0. Designing with Internet
Includes designing with multimedia, as Internet has made audio, video, stills, text, interactivity, etc. very easy to create & share.
According to this natural succession map (of civilization types), the phase we are now entering is a Planetary one. We are currently (as humans) deciding between TWO distinct Globalization paths: whether this is going to be a Global Village or a Globe of Villages.
The Global Village
is the vision of the multinationals, with a McDonalds in every town, everyone sharing one language (preferably English, but Capital will adapt to Chinese if needed) & essentially one culture. You can see a version of this vision in the Project for the New American Century (although that is not the only repository of this vision: it comes in various forms).
The Globe of Villages
is the vision of permaculture designers & the Transition Movement, together with the World Social Forum & other international people's platforms: an emphasis on human rights, multi-culturalism, sustainability, which comes with an essential re-localization of the economy in the matters that make most sense (in terms of sustainability & good design, e.g. most material goods, like food), & international exchange where that makes most sense (e.g. knowledge, information, education & essential goods that do require large-scale industrial manufacturing).
Internet is the Communications tool
Either vision is going to need, use & indeed rely on the global reach of communications technologies we now are mastering (or not mastering...), which will, very likely, be Internet-based.
So WHO controls & HOW we design Internet use is very likely going to decide which of these visions we end up with. Both will require an effective Global Government: just by WHOM & HOW?
Designing with Internet
The more skilled Permaculture Designers & other Evolutionaries GET in co-designing an effectively liberating use of internet, the more likely we are to achieve the vision of a Globe of Villages, with a global government truly in the hands of the people, & an increasingly enlightened people, with the expanded consciousness this new & bigger responsibility does require.
The overwhelming lack of enthusiasm of permaculture designers in getting to grips with this technology, as well as the equally impressive lack of resources (time, attention, materials) put to the "invisible" & "social" elements of design (the permaculture version of the "Internal quadrants of the Integral Model) could be interpreted as a lack of vision or understanding of the importance of actively designing for the global vision.
Digital Literacy Education
In 2003 Nodo Espiral of the Permaculture Academy started to unite a group of permaculture practitioners all over Spain with the vision of co-teaching a dynamic & continuously developing, comprehensive evolutionary curriculum (which we now call the Integral Permaculture Certificate curriculum, having expanded it to a year-long programme this e-book reflects).
We also very much took into account that digital literacy would be an important component of the education of future evolutionaries & permaculture designers, and so worked constantly to optimize our own chaordic working methods (a team of people quite dispersed geographically) & to learn to bring the same design genius & flexibility to this type of organizational design that permaculture is renowned for, even if usually only on the fixing ecosystems level.
The Mozilla Story
See also www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
"At Mozilla, we’re a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible, so people worldwide can be informed contributors and creators of the Web. We believe this act of human collaboration across an open platform is essential to individual growth and our collective future."
Read the Mozilla Manifesto to learn even more about the values and principles that guide the pursuit of our mission.
The best educational wikis of 2011
Congratulations to ICTMagic, 2011’s Best Educational Wiki, and second-place winner Resources for History Teachers
Linda Yollis started the Educational-Blogging wiki in November of 2009.
10 Tactics
http://archive.informationactivism.org
If you can't view the video below, click here.
10 Tactics provides original and artful ways for rights advocates to capture attention and communicate a cause. It includes a 50-minute film documenting stories from around the world and a set of cards; with tools, tips and advice, for you to work through as you plan your own info-activism.
The film has now been translated by volunteers into more than 25 languages and it has been shown at over 200 screenings in over 60 countries. If you would like to screen 10 Tactics or use it as part of a workshop, get in touch.
Some great Videos
Toward 2012 -Web Democracy
Ken Jordan is the co-founder of evolver and www.realitysandwich.com, he is a pioneer in the field of alternative social networks and strong advocate of an unregulated internet. This episode explores the initial motivations for creating the internet, and how it differs in its structure from previous means of mass communication. Connects with the Chaordic Model in M5.
Coalition of the willing
La Coalición de la Voluntad from Horatiux on Vimeo.
Let's take back the Internet!
TED talk by Rebecca MacKinnon
http://www.ted.com In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal, Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control? She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Carta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection.
A global culture to fight extremism
TED talk by Maajid Nawaz
http://www.ted.com Why do transnational extremist organizations succeed where democratic movements have a harder time taking hold? Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist extremist, asks for new grassroots stories and global social activism to spread democracy in the face of nationalism and xenophobia. A powerful talk from TEDGlobal 2011.
Charlene Li
Empowering or Censoring Citizens?
So how do we DESIGN more effectively with these tools?
Your Brain & Social Networks
The next 5,000 days of the web
A Day made of Glass ...
The Yield is only limited by our imagination ... (pc principle)
The Future for Business & Innovation
James Canton's (futurist) channel
one of the comments to this video:"The "business" mindset has no place in a sustainable future. Give us your technology, but keep your profit driven, waste creating, money inflating, socially paralyzing, consumerist, capitalist poison. We don't need it. Lets start thinking about a resourced based economy."
And it's still useful to understand how & why that business mind-set thinks.. especially about sustainability.