance
>capital. These are the distillations we need.
>
>Sincerely,
>Marcin
>
>
> On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 ms@...
>wrote:
>
>> Marcin,
>> I wanted to ask about possibly working at Madison as we discussed.  I am
>> trying to make my travel plans for the next month or two.  We will try to
>> call you in half an hour or so.  If you can email us that would be great
or
>> give us a quick call at 011  43  1  278 7801 extension 42   We can call
you
>> write back.
>> Andrius
>>
>
>

Dear ERDE partners, dear Globalvilagers and E-Rics,

yesterday, before Andrius Kulikauskas  departed from Austria to Germany,
we had quite an impressive visit to the Eisenstrasse Region in the
foothills of the alps and quite enlightening talks about Regional
Infocoaching which I would like to share with you all.

This is a region where we probably find the best examples of rural and
regional development in Austria:

- a small city which has managed to stay vital and wealthy by shifting to
new forms of knowledge intensive economy
- a village in the region around this small city which has reinvented
itself as a "theme village" and is integrating tourism into its own
purpose rather than simply submitting to it.

I will write more about these things later (sequel); it also has to do
with our Grundtvig 1 proposal which we have to sketch in broad lines until
August 15th.

Waidhofen/Ybbs (the city)  and Ybbsitz (the village) may well, according
to Eisenstrasse Documentation project leader Heidemarie Tonhofer, be a
practical implementation site for RIC and similar ideas: they have
developed a lot of projects that we can learn from even one very close to
RIC; and even though we had them on the program of the St.Pölten ERDE
workshop in 2003, the local experience that we had yesterday was very
important and showed us where we can really learn. So we also invited them
to Grundtvig 1and I will try to include at least once somebody from
Eisenstraße in the ERDE travel team of GIVE. (Poland, England, Slowenia or
Lithuania)

Grundtvig 1 was already the main point of discussion a few hours before,
when Monika, Andrius, and I started to take off from Karolinenhof
yesterday morning to this "country tour". Monika had taken along the
younger of her two daughters and she had arranged a meeting in the village
of Ybbsitz that I described above. Actually, Monika was born and raised in
that village and we also had opportunity to get to know her parents there.

So sitting in the car, we decided to discuss what Regional Information
Coaching was all about and if this was the right content for our common
work in Grundtvig 1.

Andrius had strong objections and he had voiced them several times within
the ERDE group, so it was time to sort that out. Basically also because it
seems Waclaw Idziak from Poland had voiced similar objections, while the
rest of the team (CityandBits, Coburg, David, Stanko) has not yet even
formulated their position towards Regional Information Coaching (Thank you
Karin for your encouraging words, though).

I tried my best to present my heartfelt conviction- that Regional
Information Coaching is real and valid - to Andrius; I also felt that
there was a lot of information that Andrius did not have before about what
is the background of that proposal. So I told him that RIC is not just a
pure brainchild, but the logical consequence of a development within the
(Lower) Austrian Library system. A certain kind of librarians - especially
in the small community libraries - which sit there and wait for people to
come for books, gets increasingly irrelevant. So some of the other
librarians changed the mindset and became ore mactively "marketing" the
value of their work for the community. They figured out that they have to
be in real service to the community to survive. One way was that they
opened up the library to become a meeting place, a Café, a discussion and
encounter place - another way was to provide internet access. The books
become secondary, but not unimportant. The library is the institution that
cares for the development of the individual person, much more than schools
that treat everybody as equal. So the librarians that implemented this
change towards the library being an active agency to support local
initiative, to be precise even leadership, self-learning and
entrepreneurial skills - became a creative minority, increasingly
separated from the old image of the librarian. We found that this creative
minority has a strong tendency to rediefine their own profession, and RIC
was basically an attempt to say: Hey, what you are doing here is part of a
new movement, that not only encompasses librarians, but also telehouses,
village renewal agencies, the regional offices of Monikas Bildungswerk
etc.

These are people that support local initiative by providing education and
facilitation. Ideally, they are a place that facilitates the meetings of
many local groups and cross-connect them by simply facilitating flows of
unbiased information between various associations. The Gyerhaz of Bezenye
and many of the Hungarian Telecottages were giving a good role model for
that, being the central hub and the seat of many associations. I often
discussed the proximity of Library and Pub in the past, but Tilda and Kati
in Bezenye have made it happen.

So here Andrius came in hacking with critical questions:

- Could it be that such an institution (or person) also blocks individual
and community development by "filtering" ideas from an old mindset?
- Is such an institution inherently not tending to abuse and over-eat
resources that otherwise could support the work of more people?

We tried to convince Andrius that this was not as such. The Hungarian
example of where we were (Bezenye) and the Austrian example of where we
were going (Ybbsitz) would show that Regional Information Coaches serve a
broad range of individuals and associations with facilitating them in an
information-rich (and comfortable) physical environment, allowing them to
access and present knowledge that they feel is relevant. The "central
node" would be invaluable for effective discovery and faciliatation of all
local resources. Government spendig would not be ineffective, but have a
lot of multiplying effects.

Andrius came up with another proposal. I try now to go to the reverse side
of the chessboard and show his position... he asked:
-  what if we supported the individual learners with an infrastructure
than just the central nodes?
-  what if we created a "professional" mindset of "global village
leaders", people that are the heads or souls of local associations and
initiatives?
- Instead of one person being the nodal point of the network, we should
distribute networking skills to as many people in the village as possible,
teaching people also how to make a living and sustain themselves. They
still would, with the help of Grundtvig 1, have an opportunity to transfer
this qualification and bring it to another workplace or living place. The
transfer would very likely work on the base of a portfolio system that
says "whom have you helped"?

Instead of trying to deepen the hacking points and try to find or invent
weak sides of the mutual concepts, we came to the conclusion, that the
best idea for a Grundtvig 2 proposal would most likely be to do both.
Instead of having one role, we would most likely be prapared to support a
diversity of roles with our proposal.

We had this diversity of roles allready in a proposal from 2003 when we
met for the first workshop in Vienna. But it seems that the "Regional
Innovation Coach" and the "Regional Media Coach" were not so high on the
priority list of any members that they would put the needed work into it.
Maybe it was just a way to politely reject the assumption that RIC would
be really high on anybodys priority list.

I think we could show to Andrius why RIC is important on our prority list:

- there is proven examples, that local governments in Austria and Hungary
can work together well with local innovators and the civil society. In
Ybbsitz for example, the initiative to form an association of local
governments "Kulturpark und Dokumentationszentrum Eisenstrasse" was
initiated by private persons who managed to get 26 local governments in a
collective body as members. There is a real heartfelt feeling among the
leaders of this organisation that they are an NGO. (sonds pretty paradox).
So we could most likely make the assumption that a village, small town or
region might want to support information coaching like they support the
building of roads, elementary schools and so on. Information coaches would
be like documentation persons for the overall civil society potential, and
they would most likely be also librarians, telecottage leaders, tourism
managers or something else. It is not a stand-alone profession, which is
very often the case in villages.

- there is a necessity to find a common paradigm now because so many
like-minded institutions are doing the shift now towards creative
combinations between regional development and education. For example, the
telehouse in St. Georgen wants to become a "elementary school for
entrepreneurs", taking the idea of the "founders business hub" down to the
village level.  If we could encourage all those institutions to find a
common paradigm, this could facilityte division of labour between many
RICs and much better service.

But I see also why Andrius puts Global Village Leaders high on his
priority list:

- Creativity often develops outside institutions. We have tons of programs
to support teachers and other people inside institutions, but almost
nothing for independent thinkers outside institutions. Looking backwards,
we almost regularly find that social progress, scientific findings etc.
were advanced by such individuals not willing to comply, who really help
most making this world a better place. Andrius has devoted part of his
life therefore to support independent thinkers, because its the best way
to find a global structure for remaking the world. There is an internal
connection between "marginal" places and "marginalized" culturally
creatives,  so having them supported to manifest their potential is almost
equal to supporting the villages.

- The overall effect would be bigger. If people were tought to make a
living in a way that is organic and real, the base for their activities
would be much broader. Instead of eating up government money for one job,
people would be encouraged to combine their leadership with ways that are
spurring economic power.

We also came to the conclusion that in poorer countries the corruptive
effect of diversity of such a "state funded" well-off person and the rest
of "havenots" would be most detremental to the social fabric. So a more
equitable and just way would have to be found if our common purpose was to
succeed.

So to cut the long story short, our conclusion was also that we would work
out both ideas in the Grundtvig 1 proposal. It also means that there are
new options in widening our scope of partners and very promising options
of co-operation between both approaches. Instead of competing with each
other they would support each other.

With this salomonic solution in sight, I close this mail before it becomes
a novel. Rather I'd have it a sequel. And I am curious for your reaction.
I want to narrow this down to the e_ric group and I would like all of you
who are interested in the subject to subscribe it.

http://de.groups.yahoo.com/group/e_ric/

Please, this group is not really ready yet memberwhise!

best to you all

Franz Nahrada

On Thursday 15 July 2004 01:58 pm, Franz Nahrada wrote:
> George Dafermos is a friend from Crete who was speaking at the
> Oekonux conference.
>
> <dafermos@...> on Mittwoch, 14. Juli 2004 at 20:34 Uhr
+0100 wrote:
> >Hello Franz,
> >
> >These days together with a few friends i'm trying to put
> >together a non-profit organisational vehicle for setting up
> >wireless community networks in crete, codenamed "euruzoniki
> >kritis" (which means broadband crete in greek) and if it
> >goes well we'll probably do the same elsewhere in greece
> >too.

Do you know Clif Cox of SFLAN http://www.sflan.org
or Tim Pozar of the Bay Area Research Wireless Network
http://www.barwn.org?

Both would be interested in helping.

I am talking to an ecotourism company that wants to put together
tours for people to do some useful work. They would be
interested also. If we get the "tourists" to install a wireless
network and some computers, they can maintain contact with each
other and with the village after they return home.

> Good to hear from you....
> Sounds exciting and practical...but also risky.
>
> You must be aware that you put yourself in competitive
> position to big providers. So be prepared to face an operation
> that does not run smoothly. Dont announce your plans to early.
> Seek for allies. Build local connections. Start with the
> strongest bases. Be prepared for obstruction. I keep my
> fingers crossed. The telcos here have waited until the small
> ones have created the market, then swallowed them like sharks
> do with little fish.

SFLAN and BARWN are doing fine in San Francisco, Berkeley, and
Oakland regardless of the commercial wireless providers in the
coffee shops and such. Recently the coffee shops have taken to
offering wireless for free, in a natural competitive response to
the growing availability of wireless.

> >Our philosophy is that people nowadays need not move away
> >from their villages to the urban sprawl in order to find a
> >job and secure life's essentials and that wireless
> >networking technology can help us achieve this
> >infrastructural decentralisation, which in turn is vital for
> >the wellbeing of traditionally rural/agricultural
> >communities across greece. Very much in symphony with the
> >global village vision, don't you think? :-)

The precise goals of the Simputer movement. We also want to
capture and preserve the local culture--songs, stories, history,
videos of local events, and so on.

We make this possible even where there is no electricity and no
phone system, as with the wireless network in Bhutan. Is this an
issue in Crete?

> Absolutely and one hundred percent!!! -  and by your doing
> that in Crete you realize probably the most early, essential
> and precious element of my personal, original global village
> dream.
>
> But the dream has evolved....It would be exciting if you could
> find villages that want to team up with Kirchbach in Austria;
> here we bring the global village idea one step further in
> emphasizing on Open-Source-Style co-operation between
> professionals with identical interests in many distributed
> villages.

Another of our ideas is to link villages (and also refugee camps
and orphanages) in developing regions with schools, service
clubs, and the like in the developed world. Both sides would
profit from the resulting discussions, and each would have
something of value to offer the other.

> Friends of mine have started to remodel an old court building
> there (http://www.kb5.at/content/e179/index_ger.html) and turn
> it into a local business and cultural center, with strong
> educational offerings. One with whom I work together for many
> years is Franz Steinwender who spent half a year in Heraklion
> doing telework.
>
> We decided to create two main project lines together:
> 1. "Place of Access and Learning" with possible "Regional
> Information Coaching" approach, so to say a fully fledged
> Internet self learners coaching activity..... Could be the
> "House of Knowledge" of the village one day.
> 2. "Open Souce Village" as a unique identity of this place.
> The first step will be that People can learn Linux in this
> village,

Yes!!

> but the second step is that there will be also
> courses for craftspeople and other professions how to
> cooperate and share knowledge via the internet, for example
> carpenters (you remember Claus Muellers OpenCraft)

Overstock.com is a good place to sell local art and craftwork.
They have become the largest employer in Afghanistan in the last
year, giving rug makers and others 70% of the final selling
price.

eBay is another good site. The idea is to list just a few items
on eBay, and provide a link to your main Web site, where you can
sell at set prices.

> The concept of the "Open Source Village" is entirely new and a
> product of the GIVE-Kirchbach Cooperation. There is a
> Linux-Hotel in Essen/Germany though, which is pretty
> successful and will most likely be in our network.

Tell me more. You are not the only ones thinking such thoughts,
and we want to get the like-minded together on this. One of the
major developments now is translating whole Linux distributions
into local languages such as Kinyarwanda in Rwanda, Yoruba in
Nigeria, and so on.

> >We're trying to secure some initial funding from the public
> >sector, which after all will be the main, if not the sole,
> >sponsor of the project, and i'm now writing a proposal in
> >which i identify and elaborate on the benefits stemming from
> >such a decentralised and mobile approach to connectivity and
> >rural community life.

It may not be necessary to do this through grants. There is a
growing realization that the poor can be helped at a profit.

Check with the microbanking community. The Grameen Foundation USA
has a Village Computing Project that is looking into wireless
networks to the villages. With the latest technology, it would
cost less than US$1,000 to hook up any village within wireless
range.

There will be a World Resources Institute conference in San
Francisco in December on the theme "Eradicating Poverty Through
Profit".
http://www.wri.org

> >I intend to give examples of similar
> >state-funded efforts across europe in order to emphasise the
> >advantages that accrue to remote communities, and show that
> >what we 're proposing has been done time and again in the
> >past with considerable success

I can provide more examples, such as the ITC e-choupal project in
India.

> I think that would be a perfect thing to do this research  in
> our new "globalvillages" yahoogroup. We have set up a special
> yahoogroup for open investigation on Global Villages and you
> can find the information and subscribe to that group here:
>
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/

Yes.
[remainder deleted]
--
Edward Cherlin, Simputer Evangelist
Encore Technologies (S) Pte. Ltd.
The Village Information Society
http://www.ryze.com/go/Cherlin

Dear Shannon and Franz:

Thanks for the inputs. Now I know that at least my direction is alright.

Shannon I totally agree with you on the community development path.
India has been experimenting with the "panchayat raj" system which is
a local body at the village level with a appointed head and a village
council which will be responsible and has the power to implement
various projects for the development of the village like sanitation,
irrigation, education, power etc.

This has not been successful for a lot of reasons. At this point in
time I am studying this and trying to understand their failure. One
thing which is sure is that this institutional framework is no going
to go away. So there needs to be ways to solve the present problems
changing other factors working with this institutions.

Franz, 'rural education' for development. My understanding is that
this is a way of learning more about rural places and then helping
them to development. Is this right? Can you please explain this to me
again. I think I have lost the idea.

On the wow investigation front. I understand the need for a tool which
can help investigators to do their job better in their own diverse
fields. I introduced sometime back Edward Hugh who is working on the
livingontheplanet group and his tool could be a base for the wow
system. Is it not better for this 'investigator' to be a technical
person who has the technical knowledge as well as the conceptual
understanding of "collaboration" and "group networks".

One thing is sure that there is a lot of common interests and synergy
with what I am thinking and the stuff you have mentioned. I will be
happy to be part of this effort in anyway possible.

Thanks once again,

Suhit.

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 12:19:39 +0200, Franz Nahrada <f.nahrada@...> wrote:
> Thank you Suhit, I think you are on a very good track!
>
> I would like to point to a missing link here. We have started this project
> called "Development by means of Education" or more baroque and precise
> "European rural Development by means of Education". What you write below
> about Amartya Sen could almost be considered like a background philosophy
> of what we are doing. I agree very much with Shannon that we need to
> bridge the concepts of individual and communal development and I reccomend
> these lines to all ERDE people.
>
> What I am looking for in this context is a lead investigator who works
> with Andrius and me and others on two things
>
> - in Mincius Sodas and Globalvillages: develop the system of open
> investigation. There are several investigators with different interests,
> but all have similar needs: to group distributed minds around complex
> questions in order to produce good results. We decided to put our
> resources together to find the best combination between mailing lists,
> wikis and blogs and information organizers like the Brain and
> HyperCard-like Webtops. Temporarily, the gravitation center for this will
> be in the globalvillages yahoogroup, [wow] subjects
>
> - the second thing which is missing (and not so close to my heart) would
> be a comprehensive "pattern language of rural education". So I would very
> much appreciate if there were people teaming up to build the "House of
> Knowledge" in the global villages, which is nothing else but the merger of
> many local educational institutions to better digest and disseminate
> global information. The ultimate purpose of our travelling to these places
> in ERDE would be to collect building blocks for such a house.
>
> I would wish to see people who feel enthusiastic to build this House
> parallel in reality and in the Web. If we could do that, the ERDE project
> would gain much more soul and sense.
>
> We also have a group who now starts to build the "General Health House", a
> place designed to foster individual healing and so promoting societal
> healing within our villages. They also want to start open investigation. I
> think we have a good investigator team here with Peter Wiebecke and
> others, so it would be exciting to see if this could in any form connect.
> Health House and House of Knowledge are working on the same background
> principes. Other Houses of the village will follow, we need a House of
> Tools, A house of cooperation with the living beings (aka Permaculture), A
> House of Governance. And much more that we have not even conceived yet.
>
> All the best
>
> Franz.
>
> --------
>
> Suhit Anantula <anantula@...> on Mittwoch, 14. Juli 2004 at 10:55
>
>
> Uhr +0100 wrote:
> >
> >As you would know I have been writing my blog (www.worldisgreen.com)
> >for 7 months now. The time has come for me to rethink the whole
> >exercise and the reason behind it. I am trying to find the way
> >forward. I need your opinion on the following.
> >
> >In a recent blog entry I wrote the following :
> >
> ><<Quote>>
> >
> >Development is a complex subject. Mostly development is assumed to be
> >'economic development'. Incomes and wealth is an important aspect in a
> >person's life. Development to an extent is economic
> >development. But, there is more to development. One of the ideas
> >which have influenced me on this aspect is "Development as Freedom" by
> >Amartya Sen. Sen debates, explains and provides a solid framework of
> >thought to put forward his theory that development is the process of
> >expanding people's choices,in other words, functionings and
> >capabilities to function, the range of things that a person could do
> >and be in her life.
> >
> >Lets take as an example, Education. Education, especially primary
> >education, is an integral part of development. This is now 'common
> >knowledge'. But, Education has more benefits than just that. It has
> >the power to provide opportunities and help an individual to realize
> >and extend his inner capabilties. The act of using an 'individuals
> >capabilities' enhances his ability to live well and provide him
> >meaning in his life. Both of these goals are important.
> >
> >I will write more about Amartya Sen as I understand him better and
> >fit the ideas in a better context and examples. For me, "Development
> >as Freedom" is the philosophy which will guide me in this process of
> >development. What you can call the "conceptual framework".
> >
> >On the other hand, we need ideas, models of change, extraordinary
> >people, good policy decisions and time to accomplish this goal of
> >development. These bits of pieces working together will help achieve this.
> >
> >To help me clarify this process, to better understand developement
> >under this framework will make it necessary for me to change the
> >structure of worldisgreen.com. In the coming weeks I will be
> >thinking about the best way to take this journey forward. This will
> >translate into changing the website.
> >
> ><<<UnQuote>>
> >
> >The whole website will be based on the fundamental philosophy of
> >Amartya Sen. He has proposed five instrumental freedoms.
> >
> >1. Political freedoms
> >2. Economic facilities
> >3. social opportunities
> >4. transperancy guarantees
> >5. protective security
> >
> >He says that these are the "means" and "ends" of development. Now my
> >goal is add some more fundamental things for each section.
> >
> >Like education, healthcare in social opportunity, democracy, freedom
> >of press (or oppresion) in political freedoms, energy and credit +
> >infrastructure in economic facilities etc.
> >
> >The idea is to find thos 3-5 fundamental things in each of these and
> >then start blogging about them, news, orgs working in that field,
> >people, e-groups, fellow bloggers etc,
> >
> >In this way there is a background to what is happening, a community
> >can be formed through this and also there is better understanding of
> >the problems and the solutions.
> >
> >I will have a great emphasis on "what works" like models of change,
> >people who are making a difference, new ideas which can be useful
> >etc.
> >
> >Also, once i am ready I will supplement this with a WorldisGreen
> >e-group for a common community to meet and discuss.
> >
> >Let me know what you think about it. The ideas are forming this is
> >work in progress.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Suhit.
>
>


--
        Suhit Anantula        |  Deeshaa Ventures   |  Rural Development
www.worldisgreen.com  |  www.deeshaa.com  |   +91.40.3101 2234

George Dafermos is a friend from Crete who was speaking at the Oekonux
conference.

<dafermos@...> on Mittwoch, 14. Juli 2004 at 20:34 Uhr +0100 wrote:
>Hello Franz,
>
>These days together with a few friends i'm trying to put
>together a non-profit organisational vehicle for setting up
>wireless community networks in crete, codenamed "euruzoniki
>kritis" (which means broadband crete in greek) and if it
>goes well we'll probably do the same elsewhere in greece
>too.

Good to hear from you....
Sounds exciting and practical...but also risky.

You must be aware that you put yourself in competitive position to big
providers. So be prepared to face an operation that does not run smoothly.
Dont announce your plans to early. Seek for allies. Build local
connections. Start with the strongest bases. Be prepared for obstruction.
I keep my fingers crossed. The telcos here have waited until the small
ones have created the market, then swallowed them like sharks do with
little fish.
>
>
>Our philosophy is that people nowadays need not move away
>from their villages to the urban sprawl in order to find a
>job and secure life's essentials and that wireless
>networking technology can help us achieve this
>infrastructural decentralisation, which in turn is vital for
>the wellbeing of traditionally rural/agricultural
>communities across greece. Very much in symphony with the
>global village vision, don't you think? :-)

Absolutely and one hundred percent!!! -  and by your doing that in Crete
you realize probably the most early, essential and precious element of my
personal, original global village dream.

But the dream has evolved....It would be exciting if you could find
villages that want to team up with Kirchbach in Austria; here we bring the
global village idea one step further in emphasizing on Open-Source-Style
co-operation between professionals with identical interests in many
distributed villages.

Friends of mine have started to remodel an old court building there
(http://www.kb5.at/content/e179/index_ger.html) and turn it into a local
business and cultural center, with strong educational offerings. One with
whom I work together for many years is Franz Steinwender who spent half a
year in Heraklion doing telework.

We decided to create two main project lines together:
1. "Place of Access and Learning" with possible "Regional Information
Coaching" approach, so to say a fully fledged Internet self learners
coaching activity..... Could be the "House of Knowledge" of the village
one day.
2. "Open Souce Village" as a unique identity of this place. The first step
will be that People can learn Linux in this village, but the second step
is that there will be also courses for craftspeople and other professions
how to cooperate and share knowledge via the internet, for example
carpenters (you remember Claus Muellers OpenCraft)

The concept of the "Open Source Village" is entirely new and a product of
the GIVE-Kirchbach Cooperation. There is a Linux-Hotel in Essen/Germany
though, which is pretty successful and will most likely be in our network.
>
>
>We're trying to secure some initial funding from the public
>sector, which after all will be the main, if not the sole,
>sponsor of the project, and i'm now writing a proposal in
>which i identify and elaborate on the benefits stemming from
>such a decentralised and mobile approach to connectivity and
>rural community life.

>I intend to give examples of similar
>state-funded efforts across europe in order to emphasise the
>advantages that accrue to remote communities, and show that
>what we 're proposing has been done time and again in the
>past with considerable success

I think that would be a perfect thing to do this research  in our new
"globalvillages" yahoogroup. We have set up a special yahoogroup for open
investigation on Global Villages and you can find the information and
subscribe to that group here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/

Statefunded examples are not the most successful, but also private
ventures failed. It is difficult to convince buerocrats that we have
learned from failures, but that is mostly the case.

> and i was thinking to
>situate the hertfordshire experiment we watched together in
>vienna (the one that's prominent in a bbc documentary you
>had in your vhs collection) in the core of the proposal.

I do not know the actual state of the project (I think we are talking not
about the Herfordshire Telehamlets, but about the Crickhowell Televillage
in Wales developed and marketed by Acorn televillages), but that is why I
include David Wortley to see if he has any connections to this or other
relevant projects in Britain.

The sad thing is that the Televillage ran into a lot of difficulties in
2000 and I have no actual info.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/990033.stm
http://www.findaproperty.com/cgi-bin/story.pl?storyid=0643
So contacting Ashley Dobbs would be a good idea, but not taking Acorn as a
lead example.

We could of course expand that research into looking at other examples
that we know of ambitious Televillage Projects:
for example Coletta di Castelbianco /Liguria//Italy
http://www.colletta.it

Klosterforst in Itzehoe Germany, Vauban in germany.are rather urban
examples.

The best ideas will now be put together in a project named "iVille" in 8
alpine villages, led by Adolf Jaendl from Munich. If this project proposal
succeeds, there will be lots of co-operation possibilities.
http://www.idorf.de/wDeutsch/Projekte/alpiville.html

>
>Thus, I'd be grateful if you could copy the tape with the
>bbc documentary and send it to me in crete. Also, any other
>relevant links to internet resources or tv
>programmes/documentaries will be greatly appreciated. Tell
>me what you think:-)

OK, we should have more media and visuals on that. Lets team up and
rebuild the televillages connections with the help of our yahoogroup!

Franz

Franz

(I thought I had joined gv list, but hadn't.  Now I have.)

I don't know if this http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/ would be any
good.  They are probably in a too early state of developement.

I've read about Extreme Programming, where customers tell stories so
programmers can turn them into working code.

I don't yet see the future you are (half?) imagining here (gv).  So
I'll sit back and wait until I somehow "get it".  (Ok, yes, I'm doing
other things too.)

Lucas

Thank you Suhit, I think you are on a very good track!

I would like to point to a missing link here. We have started this project
called "Development by means of Education" or more baroque and precise
"European rural Development by means of Education". What you write below
about Amartya Sen could almost be considered like a background philosophy
of what we are doing. I agree very much with Shannon that we need to
bridge the concepts of individual and communal development and I reccomend
these lines to all ERDE people.

What I am looking for in this context is a lead investigator who works
with Andrius and me and others on two things

- in Mincius Sodas and Globalvillages: develop the system of open
investigation. There are several investigators with different interests,
but all have similar needs: to group distributed minds around complex
questions in order to produce good results. We decided to put our
resources together to find the best combination between mailing lists,
wikis and blogs and information organizers like the Brain and
HyperCard-like Webtops. Temporarily, the gravitation center for this will
be in the globalvillages yahoogroup, [wow] subjects

- the second thing which is missing (and not so close to my heart) would
be a comprehensive "pattern language of rural education". So I would very
much appreciate if there were people teaming up to build the "House of
Knowledge" in the global villages, which is nothing else but the merger of
many local educational institutions to better digest and disseminate
global information. The ultimate purpose of our travelling to these places
in ERDE would be to collect building blocks for such a house.

I would wish to see people who feel enthusiastic to build this House
parallel in reality and in the Web. If we could do that, the ERDE project
would gain much more soul and sense.

We also have a group who now starts to build the "General Health House", a
place designed to foster individual healing and so promoting societal
healing within our villages. They also want to start open investigation. I
think we have a good investigator team here with Peter Wiebecke and
others, so it would be exciting to see if this could in any form connect.
Health House and House of Knowledge are working on the same background
principes. Other Houses of the village will follow, we need a House of
Tools, A house of cooperation with the living beings (aka Permaculture), A
House of Governance. And much more that we have not even conceived yet.

All the best

Franz.


--------

Suhit Anantula <anantula@...> on Mittwoch, 14. Juli 2004 at 10:55
Uhr +0100 wrote:
>
>As you would know I have been writing my blog (www.worldisgreen.com)
>for 7 months now. The time has come for me to rethink the whole
>exercise and the reason behind it. I am trying to find the way
>forward. I need your opinion on the following.
>
>In a recent blog entry I wrote the following :
>
><<Quote>>
>
>Development is a complex subject. Mostly development is assumed to be
>'economic development'. Incomes and wealth is an important aspect in a
>person's life. Development to an extent is economic
>development. But, there is more to development. One of the ideas
>which have influenced me on this aspect is "Development as Freedom" by
>Amartya Sen. Sen debates, explains and provides a solid framework of
>thought to put forward his theory that development is the process of
>expanding people's choices,in other words, functionings and
>capabilities to function, the range of things that a person could do
>and be in her life.
>
>Lets take as an example, Education. Education, especially primary
>education, is an integral part of development. This is now 'common
>knowledge'. But, Education has more benefits than just that. It has
>the power to provide opportunities and help an individual to realize
>and extend his inner capabilties. The act of using an 'individuals
>capabilities' enhances his ability to live well and provide him
>meaning in his life. Both of these goals are important.
>
>I will write more about Amartya Sen as I understand him better and
>fit the ideas in a better context and examples. For me, "Development
>as Freedom" is the philosophy which will guide me in this process of
>development. What you can call the "conceptual framework".
>
>On the other hand, we need ideas, models of change, extraordinary
>people, good policy decisions and time to accomplish this goal of
>development. These bits of pieces working together will help achieve this.
>
>To help me clarify this process, to better understand developement
>under this framework will make it necessary for me to change the
>structure of worldisgreen.com. In the coming weeks I will be
>thinking about the best way to take this journey forward. This will
>translate into changing the website.
>
><<<UnQuote>>
>
>The whole website will be based on the fundamental philosophy of
>Amartya Sen. He has proposed five instrumental freedoms.
>
>1. Political freedoms
>2. Economic facilities
>3. social opportunities
>4. transperancy guarantees
>5. protective security
>
>He says that these are the "means" and "ends" of development. Now my
>goal is add some more fundamental things for each section.
>
>Like education, healthcare in social opportunity, democracy, freedom
>of press (or oppresion) in political freedoms, energy and credit +
>infrastructure in economic facilities etc.
>
>The idea is to find thos 3-5 fundamental things in each of these and
>then start blogging about them, news, orgs working in that field,
>people, e-groups, fellow bloggers etc,
>
>In this way there is a background to what is happening, a community
>can be formed through this and also there is better understanding of
>the problems and the solutions.
>
>I will have a great emphasis on "what works" like models of change,
>people who are making a difference, new ideas which can be useful
>etc.
>
>Also, once i am ready I will supplement this with a WorldisGreen
>e-group for a common community to meet and discuss.
>
>Let me know what you think about it. The ideas are forming this is
>work in progress.
>
>Thanks,
>Suhit.

Sunit,

Sounds like a good start and an interesting blog.

A few thoughts.

One, some, though perhaps not all, of what you are doing seems related
to what a group that I am an active member in is also looking at, though
with and from a different perspective. The group is Hope Street Group
(http://www.hopestreetgroup.org) and they are a non-partisan non-profit
public policy group here in the US working to shape the public policy
debate around an idea they call "Opportunity Economics". Opportunity
Economics is the idea that economic prosperity can co-exist with both a
market economy and efforts to spread the opportunity for fulfillment
widely throughout the population (a bit awkwardly worded, I apologize).
This puts Hope Street Group very much in the center of the political
spectrum in the US which is specifically their intention. As well,
though, they are looking specifically only at public policy as related
to economics, they are agreeing to disagree around social and
geo-political issues (i.e. HSG does not have a position on abortion
rights or on the war in Iraq).

When you have a chance take a look at Hope Street Group's website, as
well as at their blog (where I periodically post along with many other
members) perhaps some of the articles and posts will be of use to you.

I am personally interested in whether any of what Hope Street Group is
writing about and thinking about is sensible outside of the specifically
American context. Given the current presidential campaign and HSG's
relative size and nearly all volunteer structure, HSG has specifically
focused on US public policy and on US examples when writing about
Opportunity Economics. However, I think that there are likely many great
examples of the same ideas outside of the US and perhaps the overall
position in the center of the political spectrum has appeal globally as
well as in the US.

In terms of development a thought that occurs to me after reading your
post (quickly) is "Is there a difference between talking about 'personal
development' and development on a community, region, or national scale?"
I think fairly clearly there is, but also that there may be a
requirement that to achieve national/regional development individuals
have to have a chance to develop themselves. There can often be a
conflict between the two aspects of development however, while some
aspects of development such as education are clearly very individually
driven it is not uncommon at all for there to be major aspects of
development that include the use of scarce resources - hence implying
that some may receive what others are not. In the case of education
while in an ideal world there interests of students would match up well
with the available teachers (and other resources required for learning),
in the real world there are usually far more people interested in
subjects associated with offering an opportunity to get rich than there
are resources available to teach the subject (whether accounting, law,
or even just a foreign language such as English).

So development can require tradeoffs. Whether it is a matter of
schedules or scarce resources or compromises, achieving "development" is
tricky.

That said, it has to also be considered that development implies a
hierarchy (at least frequently) i.e. a progression from one state to
another with the final state (i.e. the state of being developed) being
implied to be somehow "better" than the earlier. This can on many
measures be true (longer life expectancy, greater health, higher wages,
more resources being available, etc) but it can also be a set of
assumptions that by being often undiscussed gloss over complexities.

I am a capitalist. I mention this to give my ongoing thoughts some
context. I am definitely not a Marxist in terms of my economic (or
historical) views.

In looking at community development, I look at it from the perspective
of a business person, a technology entrepreneur, a historian, a
self-taught economist, a some-parts-of-the-world worldtraveler, and
writer/philosopher. These multiple perspectives of mine offer differing
conclusions and suggestions, I will now offer a few of them.

First, one of the secrets of "capitalism" and thus too of development is
the recording and management of the future. That is, by documenting and
setting up contracts and trusted relationships that extend well into the
future, capitalism builds on the past and the future to grow here in the
present. Some simple examples of this are the institution of land deeds
which in turn led to the development of mortgages (simple and complex)
the effect of which is to set down a well established manner who owns
what. Then to allow the owners to leverage that ownership via others who
are willing to offer resources today for a future promise to pay back
those resources, pay more than what was loaned, and if the payments are
not met allow the person (bank often) making the loan to gain control
(or at least partial control) of what was put up as capital for the
loan.

In a similar manner capitalism allows for workers to enter into
agreements with their employers (sometimes who are better described as
their 'customers').

It is these bonds that get established - worker contracts, mortgages,
credit agreements, other loans, and especially the acceptance of a
common unit of currency - that allow for development to potentially
occur (or at least development in a capitalist context). In the US there
are loans that are specifically focused on individuals education
(college loans usually) - these are made with the assumption that the
person after finishing school will have a greater opportunity to make
money, and will then be able to pay back the loans.

To focus more narrowly on a local community level, I think the first
step of "development" is for the community itself to identify and start
to recognize the resources that are available to the community, as well
as where the community wants to go (i.e. what is the goal of
"development" on the community scale. In making this list of goals, they
should be focused into a few important categories. First, goals that are
critical building blocks for everything else (fresh water, enough food,
enough shelter, security etc) - these are the things that if not
present, or if not present in sufficient quantities make it unlikely
that any other goal would be met. Literally most of these are likely
life or death issues. Second, the community should look at not just
goals that are short term and which are stepping stones to desired long
term futures, but very importantly at how progress towards these goals
(including achieving them) can be measured. This means of measurement
does not have to be a formal test score, indeed I would caution against
that, but it could be something like "no child has to work instead of
attending school"; "all residents are protected against local scourges
and major health risks"; "the amount of resources coming into the
community go up" (i.e. generally speaking the community sells more to
the outside world than it spends but 'get' could encompass taxes,
government grants, actual sales of goods, sales of services, etc)

Then the community should focus on where on a longer term the community
wants to go, and on what could interrupt or risk the achievement of that
goal. Is it political risks such as wars, legal changes, etc. Are there
natural risks (floods, hurricanes, volcanoes. Earthquakes etc)? Are
there cultural costs as well as benefits to 'development' and besides
the cultural cost, are there potentially other costs to losing those
resources - whether speakers of an older language or the passing of
master craftsmen as technology renders their crafts in lesser demand.

Development efforts should, ideally, seek to preserve and build on the
resources of the community, which most definitely include many things
such as old crafts which in the past in a period of "development" would
likely have been overtaken and risked being forgotten. I would suggest
that these should be looked to for potential uniqueness when looking at
a community on a global scale. Who knows, your community might have the
solution that Navajo provided the US during World War II (where Navajo
was used as an essentially unbreakable code for signally information,
all the native Navajo speakers where in the US).

Development on a personal scale is similar to that of a community, you
have to build outward from your past and your existing skills and
resources. As well, however, you have to work hard and be prepared to
fail many times before you succeed (see a related post I made to HSG's
blog on this very topic).

I hope these notes and thoughts make some sense, I look forward to
seeing what and where you take your blog!

Shannon
Chicago, IL USA

Shannon Clark
Founder, MeshForum
"Connecting Networks"
www.meshforum.org

Founder and President, JigZaw Inc
"piecing IT together"
www.jigzaw.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Suhit Anantula [mailto:anantula@...]
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 10:08 PM
To: globalvillages@yahoogroups.com; minciu_sodas_EN@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [minciu_sodas_en] Need your feedback

Hi:

I have been writing my blog (www.worldisgreen.com) for 7 months now.
The time has come for me to rethink the whole exercise and the reason
behind it. I am trying to find the way forward. I need your opinion on
the following.

I need your feedback for me to take the next steps. The ultimate
objective is to understand the process of development better and
hopefully make a 'difference' to the world, however small it may be.

In a recent blog entry I wrote the following :

<<Quote>>

Development is a complex subject. Mostly development is assumed to be
'economic development'. Incomes and wealth is an important aspect in a
person's life. Development to an extent is economic
development. But, there is more to development. One of the ideas
which have influenced me on this aspect is "Development as Freedom" by
Amartya Sen. Sen debates, explains and provides a solid framework of
thought to put forward his theory that development is the process of
expanding people's choices,in other words, functionings and
capabilities to function, the range of things that a person could do
and be in her life.

Lets take as an example, Education. Education, especially primary
education, is an integral part of development. This is now 'common
knowledge'. But, Education has more benefits than just that. It has
the power to provide opportunities and help an individual to realize
and extend his inner capabilties. The act of using an 'individuals
capabilities' enhances his ability to live well and provide him
meaning in his life. Both of these goals are important.

I will write more about Amartya Sen as I understand him better and
fit the ideas in a better context and examples. For me, "Development
as Freedom" is the philosophy which will guide me in this process of
development. What you can call the "conceptual framework".

On the other hand, we need ideas, models of change, extraordinary
people, good policy decisions and time to accomplish this goal of
development. These bits of pieces working together will help achieve
this.

To help me clarify this process, to better understand developement
under this framework will make it necessary for me to change the
structure of worldisgreen.com. In the coming weeks I will be
thinking about the best way to take this journey forward. This will
translate into changing the website.

<<<UnQuote>>

The whole website will be based on the fundamental philosophy of
Amartya Sen. He has proposed five instrumental freedoms.

1. Political freedoms
2. Economic facilities
3. social opportunities
4. transperancy guarantees
5. protective security

He says that these are the "means" and "ends" of development. Now my
goal is add some more fundamental things for each section.

Like education, healthcare in social opportunity, democracy, freedom
of press (or oppresion) in political freedoms, energy and credit +
infrastructure in economic facilities etc.

The idea is to find thos 3-5 fundamental things in each of these and
then start blogging about them, news, orgs working in that field,
people, e-groups, fellow bloggers etc,

In this way there is a background to what is happening, a community
can be formed through this and also there is better understanding of
the problems and the solutions.

I will have a great emphasis on "what works" like models of change,
people who are making a difference, new ideas which can be useful
etc.

Also, once i am ready I will supplement this with a WorldisGreen
e-group for a common community to meet and discuss.

Let me know what you think about it. The ideas are forming this is
work in progress.

Thanks,
Suhit.

--
        Suhit Anantula        |  Deeshaa Ventures   |  Rural Development
www.worldisgreen.com  |  www.deeshaa.com  |   +91.40.3101 2234



--
        Suhit Anantula        |  Deeshaa Ventures   |  Rural Development
www.worldisgreen.com  |  www.deeshaa.com  |   +91.40.3101 2234



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Hi:

I have been writing my blog (www.worldisgreen.com) for 7 months now.
The time has come for me to rethink the whole exercise and the reason
behind it. I am trying to find the way forward. I need your opinion on
the following.

I need your feedback for me to take the next steps. The ultimate
objective is to understand the process of development better and
hopefully make a 'difference' to the world, however small it may be.

In a recent blog entry I wrote the following :

<<Quote>>

Development is a complex subject. Mostly development is assumed to be
'economic development'. Incomes and wealth is an important aspect in a
person's life. Development to an extent is economic
development. But, there is more to development. One of the ideas
which have influenced me on this aspect is "Development as Freedom" by
Amartya Sen. Sen debates, explains and provides a solid framework of
thought to put forward his theory that development is the process of
expanding people's choices,in other words, functionings and
capabilities to function, the range of things that a person could do
and be in her life.

Lets take as an example, Education. Education, especially primary
education, is an integral part of development. This is now 'common
knowledge'. But, Education has more benefits than just that. It has
the power to provide opportunities and help an individual to realize
and extend his inner capabilties. The act of using an 'individuals
capabilities' enhances his ability to live well and provide him
meaning in his life. Both of these goals are important.

I will write more about Amartya Sen as I understand him better and
fit the ideas in a better context and examples. For me, "Development
as Freedom" is the philosophy which will guide me in this process of
development. What you can call the "conceptual framework".

On the other hand, we need ideas, models of change, extraordinary
people, good policy decisions and time to accomplish this goal of
development. These bits of pieces working together will help achieve this.

To help me clarify this process, to better understand developement
under this framework will make it necessary for me to change the
structure of worldisgreen.com. In the coming weeks I will be
thinking about the best way to take this journey forward. This will
translate into changing the website.

<<<UnQuote>>

The whole website will be based on the fundamental philosophy of
Amartya Sen. He has proposed five instrumental freedoms.

1. Political freedoms
2. Economic facilities
3. social opportunities
4. transperancy guarantees
5. protective security

He says that these are the "means" and "ends" of development. Now my
goal is add some more fundamental things for each section.

Like education, healthcare in social opportunity, democracy, freedom
of press (or oppresion) in political freedoms, energy and credit +
infrastructure in economic facilities etc.

The idea is to find thos 3-5 fundamental things in each of these and
then start blogging about them, news, orgs working in that field,
people, e-groups, fellow bloggers etc,

In this way there is a background to what is happening, a community
can be formed through this and also there is better understanding of
the problems and the solutions.

I will have a great emphasis on "what works" like models of change,
people who are making a difference, new ideas which can be useful
etc.

Also, once i am ready I will supplement this with a WorldisGreen
e-group for a common community to meet and discuss.

Let me know what you think about it. The ideas are forming this is
work in progress.

Thanks,
Suhit.

--
        Suhit Anantula        |  Deeshaa Ventures   |  Rural Development
www.worldisgreen.com  |  www.deeshaa.com  |   +91.40.3101 2234



--
        Suhit Anantula        |  Deeshaa Ventures   |  Rural Development
www.worldisgreen.com  |  www.deeshaa.com  |   +91.40.3101 2234

Jeff, I like your AIDS economy proposal very much.
I'm glad that you understand the many ideas that I care about, and can
integrate them with your own.

I tried to organize your ideas in a diagram.
It's hard!  but at least I'll send what I started with.

It's great, what you are all doing.  It's such a challenge! and
therefore great for open investigation, as we keep thinking further.

Good night,

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@...

Franz,

I appreciate your thoughts and redirects.  It may be that the solution
to the level of mapping you are wrestling with includes people who
share objectives working together to create a  simulation of the
environment and their roles in it, and also some people trained to take
liberties with the specific facts to create meaning in the form of
'cartoons' -- visualizations of the ideas that express the facts
meaningfully.

As we document the level of complexity that exceeds our ability to
comprehend it individually, we can find ways to respond to the
complexity that are effective, through bringing designers and people
who run design conferences ('charrettes') into the discussions, to run
group processes that enhance our abilities.

One way of handling excessive detail is to divide it up into
sub-systems which are handled by specialists, while generalists focus
on their interactions as whole systems. When mapped, we get a sense of
zooming in in steps, rather than completely smoothly.

Regards,

Mark


On Friday, July 9, 2004, at 11:05 AM, Franz Nahrada wrote:

> -------CONTENT OF THIS MAIL---------
> - Mapping activities
> - Function of Minciu Sodas
> - why we need a toolbox of thematically identical mailing list and
> wikis
> - graphical representation tool wanted
> -------------------------------------
>
> Thank you Picsie (for joining globalvillages and for your remarks and
> suggestions),  I cannot make short sentences but I did a summary.
>
> I support your request but I think this is almost exactly what Andrius
> is
> adressing with his idea of a WOW! System.
> It is also a nice coincidence because we are sitting here in Vienna
> constantly trying to "map" our endavours.
> It all boils down to the question how can we be relevant for each other
> and how can we have leverage in what we do...
>
> I would nevertheless like to redirect this question to the "minciu
> sodas"
> list, because its a kind of metaquestion that has no direct relation
> with
> the globalvillages list topic, but is a structural issue that relates
> to
> many groups. Andrius has really managed to get a host of groups going,
> and
> he is by his personal engagement making things increasingly sustainable
> and attractive.
>
> I see him as the facilitator of the informal (!) and culturally
> creative
> (!!) counterpiece of a "virtual university" - and someone who is
> offering
> a lot of leverage to participants by constantly "shapeshifting" to
> maintain integrity and vitality.
>
> When we create a WOW system for Global Villages on our dedicated
> domain, I
> will see it as my personal duty to draw a topic map of related
> activities
> around globalvillages. I think each mailinglist should be ideally
> companion of a wiki and website (possibly blog), so we create an
> optimum
> online investigative environment with tools that complement each other.
> And each of the websites or Wikis should have a pictorial
> representation
> tool.  I do not know if I would like theBrain that much for this
> purpose,
> I rather would like to have a graphical equivalent of a Wiki where
> people
> can insert and intensify the mapping.
>
> Or even better, I think that in the long run such a tool would even
> allow
> to represent, browse, compare and process different personal mappings.
> I
> feel really excited about the possibility to read other peoples
> globalvillages subject map and study their proximities and distances.
> It
> would be a vital tool for me as an investigator to be in touch with my
> online community in this way.
>
> Well we are really entering a technical domain here where the existing
> offerings of web technologies are increasingly less facilitating our
> general co-operation needs. I am sure Fleming reads this because he is
> in
> our list and I am very proud to have him here. But I kindly ask
> Andrius to
> take up the subject and have it brought home to the MinciuSodas List.
>
> Franz
>
> globalvillages@yahoogroups.com on Freitag, 9. Juli 2004 at 19:18 Uhr
> +0100
> wrote:
>> -Drowning in info-
>> -Pictorial representation-
>> -Short postings-
>>
>> With so much activity online re global villages, civic entrepreneur
>> practices and so on, I find that I am gradually drowning in a sea of
>> yahoogroups, discussion forums, wikis, emails and so on.
>>
>> Is there anybody out there who could create a pictorial
>> representation of what groups out there are doing what?
>>
>> Furthermore, I would make a plea to all of us to use as many short
>> sentences with strong active verbs.  Summaries of individual postings
>> would also be useful...at the beginning or the end.
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
Mark Roest
mark.roest@...
oneVillage Initiative - Holistic ICT Development for Eco Living
Sustainable development and technologies
http://onevillagefoundation.org/ovf/initiative.html
1.408.777.0450
Yahoo IM: onevillagemark
http://www.ryze.com/go/markroest

On Tuesday 13 July 2004 01:14 am, Franz Nahrada wrote:
> Joy Tang wrote on Dienstag, 13. Juli 2004 at 05:39 CET +0100:
> >Global Villagers, Ed Cherline's note on "The Shockwwave
> > Rider, by John Brunner."
>
> I think it would be interesting to know a little bit more
> about the content.

Spoilers below. (This means that I am giving away plot twists and
such. If you want to read the book without knowing how various
parts of it come out, don't scroll down to read the rest of this
message until afterwards.)

> I remember my friend Hannes Wolf telling me a lot about this
> novel when we were founding GIVE and he came up with the name.
>
> I did not manage to read it yet. Hannes, would you like to
> subscribe to our exciting globalvillage group and tell us more
> about this novel? This is the only group in the world that
> encopasses ecovillages and the the hottest information
> organizers and collaboration tools at the same time. Even
> HyperCard spirit is alive here!
>
> >The 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner, is
> > widely known as a forerunner of the cyberpunk stream of
> > Science Fiction, but it is not so well known that the novel
> > is an impassioned plea for eco-villages, freedom of
> > information, and putting an end to poverty. I recommend it
> > to all of you.

The Shockwave Rider
John Brunner
Copyright 1975
# Publisher: Del Rey; (March 1, 1995)
# ISBN: 0345467175

The Shockwave in the title is a reference to Alvin Toffler's
Future Shock.

Eco-Village: The town of Precipice was built by people from Claes
College, an ecology/sustainability institute in the Bay Area in
California, during the chaos after the Big One, a force 10+
earthquake. Houses are built into the landscape, with no
distinction between town and country. Everything is on a simple
human scale. Everybody helps everybody else. (They have
geneticially engineered dogs rescued from an experiment, that
can understand speech. This is science fiction, after all.)

Freedom of information: the main character creates an Internet
tapeworm that pulls all of the deep dark secrets out from where
they are hidden and broadcasts them to the world, bringing down
the oppressors.

Ending poverty: Poverty turns out to be the result of a
conspiracy of the rich and powerful. There is plenty for all.
The main character places a referendum on the Net, asking
whether we want to provide enough for everybody. Then the story
ends, with the referendum presented to the reader for a
decision.
--
Edward Cherlin, Simputer Evangelist
Encore Technologies (S) Pte. Ltd.
The Village Information Society
http://www.ryze.com/go/Cherlin

Joy Tang wrote on Dienstag, 13. Juli 2004 at 05:39 CET +0100:
>Global Villagers, Ed Cherline's note on "The Shockwwave Rider, by John
>Brunner."

I think it would be interesting to know a little bit more about the
content.

I remember my friend Hannes Wolf telling me a lot about this novel when
we were founding GIVE and he came up with the name.

I did not manage to read it yet. Hannes, would you like to subscribe to our
exciting globalvillage group and tell us more about this novel? This is
the only group in the world that encopasses ecovillages and the the hottest
information organizers and collaboration tools at the same time. Even
HyperCard spirit is alive here!

>The 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner, is widely
>known as a forerunner of the cyberpunk stream of Science
>Fiction, but it is not so well known that the novel is an
>impassioned plea for eco-villages, freedom of information, and
>putting an end to poverty. I recommend it to all of you.

To visit our group on the web and subscribe, go to:
[ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/
]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/

From:  joy@...

Sent: 7/10/2004 5:43:52 PM

Subject: [minciu_sodas_en] bizink story on Global Women's Leadership Center

Dear Friends, Mentors, and Colleagues,

 

GWLC was launched on June 30 in Santa Clara University, CA.

 

I am in the development group of GWLC.  Your input will be welcomed!  I look forward to working with you continuously.

 

Best regards,

Joy Tang
oneVillage Foundation
Holistic ICT Development for Eco Living
http://onevillagefoundation.org/ovf/initiative.html
Yahoo IM: joyayo
+1.408.435.0775
http://www.ryze.com/go/joytang

Santa Clara University opens women's center


Published: Friday, July 2, 2004

BY RHONDA ASCIERTO

Women entrepreneurs in developing countries will soon be closer to
executives in Silicon Valley, thanks to a new leadership center by the
Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University launched this week.


More than 500 men and women across the valley, India and Africa have
already signed up to be part of the new Global Women's Leadership
Center, which will begin its first program in the Fall. Sponsors include
Applied Materials Inc. in Santa Clara, Logitech Inc. in Fremont, Silicon
Valley Bank in Santa Clara and Wells Fargo & Co. of San Francisco.

The goal of the new center is to give valley companies tools to tap the
talents of local businesswomen, and to give women entrepreneurs in
developing countries greater access to new technology, business
education and contacts.

"One of the unique things we want to do is network the valley's
technology-based companies, products and services with developing
economies, in particular tapping into women entrepreneurs," says Barry
Posner, dean of the Leavey School of Business.

And Posner's not talking about bringing the regional manager in China
for some large multinational to the center. The interest is with women
small-business owners in countries lacking sufficient infrastructure and
business support. A woman in Africa who runs the local cellular
telephone service for her tiny village, and leads the community co-op
for a group of artisans, for example.

The hope is to equip women in developing countries with tools to better
lead their business and communities, Posner says.

And valley companies get more than just the chance to make a difference
in a fellow entrepreneur's life -- they also get an insight into an
untapped market.

"Most of the world is poor. It's the largest market by number of
people, so if you can figure out how to serve that market, then it's
possible to make money and meaning at the same time," Posner says.

He also expects some local companies will donate products and services
to overseas communities participating in the program, possibly to help
identify new applications.

The new on-campus center will run four to eight programs per year,
including leadership classes and networking sessions that may take
anywhere from an afternoon to a couple of weeks.

The center joins a handful of other women-in-business organizations
that provide education and networking tools to business women and
companies in Silicon Valley. They include Anita Borg Institute of Women
and Technology in Palo Alto, Forum for Women Entrepreneurs in San
Francisco and Alliance of Technology and Women (ATW) Silicon Valley
chapter.

But until there's gender parity in technology business management,
there's a need for new women-focused groups, says Kathryn Ullrich,
president of the ATW Silicon Valley chapter.

"Each group addresses a different sub-group of women, but together we
can offer a very powerful program," Ullrich says. She also is CEO of San
Mateo-based executive recruitment firm Kathryn Ullrich Associates Inc.

Despite a focus on advancing women's Silicon Valley, the statistics of
women in management reflect disparity.

While more than half, 52 percent, of women living in Silicon Valley
work in the technology industry, just 39 percent hold management
positions in the private sector, according to a report by the Community
Foundation of Silicon Valley and Collaborative Economics.

"There's not been enough attention directed toward women as leaders in
technology," says SCU's Posner, "and it's a missed opportunity, not just
for Santa Clara University, but for companies in the valley."


Deepa Arora
Media Relations
Santa Clara University
500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara
California 95053

408-554-5125
Cell 408-420-8127
news@...

Hello Mark,

thank you for that thoughtful response. In my perception I have come
closer to you even if I did not join you. You must know I am running this
global villages research since 1992 and there is a vast base of people I
was occasionally connecting to, which makes me very happy and sad at the
same time because their was no way I could stay in touch with them. I
maintain a regular mailing list in german, but not an interactive one,
more like the kind of an occasional newsletter. I spent many years and
much energy in doing three international conferences (Global Village 1993,
1995 and 1997) which you may find documented under www.give.at as well as
the culth (cultural heritage in the global village) events (currently
unavailable).

I am ready to team up with you in many possible ways. One idea that came
out of my conversation with Jeff was to attempt a collective writing in
the mode that Christopher Alexander "A pattern language for global
villages".  I envision this as a public domain work pretty similar to
Wikipedia, but driven by a far reaching consensus that we are constructing
a different reality, based on some shared assumptions but with enough
liberty to explore and leave many details open.

Andrius purpose was to use the support we all can give to him and create
something larger: an environment to support open investigators. He wants
to invent something which in contrary to existing collaboration
technologies is really driven by user needs. I think your interest in what
Andrius is doing is also based on the intuition that he has keen
understanding of the power that comes out of individuals pursuing their
work in the best possible circumstance, instead of having to adapt to
alien circumstances.

One of the reasons he made this choice is that Global Villages is not
really a timecritical endavour, it leaves room to experiment and to
reshape the tool in the course of growth. He had the idea we had one
gathering place where we all wanted also to participate. Good development
should not happen under too much pressure from day by day information
management needs, there should be a balance between the possible speed of
development and the user requirements. Of course user requirements are a
crucial thing to get things to work, but we do not even klnow all of our
user requirements: they come out of the practise of open investigation and
constructing a knowledge base.

I think this experiences will directly flow into a variety of things, be
it the AIDS relief portal, the social enterprise portal, but eventually
and conceptually it is good to keep things apart that are single clusters
of tasks. The purpose of this group should neither be AIDS relief nor
social enterprise, although it could be very close and in constant
interaction with these purpose clusters. The purpose of this group should
be conceptualising and supporting the development of Global Villages. I
think this is not confusing things, but making them clearer. I offer to
you and OneVillage a place where the conceptual elements of a new form of
habitat can be developed. - And as a second task, we agree that this is
the (maybe temporary) meeting place where we also practically study an
example of implementing a WOW system and work on its concept. The topic is
wide enough to bring in other information management problems connected to
a WOW system. I very much appreciate your previous posting reminding us of
the external roles that we have to consider in an open investigation
process, thus mentally expanding the userlevels that Andrius has unfolded.

My greetings also to Ilya Eric Lee. I am very very supportive to the idea
that the Open Source Community gathers around projects driven by real user
requirements. I have to say that my occasional visit to slashdot.org did
not very much encourage the view that people are working on real-lifef
problems there. To be honest, I think many people there have more fun in
re-inventing the wheel or following artifical models of collaborative work
than to bring forward what is needed. Of coursde there is much more out
there than any of us knows and can judge, and there are good examples of
the opposite, but I think the mainstream is still in a different mindset,
in the mindset of user-developer separation. But I think time is ripe for
a complete shift in focus, after we see that Open Source ideas are largely
accepted in the world of creative people.
>
>Secret ingredients in successfully resolving the major urgent issues
>facing the world include people coming together to support each other in
>recovering hope and faith, 'packaging' the vital resources villages need
>to rebuild rural economies in all the combinations that are needed, yet
>with economies of scale, harnessing the awakening consciousness of women
>as leaders of communities and the world, and creating knowledgebases that
>can be translated, edited and augmented by the people who will use them,
>and that carry knowledge of successful solutions to the problems of life
>to the people who need them most.

I fully agree, but now we are a turn: because this ingredients are not
longer to be secret anymore, so to say, but largely accepted bases of a
new culture.

>These same people in many cases have to give in return, the very
>connection with life and those around us that so many in the prosperous
>nations are searching for. Another ingredient is the Artists for AIDS
>Relief and others who use the arts and music as edu-tainment, to create a
>favorable environment for people to realize that they are in relationship
>with the rest of humanity.

Again I agree. That was the hope why we brought computers to Cameroon,
this was not a charity, but the beginning of co-operation and mutual
giving. We build this new culture not in one place; we build it in many
places. Andrius is right when he constantly attempts to tear the wall down
between those places, in order to increase integrity, truth and vitality
of each one (and to enable us to mutually support each other). But we need
not jump in one place to solve all the problems of the world there; it is
much better to have a good map that tells us on what we should really
focus and where.

Hoping to have an enjoyable ride together

Franz

Franz and Andrius,

I would like to address the subject of your first paragraph with an
alternative. oneVillage Foundation, which grew out of the AIDS Relief
Foundation, has already built a social environment in the real world
which can make use of the developments you were involved in. This
environment includes people from all over the world, determined to
remake the world by coming together, village by village. This
environment has critical information management needs that you have
described eloquently, perhaps without realizing it. It also has a
program of leveraging human development using technology -- of all
kinds.

Rather than create a new entity (name) and confuse things, why not just
bring this tool into oneVillage and expand out from there? Andrius has
been working with us, particularly with Joy, long enough to have seen
the breadth and depth of the world-view she has led the development of.
It truly is worthy of the term, 'libraries of the mind', and of the
tool that we can build together. We call that tool variously the AIDS
Relief Portal, the Social Enterprise Platform, and more.

It may interest you to know of the hyperlink program that Chris
Richardson did years ago, and is considering reviving. I believe he
wrote it in MUMPS -- he is a leader in the WorldVistA community and
Secretary of its Board of Directors, bringing the VistA hospital
information management program, written in MUMPS, that runs Veterans
Administration and military hospitals in the US open source and free.
There are several other tools we have discussed combining to provide
comprehensive support for social networks and change agents -- as well
as being potential commercial offerings that the VistA community as a
whole could support, in the context of an ICT Commons. I believe you
and he have much to discuss at this point, and we at oneVillage would
like to participate in the discussion.

On another front, Ilya Eric Lee, the head of the open source initiative
at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, is putting together a conference there
(August 20-22) on open source in health care, medical informatics and
education. These are topics whose complexity can make full use of a
hypertext engine that works. The international open source community is
capable of helping make it work. We are supporting Ilya in the design
of a track to plan a growth strategy for open source development.
Taiwan is actively teaching the idea of multi-lateralism in open source
development, including at a conference earlier in August.

The oneVillage network also includes branches in Ghana, Nigeria and
Kenya, and growing relationships in Columbia and Paraguay.

Secret ingredients in successfully resolving the major urgent issues
facing the world include people coming together to support each other
in recovering hope and faith, 'packaging' the vital resources villages
need to rebuild rural economies in all the combinations that are
needed, yet with economies of scale, harnessing the awakening
consciousness of women as leaders of communities and the world, and
creating knowledgebases that can be translated, edited and augmented by
the people who will use them, and that carry knowledge of successful
solutions to the problems of life to the people who need them most.
These same people in many cases have to give in return, the very
connection with life and those around us that so many in the prosperous
nations are searching for. Another ingredient is the Artists for AIDS
Relief and others who use the arts and music as edu-tainment, to create
a favorable environment for people to realize that they are in
relationship with the rest of humanity.

Why don't you consider joining us in creating a ride that all can enjoy?

Regards,

Mark


On Saturday, July 10, 2004, at 11:29 PM, Franz Nahrada wrote:

> Thank you Andrius. Yesterday was really a tremendous day in terms of
> breakthrough discussion and developments. Originally I was very unhappy
> about the thought that the just created newborn "globalvillages"
> mailinglist should have (in reality just temporarily) two subjects,
> because I planned to invite many people in here to discuss
> straightforward
> the subject of Global Villages. In fact I did invite some, but the
> response was very low which also made me think. We - Andrius and me -
> were
> almost at the point of argument but both gave it a second thought and
> both
> independently came up with the same solution.
>
> There is a saying by Hegel that you learn to swim in the water, not on
> the
> land. What that means is you canot talk about the process of
> "Erkenntnis"
> (a german word that beautifully expands to all sorts of our
> understanding
> of the world) without engaging in it; It is where most of the modern
> theory of science falls short. In a similar way the construction of a
> system for collaborative work should rather take place in the midst of
> a
> real open investigation process than apart from it. Rather than feeling
> "victimized" by this double perspective the people engaging in this
> open
> investigation process (and I am talking about myself here) should feel
> "empowered" by this.
>
> It was helpful in this development that I could unfold the concept of
> HyperCard in personal discussion with Andrius. I deeply feel that my
> motivation and zeal to support this unique tool in the late eighties
> and
> nineties might not be in vain if we can bring the value of the best
> concepts to life again in WOW. Most of you might not know HyperCard at
> all, so I give my perspective on it. I was for four years doing the
> HyperCard developen support for Apple Austria together with Wolfgang
> Biro,
> and saw the opportunity to expand this to empowering usergroup
> structures,
> when Apple managed to kill its own best invention ever (it took three
> killings and the Idea of HyperCard is still alive although the product
> is
> not supported any more, see here: http://www.ihug.org)
>
> HyperCard can be called the most powerful single software tool ever
> invented - if you do not believe it follow through the stories on that
> IHUG site. What makes HyperCard so powerful is not its different
> technical
> features - you might find a better multimedia tool, you might find a
> better database - but the combination of seemingly unrelated
> functionalities and the possibility to combine them in any possible
> way.
> In one word, the power of HyperCard is based on the fact that it gives
> all
> the power of the computer to the user. Before and after HyperCard we
> did
> not have the full imagination of what that means. Even Linux is built
> on
> the same old dichotomy of "programmers" on one side and "users" on the
> other side that hyperCard radically and successfully tried to bridge.
>
> HyperCard was built on the concept that when you personally organize
> your
> information, you want to extend your abilities. So it made no sense to
> organize personal information and algorithmic ways to enact and process
> this information in different environments. HyperCard treated chuncs of
> Information equally as objects-  as for example buttons. There was a
> human
> language to tell the computer in fine granularity what to do with this
> information. The task was to create a very close relation between
> information and action. And information was considered potential or
> frozen
> action. So for example you could easily put in your document objects
> with
> scripts that produced reports and much more. You had a very close
> companion that could "conduct" the whole computer, but you had a way to
> embody those ways of conducting in objects that were recognizeable and
> humainly stored together with the information.
>
> So each human user of the computer was embodying his set of tasks in a
> personal environment that served primarily to organize the work.
> Hypercard
> could open other applications or turn the coffee machine or the TV on;
> HyperCard could transmit information to these external devices. A
> wonderful example is the CD on Beethoven by Voyager, where an
> "electronic
> book" retrieves the chunc of music that is just analyzed from the CD
> player. Instead of focussing on marketing this functionality to the
> user,
> Apple focussed on third party companies to "sell" functionality. But
> these
> companies were rather interested in "specializes", "perfect" tools
> rather
> than HyperCard, also hating the way each functionality was stored
> openly.
> Because HyperCard originally compiled each script on the fly, it used
> to
> be a little bit slower than other applications. But the really crucial
> thing was that HyperCard was the Open Source, it contained all the
> code in
> its objects, and people could easily learn from each other. Not the
> right
> tool for a "New Economy" where all profit is based on the
> monopolisation
> of information and the ability to withhold such abilities from users
> and
> competitors.
>
> We built several applications on the base of HyperCard, one that I am
> really proud of is the multimedia novel "Electronic Encyclopedia of a
> sentimental journey of an export salesman on a hot June Day on the
> Danube
> to Druden" based on a work by Austrian Novelist Andreas Okopenko. My
> personal fate is that I lost the possibility to expand that dream into
> a
> world of really useful developments; When Apple had orphaned HyperCard
> and
> dumped it on Claris, I managed to have serious talks at Claris Corp.
> about
> a European Hyper Card User Group. But then the combination of HyperCard
> and Filemaker became to much of a threat to get out of control of a
> single
> Operating System and Apple called HyperCard back. Of course it was
> absurd
> to limit this functionality to the Macintosh world. So HyperCard died.
>
> HyperCaqrds father, bill Atkinson was the first person to recognize
> that
> we were making a transition from "Personal" to "Interpersonal"
> computing -
> so he went with other wizzards like Andy Hertzfeld to General Magic
> where
> they worked on Telescript. I said to Andrius yesterday why this could
> not
> work: Telescript was action without information. We have a saying by
> Kant,
> that "Begriffe ohne Anschauung sind leer. Anschauung ohne Begriffe ist
> blind". Telecript was like Begriff ohne Anschauung. It means that only
> if
> you combine organizing principles with content, you get something
> meaningful, similar to what Hegel says about the attempts to swim on
> dry
> land. The information organized seperately from Telescript on the web,
> and
> Telescript died.
>
> Now we "surf" and "drown" in the web, mostly because we lack the
> ability
> to efficiently organize information. We have information in abundance,
> but
> no organizing principles that help us to structure it well. My state of
> despair was growing with the size of the web until I deeply studied the
> concept of SUMS by Kim Veltman, who for the first time showed a concept
> that allowed us to organize information collectively by connecting
> relevant chuncs on a meta-level. So powerful was that experience that
> we
> sat down together and wrote up a call for monasteries of the 21st
> century
> where this work shoulc be done.
>
> Andrius intuition of using a personal information organizer as the
> Brain
> as a meta-browsing-tool seems to me another step towards the
> re-integration of interpersonal information organizing. But in fact the
> brain just stores information, not action. My intuition was that if
> HyperCard was considered a personal web companion rather than a
> stand-alone application, it would be the killer application in todays
> web
> world. What Andrius is starting with WOW, is an interpersonal web
> companion that allows us to structure and integrate information into
> meaningful clusters. I once had a friend who had a passion for
> beautiful
> proverbs and metaphors that she collected like others collect stamps.
> It
> served her well to say kind words to people, out of which reason ever.
> Onbe that she originated herself was "I want to walk through the
> Libraries
> of your Mind". Now imagine somebody says that to you, would you not be
> flattered? So I called our HyperCard promotion team "Libraries of the
> Mind". What I see in WOW is that we can walk through the libraries of
> each
> others mind, or the open investigator is the builder of a virtual
> library
> of external information that can adapt for many purposes.
>
> In fact that is what brings us back to the Global Villages. Only if
> such
> dynamic living libraries exist and make relevant knowledge and services
> available to us even in remote location and shaped according to the
> unique
> needs of these locations, we will really feel comfortably to live in
> the
> global villages. So its not to random subjects tied together. They are
> intrinsically linked.
>
> Franz
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
Mark Roest
mark.roest@...
oneVillage Initiative - Holistic ICT Development for Eco Living
Sustainable development and technologies
http://onevillagefoundation.org/ovf/initiative.html
1.408.777.0450
Yahoo IM: onevillagemark
http://www.ryze.com/go/markroest

Thank you Andrius for your pioneering effort with The Brain and WOW.

I share my feedback and some questions.

Ilya, does this make sense to you in terms of needs the open source
community in Taiwan can serve?

Most of the diagram focuses on information flows and processing. As the
title, Web System for Working Openly, says, the purpose of the exercise
is to facilitate work (ing openly). In order to make it clear how it
already does that, and to get to a point where it does so even better,
it may help to have more connections in the flow diagram to (or
explanation of) work that gets done outside the system.

Here are the references I found to work that gets done outside the
system, or directly impacts those outside the system, with [comments]
on action possibilities:
PAGE TEMPLATES: ...pages that people can set up as needed for their
projects, ...
[It would be useful to have these cross-referenced so you can find them
both in a list of templates, and also have links to templates likely to
be useful 'out in the content'.]

INVESTIGATOR'S PORTFOLIO: ...a portfolio ... of an investigator's vision
STRATEGIC PRESENTATION: present a map of ... your vision and lead to
key excerpts and links.
LEADERS' MENTAL MAP: of community  venues, people, interests, groups,
resources.
[These three support the actions of communication and enrollment. One
way to use them is to have tracked the viewing path of someone who
'randomly' comes in, or have a reference of some sort for people who
are introduced to the site, and have corresponding opportunities for
action presented to them. That could be an activist's parallel to the
commercial website that sends you from the educational pages to the
shopping cart. In fact, that chance to choose to 'do something about
it' is what the women at the Women's Global Leadership Center kick-off
were asking Joy for, when she mentioned 'one woman, one child' as one
model for personal participation in development assistance and relief
work.]

PATTERN LANGUAGES: all
[This is what we refer to when we speak of knowledgebases. It also can
refer to health care or sustainability knowledgebases. It is a key tool
that sustains intelligent action by sharing expertise and understanding
of complex phenomena.]

brings traffic to PERSONAL PRESENCE:
[this can, but doesn't always lead to action. How can we help it do so?]

CATEGORIZED EXCERPTS: ... requests for help
[Direct call to action possible here.]

ONLINE NETWORKING: ... facilitate social networking ...
[What if this fed directly into a project management system, which
itself has enrollment opportunities at every task or campaign?]


Suggestion from Chris of WorldVistA: aim for:
Simplified set of tools behind the scenes that get things done; as
simple an interface for user as possible. similar to email or something
they are used to anyway, where power is there but not in your face;
search is easy. Cut across many data structure in as transparent a way
as possible -- user doesn't need to know how or where the data is
stored. Powerful search tools can make this work. Both the VistA
community and Norm Goundry have the potential to contribute here.


Regards,

Mark


On Saturday, July 10, 2004, at 05:48 PM, Andrius Kulikauskas wrote:

> I share my diagram for a "web system for working openly" with some
> groups that might be interested. I appreciate discussion everywhere,
> and
> I invite you to join us at
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/
> I ask OneVillage.Biz, sourceopen.org, ERDE and others to let me know of
> your special needs.  What should be our priorities?  ERDE's Austrian
> partners have dedicated 1000 euros for me to work in this direction as
> I
> build the ERDE website and support "global villages".  Andrius
> Kulikauskas, http://www.ms.lt
> -----------------------------------------------
>
> Franz Nahrada and I had lively discussion yesterday and today regarding
> globalvillages@yahoogroups.com  This is the discussion group at which
> he's exploring his ideas on the global village.  He's agreed to host
> our
> discussion on a Web system for working openly, because that is a
> pressing need of ours.  Meanwhile, he will be developing his thoughts
> on
> the global village, and inviting others to join us here.  So we hope to
> have creative energy from these two different subjects.  It would be
> useful to indicate in our subject line which topic our letter primarily
> addresses:
> [gv] = global villages
> [wow] = working openly WOW
>
> I think of Franz's explorations as the axis around which we work as we
> put together our Web system for working openly.  Franz has a long love
> for Apple's Hypercard and he was happy to realize that we're heading in
> such a direction.  The difference is that in our case the "objects" are
> "web pages", each with their own functionality.  We want our system to
> connect those web pages usefully.  This is first of all a matter of
> workflow - division of labor for idea flow.  We'll first customize this
> for our key people, then as we learn we'll gradually develop templates
> for use more broadly.  We might think of ourselves as creating a Human
> Web Action Language.  This is the thoughtful breaking down of human
> actions for getting things done on the web.  It is especially important
> in areas of marginal Internet access.  And the Global Village is just
> such an area - access, but never perfect.
>
> I attach a diagram that I've drawn (thank you, Picsie, for the
> suggestion!)  It includes some of the key functionalities that I want
> to
> build, and the workflow they support.  There are five levels of
> intensity of participation, indicating increasing awareness, vision and
> leadership.  Our objects - web pages - may be read, but also edited,
> created, interlinked, and organized.  I mean each of these in the
> context of our community.  Not every web link is one that is relevant
> to
> our community.  Our community needs to emphasize what it finds
> important, it needs to reference that explicitly, in order for its
> participants to become aware of this.
>
> I may point out some key work flows for me:
>
> Raw Content - Uncategorized Excerpts - Categorized Excerpts (they are
> our building blocks) - Weekly Feed - Discussion Groups - Raw Content
>
> Categorized Excerpts - Strategic Presentation - Leader's Mental Map
> (=WOW) - Online Networking
>
> Categorize Excerpts - Document a Pattern - Present a Pattern - Pattern
> Languages
>
> This one is perhaps related to a "web of references" for
> OneVillage.Biz:
> Personal Presence - Search Terms - Feed of New Pages - Intellectual
> Location - Online Networking
>
> My main point is that working as a community we find it more useful to
> separate apart many tasks that we're using to doing at the same time.
> For example, a blog can serve as an "infodump", be a place to think out
> loud, and a place to cultivate an audience.  But when we work as a
> community it makes sense to separate those functions, and worry about
> them one at a time.
>
> I hope my diagram encourages us to think of the community workflow
> process for OneVillage.Biz, sourceopen.org and ERDE.  What are our
> special needs?  How might we improve this, or make this more concrete?
>
> Andrius
>
> Andrius Kulikauskas
> Minciu Sodas
> http://www.ms.lt
> ms@...
> from Vienna, Austria
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
> <websystem.gif>
Mark Roest
mark.roest@...
oneVillage Initiative - Holistic ICT Development for Eco Living
Sustainable development and technologies
http://onevillagefoundation.org/ovf/initiative.html
1.408.777.0450
Yahoo IM: onevillagemark
http://www.ryze.com/go/markroest

Thank you Andrius. Yesterday was really a tremendous day in terms of
breakthrough discussion and developments. Originally I was very unhappy
about the thought that the just created newborn "globalvillages"
mailinglist should have (in reality just temporarily) two subjects,
because I planned to invite many people in here to discuss straightforward
the subject of Global Villages. In fact I did invite some, but the
response was very low which also made me think. We - Andrius and me - were
almost at the point of argument but both gave it a second thought and both
independently came up with the same solution.

There is a saying by Hegel that you learn to swim in the water, not on the
land. What that means is you canot talk about the process of "Erkenntnis"
(a german word that beautifully expands to all sorts of our understanding
of the world) without engaging in it; It is where most of the modern
theory of science falls short. In a similar way the construction of a
system for collaborative work should rather take place in the midst of a
real open investigation process than apart from it. Rather than feeling
"victimized" by this double perspective the people engaging in this open
investigation process (and I am talking about myself here) should feel
"empowered" by this.

It was helpful in this development that I could unfold the concept of
HyperCard in personal discussion with Andrius. I deeply feel that my
motivation and zeal to support this unique tool in the late eighties and
nineties might not be in vain if we can bring the value of the best
concepts to life again in WOW. Most of you might not know HyperCard at
all, so I give my perspective on it. I was for four years doing the
HyperCard developen support for Apple Austria together with Wolfgang Biro,
and saw the opportunity to expand this to empowering usergroup structures,
when Apple managed to kill its own best invention ever (it took three
killings and the Idea of HyperCard is still alive although the product is
not supported any more, see here: http://www.ihug.org)

HyperCard can be called the most powerful single software tool ever
invented - if you do not believe it follow through the stories on that
IHUG site. What makes HyperCard so powerful is not its different technical
features - you might find a better multimedia tool, you might find a
better database - but the combination of seemingly unrelated
functionalities and the possibility to combine them in any possible way.
In one word, the power of HyperCard is based on the fact that it gives all
the power of the computer to the user. Before and after HyperCard we did
not have the full imagination of what that means. Even Linux is built on
the same old dichotomy of "programmers" on one side and "users" on the
other side that hyperCard radically and successfully tried to bridge.

HyperCard was built on the concept that when you personally organize your
information, you want to extend your abilities. So it made no sense to
organize personal information and algorithmic ways to enact and process
this information in different environments. HyperCard treated chuncs of
Information equally as objects-  as for example buttons. There was a human
language to tell the computer in fine granularity what to do with this
information. The task was to create a very close relation between
information and action. And information was considered potential or frozen
action. So for example you could easily put in your document objects with
scripts that produced reports and much more. You had a very close
companion that could "conduct" the whole computer, but you had a way to
embody those ways of conducting in objects that were recognizeable and
humainly stored together with the information.

So each human user of the computer was embodying his set of tasks in a
personal environment that served primarily to organize the work. Hypercard
could open other applications or turn the coffee machine or the TV on;
HyperCard could transmit information to these external devices. A
wonderful example is the CD on Beethoven by Voyager, where an "electronic
book" retrieves the chunc of music that is just analyzed from the CD
player. Instead of focussing on marketing this functionality to the user,
Apple focussed on third party companies to "sell" functionality. But these
companies were rather interested in "specializes", "perfect" tools rather
than HyperCard, also hating the way each functionality was stored openly.
Because HyperCard originally compiled each script on the fly, it used to
be a little bit slower than other applications. But the really crucial
thing was that HyperCard was the Open Source, it contained all the code in
its objects, and people could easily learn from each other. Not the right
tool for a "New Economy" where all profit is based on the monopolisation
of information and the ability to withhold such abilities from users and
competitors.

We built several applications on the base of HyperCard, one that I am
really proud of is the multimedia novel "Electronic Encyclopedia of a
sentimental journey of an export salesman on a hot June Day on the Danube
to Druden" based on a work by Austrian Novelist Andreas Okopenko. My
personal fate is that I lost the possibility to expand that dream into a
world of really useful developments; When Apple had orphaned HyperCard and
dumped it on Claris, I managed to have serious talks at Claris Corp. about
a European Hyper Card User Group. But then the combination of HyperCard
and Filemaker became to much of a threat to get out of control of a single
Operating System and Apple called HyperCard back. Of course it was absurd
to limit this functionality to the Macintosh world. So HyperCard died.

HyperCaqrds father, bill Atkinson was the first person to recognize that
we were making a transition from "Personal" to "Interpersonal" computing -
so he went with other wizzards like Andy Hertzfeld to General Magic where
they worked on Telescript. I said to Andrius yesterday why this could not
work: Telescript was action without information. We have a saying by Kant,
that "Begriffe ohne Anschauung sind leer. Anschauung ohne Begriffe ist
blind". Telecript was like Begriff ohne Anschauung. It means that only if
you combine organizing principles with content, you get something
meaningful, similar to what Hegel says about the attempts to swim on dry
land. The information organized seperately from Telescript on the web, and
Telescript died.

Now we "surf" and "drown" in the web, mostly because we lack the ability
to efficiently organize information. We have information in abundance, but
no organizing principles that help us to structure it well. My state of
despair was growing with the size of the web until I deeply studied the
concept of SUMS by Kim Veltman, who for the first time showed a concept
that allowed us to organize information collectively by connecting
relevant chuncs on a meta-level. So powerful was that experience that we
sat down together and wrote up a call for monasteries of the 21st century
where this work shoulc be done.

Andrius intuition of using a personal information organizer as the Brain
as a meta-browsing-tool seems to me another step towards the
re-integration of interpersonal information organizing. But in fact the
brain just stores information, not action. My intuition was that if
HyperCard was considered a personal web companion rather than a
stand-alone application, it would be the killer application in todays web
world. What Andrius is starting with WOW, is an interpersonal web
companion that allows us to structure and integrate information into
meaningful clusters. I once had a friend who had a passion for beautiful
proverbs and metaphors that she collected like others collect stamps. It
served her well to say kind words to people, out of which reason ever.
Onbe that she originated herself was "I want to walk through the Libraries
of your Mind". Now imagine somebody says that to you, would you not be
flattered? So I called our HyperCard promotion team "Libraries of the
Mind". What I see in WOW is that we can walk through the libraries of each
others mind, or the open investigator is the builder of a virtual library
of external information that can adapt for many purposes.

In fact that is what brings us back to the Global Villages. Only if such
dynamic living libraries exist and make relevant knowledge and services
available to us even in remote location and shaped according to the unique
needs of these locations, we will really feel comfortably to live in the
global villages. So its not to random subjects tied together. They are
intrinsically linked.

Franz

I share my diagram for a "web system for working openly" with some
groups that might be interested. I appreciate discussion everywhere, and
I invite you to join us at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/
I ask OneVillage.Biz, sourceopen.org, ERDE and others to let me know of
your special needs.  What should be our priorities?  ERDE's Austrian
partners have dedicated 1000 euros for me to work in this direction as I
build the ERDE website and support "global villages".  Andrius
Kulikauskas, http://www.ms.lt
-----------------------------------------------

Franz Nahrada and I had lively discussion yesterday and today regarding
globalvillages@yahoogroups.com  This is the discussion group at which
he's exploring his ideas on the global village.  He's agreed to host our
discussion on a Web system for working openly, because that is a
pressing need of ours.  Meanwhile, he will be developing his thoughts on
the global village, and inviting others to join us here.  So we hope to
have creative energy from these two different subjects.  It would be
useful to indicate in our subject line which topic our letter primarily
addresses:
[gv] = global villages
[wow] = working openly WOW

I think of Franz's explorations as the axis around which we work as we
put together our Web system for working openly.  Franz has a long love
for Apple's Hypercard and he was happy to realize that we're heading in
such a direction.  The difference is that in our case the "objects" are
"web pages", each with their own functionality.  We want our system to
connect those web pages usefully.  This is first of all a matter of
workflow - division of labor for idea flow.  We'll first customize this
for our key people, then as we learn we'll gradually develop templates
for use more broadly.  We might think of ourselves as creating a Human
Web Action Language.  This is the thoughtful breaking down of human
actions for getting things done on the web.  It is especially important
in areas of marginal Internet access.  And the Global Village is just
such an area - access, but never perfect.

I attach a diagram that I've drawn (thank you, Picsie, for the
suggestion!)  It includes some of the key functionalities that I want to
build, and the workflow they support.  There are five levels of
intensity of participation, indicating increasing awareness, vision and
leadership.  Our objects - web pages - may be read, but also edited,
created, interlinked, and organized.  I mean each of these in the
context of our community.  Not every web link is one that is relevant to
our community.  Our community needs to emphasize what it finds
important, it needs to reference that explicitly, in order for its
participants to become aware of this.

I may point out some key work flows for me:

Raw Content - Uncategorized Excerpts - Categorized Excerpts (they are
our building blocks) - Weekly Feed - Discussion Groups - Raw Content

Categorized Excerpts - Strategic Presentation - Leader's Mental Map
(=WOW) - Online Networking

Categorize Excerpts - Document a Pattern - Present a Pattern - Pattern
Languages

This one is perhaps related to a "web of references" for OneVillage.Biz:
Personal Presence - Search Terms - Feed of New Pages - Intellectual
Location - Online Networking

My main point is that working as a community we find it more useful to
separate apart many tasks that we're using to doing at the same time.
For example, a blog can serve as an "infodump", be a place to think out
loud, and a place to cultivate an audience.  But when we work as a
community it makes sense to separate those functions, and worry about
them one at a time.

I hope my diagram encourages us to think of the community workflow
process for OneVillage.Biz, sourceopen.org and ERDE.  What are our
special needs?  How might we improve this, or make this more concrete?

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@...
from Vienna, Austria

-------CONTENT OF THIS MAIL---------
- Mapping activities
- Function of Minciu Sodas
- why we need a toolbox of thematically identical mailing list and wikis
- graphical representation tool wanted
-------------------------------------

Thank you Picsie (for joining globalvillages and for your remarks and
suggestions),  I cannot make short sentences but I did a summary.

I support your request but I think this is almost exactly what Andrius is
adressing with his idea of a WOW! System.
It is also a nice coincidence because we are sitting here in Vienna
constantly trying to "map" our endavours.
It all boils down to the question how can we be relevant for each other
and how can we have leverage in what we do...

I would nevertheless like to redirect this question to the "minciu sodas"
list, because its a kind of metaquestion that has no direct relation with
the globalvillages list topic, but is a structural issue that relates to
many groups. Andrius has really managed to get a host of groups going, and
he is by his personal engagement making things increasingly sustainable
and attractive.

I see him as the facilitator of the informal (!) and culturally creative
(!!) counterpiece of a "virtual university" - and someone who is offering
a lot of leverage to participants by constantly "shapeshifting" to
maintain integrity and vitality.

When we create a WOW system for Global Villages on our dedicated domain, I
will see it as my personal duty to draw a topic map of related activities
around globalvillages. I think each mailinglist should be ideally
companion of a wiki and website (possibly blog), so we create an optimum
online investigative environment with tools that complement each other.
And each of the websites or Wikis should have a pictorial representation
tool.  I do not know if I would like theBrain that much for this purpose,
I rather would like to have a graphical equivalent of a Wiki where people
can insert and intensify the mapping.

Or even better, I think that in the long run such a tool would even allow
to represent, browse, compare and process different personal mappings. I
feel really excited about the possibility to read other peoples
globalvillages subject map and study their proximities and distances. It
would be a vital tool for me as an investigator to be in touch with my
online community in this way.

Well we are really entering a technical domain here where the existing
offerings of web technologies are increasingly less facilitating our
general co-operation needs. I am sure Fleming reads this because he is in
our list and I am very proud to have him here. But I kindly ask Andrius to
take up the subject and have it brought home to the MinciuSodas List.

Franz

globalvillages@yahoogroups.com on Freitag, 9. Juli 2004 at 19:18 Uhr +0100
wrote:
>-Drowning in info-
>-Pictorial representation-
>-Short postings-
>
>With so much activity online re global villages, civic entrepreneur
>practices and so on, I find that I am gradually drowning in a sea of
>yahoogroups, discussion forums, wikis, emails and so on.
>
>Is there anybody out there who could create a pictorial
>representation of what groups out there are doing what?
>
>Furthermore, I would make a plea to all of us to use as many short
>sentences with strong active verbs.  Summaries of individual postings
>would also be useful...at the beginning or the end.

-Drowning in info-
-Pictorial representation-
-Short postings-

With so much activity online re global villages, civic entrepreneur
practices and so on, I find that I am gradually drowning in a sea of
yahoogroups, discussion forums, wikis, emails and so on.

Is there anybody out there who could create a pictorial
representation of what groups out there are doing what?

Furthermore, I would make a plea to all of us to use as many short
sentences with strong active verbs.  Summaries of individual postings
would also be useful...at the beginning or the end.

Regards

PICSIE

Today I met with Monika Erb of http://www.bhwnoe.at and Franz Nahrada of
http://www.give.at  They agreed to dedicate a total of 1000 euros for me
to construct the ERDE website (European Rural Development by means of
Education).

I will be able to use this funding to work on a web system for global
villages to openly work together.  Recently Franz and I started a new
discussion group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/ for his
work as an Investigatorius at our laboratory.  I invite us all to join:
   please subscribe by sending a blank message to
globalvillages-subscribe@yahoogroups.com   There we are designing this
system with the help of leaders of OneVillage.Biz, sourceopen.org and
others who would like such a system.

I ask for help as well from my ERDE partners!
This is a system that should serve all of us.

Here is what I invoiced for:

"Construction of an ERDE website as a central reference point for ERDE
activities, including: Registration of a domain for ERDE for twelve
months. Hosting for twelve months.  A page for a leader from each
learning partner that documents their conceptual perspective on the
building blocks they contribute. A set of links for each of these
leaders to pages for further engaging their work.  An online navigation
system WOW that places the activities of ERDE in a wider global context.
   Integration of the ERDE wiki and ERDE discussion group into such a
wider system.  Assistance and coaching for ERDE participants so they
make best use of this online system, including technical service as
needed for them to start their own weblogs."

A first question: What domain name would be best for the ERDE project?
We're thinking of getting  erde.lt  which seems to be available in
Lithuania.  Any other suggestions?

I imagine  erde.lt  as a "brochure" for ERDE that would include pages
for each of us who desire to encapsulate our conceptual perspective.
Then there would be further links that would take us into a broader
online navigation for Global Villages.  Franz will set up another domain
for that.  There I plan to set up a WOW system much as we have for
OneVillage.biz and the AIDS Economy, see:
http://www.onevillage.biz/wow/1.html

I appreciate learning as much as possible about our needs, our
requirements, our personal wishes!

Thank you!

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@...
from Vienna, Austria

Mark, THANK YOU!! for your encouragement, it means a great deal to me.

One more thought regarding TheBrain and WOW.  The data is going from
TheBrain to WOW by way of XML.  So we can do many things with the XML
data that can't be done with the WOW.  It should be possible to do
things that would reference the six pillars / mandala.  Please keep me
posted on what you want!

Regarding helping others in far away places - you note that translating
a letter might cost only $1 or less.  My point, however, is that any
time we have a "tracking problem" then the costs go up very quickly.  It
becomes a "management problem".  What do you do, for example, if they
don't send the letter?  What do you do, if the child didn't get the
help, or the child died before they got the help, or if the child is
missing, or if the wrong child got helped?  None of these questions are
important for the AIDS Economy, and all of a sudden they become the
central thing that you become "accountable" for.  It is a ficitious form
of accounting - I personally think, from my experience, that it
encourages the wrong kind of thinking on the donors' part.

Another problem is reducing help to giving money.  It's not especially
helpful to give money if it's not serving to develop a personal
relationship.  Because, much more than money, we need people to get
personally involved.  And not in a fantasy way, but in a way that honors
reality.  Maybe this means like Christ says, "Love your neighbor" - love
the people who can show you mercy, who can be good to you (like the Good
Samaritan), who are close to you, who are like you.  Realistically, what
is the chance of a professional woman in California having a personal
relationship with a child in Africa?  That would be exceptional.  Much
more likely is for her to have a personal relationship with an African
software developer who needs computer books, or an African doctor who
needs help getting a visa, or an African school teacher who mentally
seeks global connection, or an African university student who is helping
with IT in their village.  And it's much more likely that the children
will be actually helped in the latter way, because the software
developer, doctor, school teacher, student and their colleagues all give
much more practical, organic, local help than we can from far away.
Especially if we encourage and expect these people to reach out to
others, and focus on the one who do "work for free", so they understand
that this is why we are supporting them.  I personally think this
approach is much more relevant to the AIDS Economy and the strengths of
OneVillage.Biz and the mindset that we need in the West.  You see the
benefits of us supporting each other - key strugglers in the "privileged
world" and a great step would be to support such key strugglers in the
African world.  Just like we struggle, so do they.  We can build a web
system that shows our importance for them, and their importance for
those further on, and makes concrete for every potential donor the human
logic that I am trying to convey.  I think that would be a great
achievement - elevating all of us.

Yes, I think your teenager program is great to develop.  Again, I will
emphasize that so long as we don't need to "track" what we're doing,
everything can be quite efficient.  If you can nurture a trustworthy
traveler, then they will know how to spend money well when they get
there.  But if you impose on them an accountability, then it becomes
very wasteful.  Tracking children in Africa seems crazy to me.  Even if
it can be done.  Imagine Africans tracking senior citizens in
California.  I'm very interested to develop ways that of eliminating
tracking and monitoring costs, as we have by focusing on people who
"work for free" and rewarding them for their work already done by
relying on their good behavior and good judgement.

Here I draw on my experience in Lithuania - helping a wide variety of
people, including my god children.

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@...


------------------------------------------
Mark Roest wrote, presumed copyright:
  > I'd like to address your comments from July 3, referring to the apparent
  > demand for one woman, one orphan matchmaking software, and the idea of
  > verifying the use of donations to the donors:


Andrius:
  >   My gut instinct is that this kind of mindset can be almost
  > destructive.  For example, I have heard that $10 will pay for an orphan
  > to go to school all year.  But I imagine that getting a letter (or news
  > in English) from a particular orphan might cost $100.  And asking an
  > entrepreneur to document and verify and certify that the particular
  > money was "spent on its dedicated purpose" might cost $1,000.


Mark:
  > Getting a short letter translated in-country is likely to cost under
  > $1.00, according to Ed. In addition, we're looking at a different
  > scenario, in which teenagers are turning into sociologist / journalists
  > and satisfying their thirst for meaning by doing so, and the whole
  > village is turning activist and shedding the experience of helplessness,
  > in a context of continuous, rich communication. In this scenario, the
  > village puts together the request for assistance that the village agrees
  > is needed, and native-language speakers in the diaspora are coordinating
  > planning and implementation of aid projects. These diaspora members (or
  > local translators) can do any necessary translation.

Mark:
  > Thus we are not looking at an outside consultant coming in to judge or
  > verify, other than an occasional audit: we are looking at one more
  > labeled video clip uploaded into a knowledgebase that records progress
  > that everyone knows about, and emailed to the donor. On Saturday we
  > visited Ade and Remi, and met Agaja, and we heard that the oral history
  > is still alive and well in the villages. The digital camera or video is
  > an expansion of that record.

Andrius:
  > I think we know what would help.  We need a "web of references" so that
  > we can all see the relationships by which we are spanning our worlds,
  > from the funders all of the way to the children.  We need to be aware of
  > the real "weak points" in that web, and the kinds of places where each
  > of us can help in different ways: perhaps an African school teacher
  > needs a chance to travel, perhaps a regional hospital needs medical
  > books, perhaps an African software developer needs worldwide contacts,
  > perhaps a US social entrepreneur needs a part-time job.
  >
  > I can try to think through a way for us to show that web - an online
  > networking system - that would reference all of our work that is on the
  > web and makes us real and visible.  And that would help people
  > independently support participants.  And would let us register needs,
  > help, thank yous, etc. as needed for the donors.


Mark:

  > It seems that you are already off to a great start with WOW and The
  > Brain! As a team, we are plunging into turning the extensive writing we
  > have done into nodes, links and paragraph descriptions, of partners,
  > prospects, projects / interests, and their relationships with each other
  > and the mandala, to be sent to you after we review it in batches, every
  > few days. It is likely to become a very rich web shortly, so the
  > question will become one of picking out the information that is most
  > relevant to either specific project needs, or an understanding of the
  > structure and dynamics of the relationships.
  >
  > We are likely to be doing this in clusters around core interests /
  > projects. That may make it easier for you to plan how to map the topics
  > in relation to each other. Please let us know how we can make that
  > easier for you. Also, please establish a rapid review cycle -- or do you
  > think a wiki-like review model, in which change logs are always
  > available to all participants, would be a good approach?
  >
  > Looking forward, can you display a taxonomy at varying degrees of
  > resolution? In other words, can you already enable a visitor to look at
  > major categories and instances to a specified granularity? For example,
  > show a diagram in The Brain that has the mandala pie slices as the major
  > nodes, and then shows partners, projects, and links to other partners
  > and their projects that may be in a different pie slice? If that were
  > displayed as projects surrounding the mandala, there might be a forest
  > of arcs and connected to its outer rim at each of their ends.
  >
  > A sustainable information and communication ecology
  > As we build the web of contacts and projects (interests), we will be
  > identifying common and universal needs, as well as 'surfacing'
  > relatively unique individual needs and desires. As the web is used to
  > organize the various, and complementary, human and technological
  > resources needed to create sustainable economies and unite communities,
  > it will become a kind of ecology which will have natural niches for
  > individual thinkers.
  >
  > As this information and communication ecology expands and grows
  > stronger, software may be designed to combine the specific requests with
  > their geographic and qualitative context to identify, categorize and
  > prioritize matches.
  >
  > Within specific geographic locations such as villages, the diaspora and
  > other interested parties would be organized to work with their village
  > of choice -- and to work with others in their professional discipline
  > and complementary ones as needed to develop more programs. Individuals
  > would be able to identify each other and form bonds of spiritual and
  > material support in the context of the communal support system, which
  > will need to include procedures and communications designed to ensure
  > that no one is left out of real opportunities for growth because they
  > are less attractive or less interesting.
  >
  > Immediate need
  > But that is medium term. In the short term, we focus on identifying and
  > supporting potential leaders who are committed to service through
  > maximizing human potential, and something simple would do -- ideally a
  > simple extension of, or even a simple procedure within, The Brain and
  > oneVillage WOW as you have already provided them.


Andrius:
  > Often funders try to "eliminate waste".  But I think we forget that the
  > foundation of our life is that "waste", "slack", "surplus", what we can
  > give to each other.  We need for that to exist openly as a "layer of
  > fat" all along our web of relationships.  Otherwise we are just skin and
  > bones.  My experience is that the strongest way to build relationships
  > is often that which seems most wasteful:  travel, gifts, or the rich
  > working amongst the poor.  Really, what matters is that our actions be
  > open and belong to everybody.  That way we can all share in our generous
  > giving.  And we also see more honestly what the impact is, and that
  > encourages us to give thoughtfully, and most importantly to give
  > ourselves - to find ways to participate directly.  Because our
  > relationship is much more important then any money that we can give,
  > especially if we want to help people by integrating them.
  >
  > We think of the AIDS Economy as a challenge so big that it forces us to
  > think differently.


Mark:
  > Amen and Ashe!
  >
  > Thank you very much for your commitment to humanity, for your hard work,
  > for your patience and determination, and for your very kind words to
  > others about the people and mission of oneVillage Foundation.
  >
  > Regards,
  >
  > Mark
  >
  >
  >
  > Mark Roest
  > mark.roest@...
  > oneVillage Initiative - Holistic ICT Development for Eco Living
  > Sustainable development and technologies
  > http://onevillagefoundation.org/ovf/initiative.html
  > 1.408.777.0450
  > Yahoo IM: onevillagemark
  > http://www.ryze.com/go/markroest

Mark, Edward, Thank you for your letters.
I am forwarding them to our lab's new group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/ for Franz Nahrada's work
as an Investigatorius at our laboratory.
That's where I'd like to discuss our work together on a "web system for
working openly".  Marcin Jakubowski, Flemming Funch and Suhit Anantula
are also there.

Mark, TheBrain only runs on Windows  :(
However, you can also participate in WOW by adding material - and
suggesting links and pages - through the wiki pages in the upper frames
at http://www.onevillage.biz/wow/1.html
For example, here is a page for Edward:
http://www.onevillage.biz/wow/137.html
and here is a page for Mark:
http://www.onevillage.biz/wow/138.html
and you can use these as "drop-off" places for links that you want in
the system.
We can monitor your pages (and other wiki pages) for updates by going to
"View recently updated pages": http://www.onevillage.biz/wow/193.html

This is crude, but it might work, and we can improve it.  For example, I
need to get the Search fuction to work, and if the PHP Wiki gets a
search function, then I will make good use of that, too.

I will keep improving our ability to participate effectively.  Part of
the logic of WOW is that a single editor with their own vision and a
nimble tool (like TheBrain) can at times organize information more
effeciently and intelligently than a "self-organized" community.  My
plan is that Joy, Jeff and I will keep trading the role of editor.  Even
if we just make updates once a week, still that can be quite lively and
helpful.  Also, I will work to improve this process so that perhaps it
is possible to upload TheBrain directly and have the changes made
automatically without my help.  After that, the next step will be to
allow online participants to add pages to WOW etc.  This will require
some synchronization.  Ultimately, we can make this a system where all
of the information can be added through a web interface and that will be
synchronized with anything added by editors who are using TheBrain.
This is something that we might ask funders to fund.  Or we may find
clients who need such functionality.

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@...


Mark Roest wrote, presumed copyright:

>
>
> Dear Andrius,
>
> Two of us, Ed Cherlin and I, do not operate on PC and do have Linux
> computers. Are you able to set us up to run The Brain, and add data to
> it and to oneVillage WOW, to augment what Joy and Jeff are doing? If so,
> we would both appreciate it very much if you would.
>
> Joy said you talked about a six-month project budget to do all that she
> and Jeff talked with you about. I think we still need to have a quote
> for a basic, fast solution to our critical needs, which can be revised
> in six months as more is built. That would be useful to us all in
> understanding what our choices are. What can we have now without
> building a large application from scratch? Can you bolt an existing
> e-commerce engine onto WOW?
>
> I'd like to address your comments from July 3, referring to the apparent
> demand for one woman, one orphan matchmaking software, and the idea of
> verifying the use of donations to the donors:
>
>   My gut instinct is that this kind of mindset can be almost
> destructive.  For example, I have heard that $10 will pay for an orphan
> to go to school all year.  But I imagine that getting a letter (or news
> in English) from a particular orphan might cost $100.  And asking an
> entrepreneur to document and verify and certify that the particular
> money was "spent on its dedicated purpose" might cost $1,000.
>
> Getting a short letter translated in-country is likely to cost under
> $1.00, according to Ed. In addition, we're looking at a different
> scenario, in which teenagers are turning into sociologist / journalists
> and satisfying their thirst for meaning by doing so, and the whole
> village is turning activist and shedding the experience of helplessness,
> in a context of continuous, rich communication. In this scenario, the
> village puts together the request for assistance that the village agrees
> is needed, and native-language speakers in the diaspora are coordinating
> planning and implementation of aid projects. These diaspora members (or
> local translators) can do any necessary translation.
>
> Thus we are not looking at an outside consultant coming in to judge or
> verify, other than an occasional audit: we are looking at one more
> labeled video clip uploaded into a knowledgebase that records progress
> that everyone knows about, and emailed to the donor. On Saturday we
> visited Ade and Remi, and met Agaja, and we heard that the oral history
> is still alive and well in the villages. The digital camera or video is
> an expansion of that record.
>
>
>
> I think we know what would help.  We need a "web of references" so that
> we can all see the relationships by which we are spanning our worlds,
> from the funders all of the way to the children.  We need to be aware of
> the real "weak points" in that web, and the kinds of places where each
> of us can help in different ways: perhaps an African school teacher
> needs a chance to travel, perhaps a regional hospital needs medical
> books, perhaps an African software developer needs worldwide contacts,
> perhaps a US social entrepreneur needs a part-time job.
>
> I can try to think through a way for us to show that web - an online
> networking system - that would reference all of our work that is on the
> web and makes us real and visible.  And that would help people
> independently support participants.  And would let us register needs,
> help, thank yous, etc. as needed for the donors.
>
> It seems that you are already off to a great start with WOW and The
> Brain! As a team, we are plunging into turning the extensive writing we
> have done into nodes, links and paragraph descriptions, of partners,
> prospects, projects / interests, and their relationships with each other
> and the mandala, to be sent to you after we review it in batches, every
> few days. It is likely to become a very rich web shortly, so the
> question will become one of picking out the information that is most
> relevant to either specific project needs, or an understanding of the
> structure and dynamics of the relationships.
>
> We are likely to be doing this in clusters around core interests /
> projects. That may make it easier for you to plan how to map the topics
> in relation to each other. Please let us know how we can make that
> easier for you. Also, please establish a rapid review cycle -- or do you
> think a wiki-like review model, in which change logs are always
> available to all participants, would be a good approach?
>
> Looking forward, can you display a taxonomy at varying degrees of
> resolution? In other words, can you already enable a visitor to look at
> major categories and instances to a specified granularity? For example,
> show a diagram in The Brain that has the mandala pie slices as the major
> nodes, and then shows partners, projects, and links to other partners
> and their projects that may be in a different pie slice? If that were
> displayed as projects surrounding the mandala, there might be a forest
> of arcs and connected to its outer rim at each of their ends.
>
> A sustainable information and communication ecology
> As we build the web of contacts and projects (interests), we will be
> identifying common and universal needs, as well as 'surfacing'
> relatively unique individual needs and desires. As the web is used to
> organize the various, and complementary, human and technological
> resources needed to create sustainable economies and unite communities,
> it will become a kind of ecology which will have natural niches for
> individual thinkers.
>
> As this information and communication ecology expands and grows
> stronger, software may be designed to combine the specific requests with
> their geographic and qualitative context to identify, categorize and
> prioritize matches.
>
> Within specific geographic locations such as villages, the diaspora and
> other interested parties would be organized to work with their village
> of choice -- and to work with others in their professional discipline
> and complementary ones as needed to develop more programs. Individuals
> would be able to identify each other and form bonds of spiritual and
> material support in the context of the communal support system, which
> will need to include procedures and communications designed to ensure
> that no one is left out of real opportunities for growth because they
> are less attractive or less interesting.
>
> Immediate need
> But that is medium term. In the short term, we focus on identifying and
> supporting potential leaders who are committed to service through
> maximizing human potential, and something simple would do -- ideally a
> simple extension of, or even a simple procedure within, The Brain and
> oneVillage WOW as you have already provided them.
>
>
> Often funders try to "eliminate waste".  But I think we forget that the
> foundation of our life is that "waste", "slack", "surplus", what we can
> give to each other.  We need for that to exist openly as a "layer of
> fat" all along our web of relationships.  Otherwise we are just skin and
> bones.  My experience is that the strongest way to build relationships
> is often that which seems most wasteful:  travel, gifts, or the rich
> working amongst the poor.  Really, what matters is that our actions be
> open and belong to everybody.  That way we can all share in our generous
> giving.  And we also see more honestly what the impact is, and that
> encourages us to give thoughtfully, and most importantly to give
> ourselves - to find ways to participate directly.  Because our
> relationship is much more important then any money that we can give,
> especially if we want to help people by integrating them.
>
> We think of the AIDS Economy as a challenge so big that it forces us to
> think differently.
>
> Amen and Ashe!
>
> Thank you very much for your commitment to humanity, for your hard work,
> for your patience and determination, and for your very kind words to
> others about the people and mission of oneVillage Foundation.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mark
>
>
>
> Mark Roest
> mark.roest@...
> oneVillage Initiative - Holistic ICT Development for Eco Living
> Sustainable development and technologies
> http://onevillagefoundation.org/ovf/initiative.html
> 1.408.777.0450
> Yahoo IM: onevillagemark
> http://www.ryze.com/go/markroest
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

"jeff buderer" <jeff@...> on Donnerstag, 8. Juli 2004 at 22:36
Uhr +0100 wrote:
>Franz why don't we continue the discussion on the global village yahoo
>group that Andrius just created?
>
>globalvillages@yahoogroups.com
>
> Jeff

Everybody is very welcome to subscribe to this new list, but I would like
to renew my call for private mails on the subject I was asking about.

Or even better, invite you all to subscibe to the new group and keep in
mind its purpose: to focus on the new potentials of cooperating local
groups and circumstances.

In a private mail, Tony Judge brought forward the following challenge:

>What would happen if resources were transferred from a high resource
>group to a multitude of low resource groups?
>
>Why do you assume that the low resource groups, or some significant
>proportion of them, would use the funds "wisely", whatever that is?
>Remember the story about the talents?.

That is indeed the central question. Martin Pedersen has touched it in a
different way the other way around: why arent we supporting the creative
multitude more. For example: why are we always clunging to the corporate &
high-resource yahoo instead of empowering the hackers. Tonys question
forces us to look closer.

I think this question is complicated and we all know part of the answers,
we all know more or less the big picture, but we have not brought the
parts to coherence. I know that Tony has written years ago about ideas
very similar to Global Villages (One needs to just run a Google Search
like on "villages" and "Anthony Judge" and will find a wealth of material)
and is far from being clueless here.

Lets talk fundamentals:
I think of "local groups" as crystallisation points of decentralised,
sophisticated and organic "global villages" in line with Marshall McLuhans
"GlobalVillage2" definition. In "GlobalVillage1" McLuhan emphasizes on the
disturbing and disruptive effect that the electronic media with their
omnipresence of instantly distributed multisensual "reality" inflict on
the sensorium of the masses; he is talking of "considerable pain" and of
destructive reactions there. This is the famous passage in "War and Peace
in the Global Village" where he highlights the deceptive, pain-inflicting
and destructive qualities  of a media environment in which  "everything is
brought to our attention as if it happened in our village". Yet there is a
"GlobalVillage2", as I would like to call it, when he states:  >"Our
speed-up today is not a slow explosion outward from center to margins but
an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our
specialist and fragmented civilization of center-margin structure is
suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized
bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village."<
(Understanding Media 93-94).

This new world by its very definition breaks the center-margin structure;
intelligent automation replaces gigantomanic industry for many of its
results, and instead of the "big machine who does not really care if it
turns out cornflakes or cadillacs" we see the emergence of
productive-reproductive cycles driven by decentralized and organically
arranged microautomation in conjunction with natural cyclical flows of
matter and energy, a grand retrieval of the multipurpose village where
"human scale" becomes again the most relevant measurement factor. We see
an enormous crowd of hackers developing a knowledge base for this
decentralized circumstance that allows us to challenge all the pests
(ignorance, threats and storms and tides) that made rural and
decentralised life so miserable in previous ages.

So strong is this tendency that we might not be able to talk about social
change at all without talking about this new form of human habitat,
society and culture as its elementary form; the village as the core cell
of a new social structure based on the voluntary association of empowered
producers, taking control of their own life. Its the spatial manifestation
of decentralised automation and humanized ecosystems, of free cooperation
and autonomy. Its an expanded choice because each of these new villages
will neccesarily gather around an intentionally chosen part of the human
experience; not fate neither blood nor soil will have us live there in an
age where global mobility is a reality, but special and individual flavour
and values that emerge out of conscious social self-reflection.

Still there is another reality. I am well aware that the physical and
human resouces in an urban environment are very powerful and efficient.
There is even more to it: This power grid is the very condition that
allows us to think about such an extent of decentralisation. We are
bringing a lot of physical stuff with us when be bring the mind home; not
only the computers to connect and facilitate the global communication and
design process; but all the technologies that enable us to create an
effective circumstance in which we can co-operate fully with our physical
environment. Take, as a primitive example, an electric generator or a
windmill, now part of local operating networks co-operating with passive
solar buildings and greenhouses. All these prosumer technologies, for a
very long time, will be products of high-resource environments as Tony
puts it.

Yet the capacity to conceive and combine those technologies, to design and
determine their shape and function, will increasingly migrate to networks
of shared collective intelligence. That is what I mean and that is what I
want to support. The ultimate shape of technology that we need and want to
see cannot any more be generated on a corporate desktop. A shift in design
leadership has to take place, allowing corporations to even perceive this
as an opportunity to adapt to, a more safe circumstance that the one they
are operating under now, a jungle of prorietory specifications in which
they get increasingly lost. A few days ago I have again had a long phone
conversation with Marcus Merz, maintainer of the long term silent german
Open-Source-Car project. He told me the entities bugging him most to
resume his work are the car industries! Unbelievable? Give it the
privilege of doubt!

In a GlobalVillages Forum and hopeful Global Village Network (thank you
Tony for keeping the place open for this ghost organisation since eight
years) we will not really deal with cars, besides electrical Mini-Cars
that fit in the tubes on the backsides of our houses, the "mews" or
"insignificant serviceways" that another Tony, namely Tony Gwilliam has
conceived in his grand vision of the global villages, to give place to the
lavish pedestrian "greenways" in front of our homes in which we want to
recenter our social life. But even here we are creating a circumstance
which sets new order parameters for the industries.

But we need support to build this local design leadership. Indeed, we need
a transfer of resources. How can we achieve that? Thats a question to ask
in this new forum and I beg you to be specific on that if you join it.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/

Thank you all for your consideration.

Franz

Thank you Andrius for this great step forward!

I feel the installation of a dedicated globalvillages mailing list is
giving me the opportunity to bring together the circle of 200 or so people
that has shown dedicated interest in the subject of Global Villages in the
course of the last 15 years and not to loose them with changes of focus or
email adress.

I am also looking for a suitable domain to set up a wiki for working
openly. We have created Dorfwiki, but this is primarily a meeting point
between various projects in german and I found out that there is not very
much support yet for fractal Wikis.

I think in a first step I would also like to define what is a Global
Village - as the term is allready used in the net in plural by a small
providership in England. (www.globalvillages.net aka gvuk) it might be
wise to start with a provisional definition.

Global Villages as the subject of this list are small settlements or
relatively self-conttained units within larger settlement like
neighbourhoods which meet the following criteria:
- there is a process going on to intentionally foster local development
and sustainability
- which is based on local actors communication and exchange
- which is combined with the need for information and good practises how
to improve and augment the process
- which is met by facilities who intentionally want to use the potential
of global information, communication, co-operation and co-construction.

Interesting: a google search braught up 3570 hits - so the term is getting
popular! when I look at those, it seems half a year of research would not
be enough to browse that pile. It seems the term is magically suited to
attract the semantic diversity of topics involved. I looked at the first
three and my appetite was enlarged.

http://www.boston.com/travel/articles/2003/11/16/global_villages_where_everyone_\
is_challenged/
(Yes, the aspect of village as meeting place is important)

http://www.heifer.org/Learn/Global_Villages/Index.shtml
(Marcin you got to look at this!)

http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dabrent/mcluhan/globvill.htm
Dough Brent proves why we are justified using McLuhans term in a creative
way; but we also have the blessing of EricMcLuhan for this ;-)

and so on....

I also gave another short account here in German:

http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?GlobaleD%f6rfer

it looks exciting and I hope that many people will join this list.

Franz

Hi!

This is an open group for supporting Franz Nahrada as an Investigatorius
of the Minciu Sodas laboratory as he explores and develops his vision of
"global villages".

We're starting by exploring our needs for a "web system for working
openly".  I'm sending the first part of a longer letter that I'm
writing.  I appreciate your thoughts here and look forward to involving
more people, all are welcome.

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Direktorius
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt



I'm sharing my vision for a "web system for working openly". Some parts
of this system are already in operation.  There is modest funding for me
to work on other parts.  I hope together we might adapt, extend and
apply this system to advance our many projects.  It is a map of the key
functionality that I think we can create of our own efforts.  We may
also find clients or funders who would benefit from accelerating our work.

This system is an outgrowth of my work at the Minciu Sodas laboratory,
http://www.ms.lt, where we have brought together 75 active and 750
supportive "independent thinkers".  My strategy is to focus our
network's energy on those individuals whose open, sharing, dedicated
work might help us care ever more deeply about thinking and all of life.
   This summer, several of these leaders have asked for our help to
create a project management system for working openly.
- Joy Village, Jeff Buderer, Mark Roest, Edward Cherlin of
OneVillage.Biz have motivated me to adapt my WOW (Working Openly WOW)
online navigation system http://www.onevillage.biz/wow/1.html for the
AIDS 2004 Conference, and it's interplaying nicely with the wiki
http://www.aids2004wiki.org  We're looking to write larger proposals.
- Franz Nahrada and Monika Erb of ERDE (European Regional Develoment by
means of Education) are dedicating 1000 euros for me to build the ERDE
website, and use our WOW online navigation system to showcase "global
villages".
- Marcin Jakubowski of http://www.sourceopen.org has asked me to propose
a project management system that would satisfy his vision.  We're hoping
that I might work this fall from his farm in Madison, Wisconsin.

All three of these initiatives, and also our Minciu Sodas laboratory,
have a shared need for a project management system for working openly.
I will describe my vision for the "core" of that system, and then also
mention some modules to meet our special needs.

My strategy is to focus my energies, and our lab's energies, on those
individuals who show the way for us by their example. Learning by
example is the whole point of working openly.
- "Instigators", those who satisfy the basic requirements for openly
getting things done.
- "Investigators", those who continuously challenge themselves as they
develop their vision, and thereby inspire and challenge us as well.

We have started an Open People Network and found it to be effective for
self-selecting effective Instigators.
http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?OpenPeople
We simply ask people to declare an online venue where we may assume that
their content is in the Public Domain except as it notes otherwise.
(We should probably also expect participants to be generating at least
one item per week.)  Evidently, this selects for generously-spirited
social networkers.  We can invest ourselves in these people knowing that
they can make great use of our support.  A major concern is to help them
find ample part-time or full-time work by which they can make a living
as they pursue their endeavors.  I have set up a mailing list to
coordinate our activity: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/opnw/  If you're
a member, or would like to become one, send a blank message to
opnw-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and I'll let you in, or work with you so
you might join.  I want this to be an inclusive but focused and
responsive network, with clear entry criteria and ample benefits.