Optimist. Instigator. Facilitator. Explorer.
enabling communities and organisations to build better futures for all, together
What does it mean to be living in a hyperconnected world? How is it changing the way we communicate, relate, work and consume – and what impact is this having...
Adam Bandt launches Ideas for Melbourne. Inspired by amazing community-based projects springing up in cities and towns all around the world, like New York City’s Highline, Renew Newcastle, and Hepburn...
Hi everyone, it is a pleasure to be asked to provide an update on the Social Change Collaboratory group and what some of us have been up to recently. First...
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~ Bucky Fuller Gathering ’11 is the inaugural Gathering...
Originally posted at http://gathering11.net/start-building/ Something needs to change. It’s clear that industrial age institutions and systems aren’t the answer to today’s complex social and environmental issues. Albert Einstein once said,...
Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has. ~ Margaret Mead In January...
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~ Bucky Fuller
Gathering '11 brings together leading thinkers, change-makers and collaborators from across Australia and around the world. Our purpose: to explore, discover and co-create pathways to a future of real solutions to the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges.
At Gathering ’11, we’re coming together to ask:
How might we tap into the potential of emerging technologies, networks, and systems to co-create a thrivable new world?
Where are the opportunities – and what do we need – to build pathways toward a new economy, a cleaner environment, resilient communities, and a happier planet?
What can we all do to build better futures?
Gathering ’11 will provide a space to support the emergence of socially innovative and transformative ideas.
Gathering ’11 will provide a space and experience that supports the emergence of socially innovative and transformative ideas. Using the World Caféprocess, Open Space Technology and drawing from the methodology of Improv, Presencing and Theory U, we have collaboratively developed a program to transform inspiration into action with positive social impact.
At Gathering ’11 you will be inspired by presentations, dive deep in to discussions and together develop ideas on how to co-create solutions to today’s pressing societal challenges. You will be working with people who are leaders in the use and development of emerging technologies and systems, to co-create plans for projects, services and enterprises with world-changing impact.
Register for Gathering '11 here.
Deborah Frieze explains the “two loops,” Berkana Institute’s perspective on systems change.
We believe that the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The fun theory. http://www.thefuntheory.com
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.
The Living Principles for Design framework is a catalyst for driving positive cultural change. It distills the four streams of sustainability – environment, people, economy, and culture – into a roadmap that is understandable, integrated, and most importantly, actionable. Designers, business leaders, and educators can use The Living Principles to guide every decision, every day.
Every revolution begins from the bottom up. Fed up with the status quo? Tired of the 20th century? Then don’t just talk about it. Reject it and refuse it. Build a better 21st century instead.
Real change doesn’t begin with governments, presidents, or prime ministers. It begins with each of us. In the 20th century, never-ending mass-marketing, monopoly, and mega-politics came together to convince us, each and every one, that we’re not really free: just free enough to choose between different flavors of the same old toxic junk. It was a trick, a ploy, a television hallucination. We’re the freest people in history. It’s time to use it like we meant it.
One of history’s greatest builders once said: “be the change you want to see in the world”. Let me update Gandhi’s wisdom for the next decade. Want a revolution? Be the revolution you want to see in the world.
So what can you do? Here are eight ways to kick start betterness:…
The complete Betterness Manifesto, by Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review.
From Human Ventures
Manifesto
we are compassionate
we are diverse
we are creative
we are purposeful
we are hopeful
we are enquiring
we are advocates
we are innovators
we are enablers
we are custodians
we are connected
we are HUMAN.
We live in a time, more than any other time in history, with broad prosperity and longevity of life.
We live in a time, more than any other time in history, where people have access to the tools and resources to have a voice and to be heard.
We live in an age of global information and communication, yet people are increasingly more isolated, and family breakdown is on the rise.
People are working longer hours and face increasing rates of depression, and poor mental health.
Faceless entities and globalisation deliver products and services on demand, yet little is being invested back into communities and there is limited connection with the people and ecosystems that ensure our standards of living are maintained.
Our environment and natural resources are under significant strain.
The rich are getting richer, yet the poor remain very poor.
We need positive change.
“The biggest disease today is… the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference toward one’s neighbour.”1
By diminishing others, we diminish ourselves.
It is not enough to be tolerant.
It is not enough to do no harm.
In 2008, researchers proved the theory that on average we are bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of little more than 6 people.2 This understanding exists as more than a gimmick or a social experiment.
We realise we are part of something bigger than ourselves and that “the only way we can ever be human is together”.3
We strive for a new paradigm that considers and encourages social, economic, cultural and environmental benefits in all human activity.
We actively uphold and seek to realise the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Convention on the Rights of the Child.
We take our passion, skills and networks and give them expression in all areas of our life.
We use our creativity to challenge, to question, to reinvent, to discover new solutions to old and emerging problems.
We use our powers for good, not evil (or indifference).
We work to equip and empower the vulnerable, poor, unheard, and under-valued.
We share the stories that need to be told.
Not the syndicated and dehumanizing violence, mayhem, crime and objectification fed to us through ‘popular’ media. Rather, the stories that dispel myths, communicate ideas, educate, enlighten, heal and unite.
We harness the power of creativity to positively change people’s lives.
Not just to sell more stuff to more people.
We harness the power of entrepreneurship as an agent of community benefit and to redress disadvantage.
We actively promote and equip people, initiatives and services that enrich humanity and create a better future for all.
We endorse this manifesto and seek to share its desire for peace and hope.
Footnotes:
1 Mother Teresa
2 The Guardian, 3 August 2008
3 The Most Reverend Desmond M. Tutu
How cognitive surplus will change the world
Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose collaboration — and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower — will change the way society works.
Each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
How complexity leads to simplicity…
In just three-and-a-half minutes Eric Berlow illustrates perfectly that “complex doesn’t always equal complicated” and that with the right approach to data, patterns, insights and solutions can emerge to issues previously regarded as complicated.
What is Thrivability?
In early 2010, seventy authors submitted their perspectives on the values, qualities, cycles, and actions that comprise Thrivability.
RSA Animate: The Empathic Civilisation ~ Jeremy Rifkin
Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Within a single generation, digital media and the World Wide Web have transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture, from the way we learn and work to the ways in which we socialize and even conduct war. But is the technology moving faster than we can adapt to it? And is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we’ve gained?
In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, FRONTLINE presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world.
With Douglas Rushkoff.
Psychologists have been studying how we try to influence each other for many years. I’ve been covering some highlights of this research, which are collected here.
Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
“Our story is the story of the universe. Every piece of everyone, of everything you love and everything you hate, of the thing you hold most precious, was assembled by the forces of nature in the first few minutes of the life of the universe, transformed in the hearts of the stars or created in their fiery deaths.
And when you die, those pieces will be returned to the universe in the endless cycle of death and rebirth. What a wonderful thing it is to be part of that universe. And what a story, what a majestic story.”
Professor Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe.
Another mind expanding, soul tingling post from Kevin Kelly in The Technium today.
Every year at year’s end the intellectual impresario (and my literary agent) John Brockman asks his clients and friends a Question. For 2012 the question was WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? About 200 of us answered, compiled here. The collection is a good read.
My answer:
We Are Stardust
Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that?
From one of my favourite blogs, The Technium, by Kevin Kelly
I live about 2 km from the ocean. I rode down on my bike today and just hung out on the shore to watch the waves crashing over each other. This is what it looked like on our beach in Pacifica. As I sat on some rocks watching the waves roll in and the wind whipping the foam at the top, and the sun shinning through the crest of the wave, I was overcome with the certainty that everything I was seeing was immaterial. It was real, but it was not solid. Despite the hard rocks I was sitting on, despite the gritty sand on my feet, despite the pounding water in the surf, despite the force of wind on my cheeks, despite my knowledge of how fatal the ocean can be to life, despite all these clear and unmistakeable signals, it was (and still is) clearer yet, that at their essences, all these things are really made of something intangible, without weight, something close to what we think of as information.
Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. What is a oxygen atom made of? Not oxygen, but of smaller particles, like protons and electrons. And what are they made of? Mostly space. In a lecture I just watched, Brian Cox gave a figure for how empty an atom is. It is 99.9999999999999% space. And what is that remaining 0.000000000000001% non-space made of? Nothing that we would call hard, or material. It is some wavicle, some quantum superposition, some intangible force. Maybe it is simply information. We actually don’t know what matter is at the bottom, but we do know it is fungible into energy and information.
So in a very real sense, the drops of water splashed up by waves thundering on the beach before me, and the sand churned up from the beach, are just patterns of the immaterial. Water and sand are real patterns just as the waves are real patterns; but they are patterns of a kind of nothingness.
I know the monks on the tops of mountains have been saying the real world is immaterial for eons, but the difference is that now we say can it precisely, and in such a scientific way that we can predict what else we should see if this view is correct. So far we can’t use ordinary words to describe what this fundamental intangible is. Wavicles don’t mean anything. Neither does the concept of a quantum particle being in two places at once. All we have is the language of mathematics, which few can speak. And what the maths say is that the tons of water rolling in under the light of a sun 93 millions miles away and pounding the sand in front of me is all really mostly nothing, and the little that is not nothing, is really just another kind of nothing.
This is hard to see at sunset on the beach along the edge of the Pacific Ocean. But this afternoon I could see it.
This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
Walt Whitman (via girlwithoutwings)
What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force… When we are listened to …a little creative fountain inside us begins to spring up and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisdom… Now this little creative fountain is in us all. It is the spirit, or the intelligence, or the imagination—whatever you want to call it. It is when people really listen to us, with quiet fascinated attention, that this fountain begins to work again, to accelerate in the most surprising way…
The Heart of Innovation: 21 Awesome Quotes on Intuition
ideachampions.com“It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.” - Henri Poincare
“Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.” - John…
Got a feeling you’ll like this one… ;)
The only standard is impermanence.
It’s very easy to believe that the world we live in has always been this way.
Your ethnic group has always had a similar standing.
Technology has always permitted certain kinds of interactions and is always improving.
Real estate values always rise from decade to decade. (Until they don’t).
A job has always been the standard way to make a living.
Your chosen religion has always been practiced the way you practice it.
People in positions of authority and leverage have always had degrees from famous colleges.
Information has always been widely available.
As soon as you accept that just about everything in our created world is only a few generations old, it makes it a lot easier to deal with the fact that the assumptions we make about the future are generally wrong, and that the stress we have over change is completely wasted.
From Seth Godin’s blog