Planetwork Update

We (the oneVillage team) attended the PlaNetwork conference last weekend and the PlaNetwork's wiki pages (150+ ) work continued to expand from the massive melding of minds. The June 5th PlaNetwork Interactive conference focused on using innovative social networking tools networking to create positive social change. One component of this was the testing of an innovative method of developing ideas. Conference goers were allowed to define the agenda before the conference using innovative social network tools like Neosociety. Tomorrow Makers' Gail Taylor and Christina Carpenter helped ensure the interactive sessions ran smoothly at PlaNetwork.

Identity Commons
The PlaNetwork working group headed by Eugene Kim of Blue Oxen and Associates has developed a single user ID platform as part of their identity commons system, which is designed to empower people to control the release of their information on the net.

Online Networking and Integration Tools
The PlaNetwork Development Team has come up with other integration tools, which we feel are potentially useful towards the construction of our portals. Living Directory developed Sergio Lub and Victor Grey enables people to link people of similar interests together on the web. Another tool allows people within Planetwork interactive to see people who are developing similar ideas in their posts on the PlaNetwork Interactive site.

EcoResearch.net
DR. Arno Scharl has recently written a book on online organization for sustainable development and has developed a complementary website ecoresearch.net. He gave a lecture on web-based research for environmentalists. With the rapidly changing dynamics of the information economy there is a rising need for data about emerging market trends and public opinion. this includes, understanding success factors for communication of ideas and information on the web in terms of promoting environmental awareness and sustainable development. What are the relationships between environmental and social problems and the various organizations that work to resolve them? Environmental science is rapidly leading to an awareness of the need to redesign the built enviornment and the means of production in the modern world. However the message is not getting through to the mainstream public. It is on this level that there is a need to represent data in enviornmental ontologies that more clearly defines trends and how we can proactively respond to them.

• Promote open and public access to environmental data relevant to grassroots sustainable economic development
• Expand environmental education and introduce new teaching concepts relevant to the changing nature of knowledge
• Online advocacy
• Data sharing
• Distributed internet computing
• Geographically referenced data


Corporate sustainability and socially conscious business is being driven not by the corporations themselves but by socially responsible consumers who through effective environmental reporting are becoming more aware that there is a need to look carefully at what we consume. Green investments are a logical outcome of this trend. However socially conscious investors are only beginning to awaken to the idea that socially conscious investing is and must be a global phenomenon. Such a movement relies on the emergence of globally networked virtual communities that build trust and credibility among the stakeholders and members promoting effective knowledge management and online collaboration such as what we are trying to develop through the oneVillage Foundation.

Brainstorming Tools
One presenter suggested that highly efficient groups write things down rather than speak them and they know when ideas do not fit together allocating time effectuvely on those that do and are relevant to their work. The key concept here is focus and direction. It is the process of evolving from the brainstorming phase to the implementation phase. One tool was discussed to help develop ideas into the coherent pattern languages that are relevant to the particular network or group.

Idea Tree is a knowledge map. This system is different than visualization tools, it is brainstorming tool. An interesting aspect of Idea Tree is that you can make comments on the relationships between nodes. It would be interesting to compare and contrast this system with the Brain software. While it may be that virtual communication is more effective than traditional forms of communication in many respects, human interaction is crucial and these tools help to maximize productivity when people do decide to meet by helping to collect and organize relevant information for meetings.

We conclude that there is not so much a need to develop new technologies, but to effectively collect innovative ideas through an open source platform that efficiently and effectively transmits information helping people to empower themselves in their lives so that they are spending more time doing what they want to do in life and less time "workin for the man."

It is not simply the software itself that is significant but the very way in which information is organized. An important aspect to social change is to focus on relationship building changing the emphasis of knowledge development away from objects and towards relationships and understanding how various component systems relate to one another and why.

Aikido Activism in 25 Words or less
At the monthly Planetwork meeting I met up with Reed Burkhart who is doing pioneering working in using satellites to video-conference. He spoke of Aikido Activism as a way to proactively rather than reactively address social problems.

"Aikido Activism is the promotion of global community over self-promotion, using the Aikido principal of engaging an enemy's power to turn that enemy towards progress." I think the two parts of the sentence are important, 1) what the objective is, and 2) how it will be done. It's all very simple and obvious.

"The hard part -- as with anything simple and obvious that could change the world -- is revealing and gradually overcoming the traditions that oppose the advancement (which is why writing and sharing those ideas in the essay Aikido Activism is so important)."

Reed Burkhart also has a plan for inexpensive satellite communication, and spent many years in that industry, part of what he calls the forth paradigm in communications evolution.

While talking to Reed I met Rolf von Behrens of the Australian National Sustainability Initiative. While in SF Rolf sought to bring together Australians in the Bay Area and mobilize them toward the effective use of ICT to promote sustainability at a meeting he organized after the conference. Innovative tools for networking and bringing people together seemed to be a priority for Rolf and his organization.


Also at PlaNetwork we met Juan Maldonado, who grew up in Columbia and other Latin American countries, lives in Seattle, works in IT, and has an uncle who publishes a leading Spanish-language medical journal. Juan was asked to help create a distance learning system (continuing education) for rural doctors in Columbia.

Bridging Digital Divide Conference
Professor Raoul Weiler and Rolando Burger spoke at the conference about the Club of Rome/UNESCO sponsored Bridging Digital Divide Conference. Issues include the role of information technologies (ICT) in enhancing education, promoting sustainability and bridging the income divide. The Bridging Digital Divide Conference will take place in Spring of 2005 in Europe as a follow up event to WSIS 2004 and a precursor event to the World Summit on Information society (WSIS) November 2005 meeting at Tunis.


The Strong Angel Connection
Joy connected with John Graham who is involved with Strong Angel -- bringing military and civilian technology together for effective internet tools for difficult environments, and rigorously testing them in Hawaii very soon. John also created GeoFusion space image mapping and display technology.