Thriving too

Love Letters To the Future

Love Letters to the Future is collecting letters in advance of Coepnhagen and the top 100 lettets will be included in a locked time capsule on 13th December.

We Feel Fine Book

Lots of people I know will love this new We Feel Fine book.  

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved."

NB The content in the We Feel Fine project is direct from the web, and is not censored. 

  

No Impact Project

I *really* like this No Impact Project. 

It is fun, and could lead to people making real changes to their daily lives by trying their one week 'experiment'. I took to the guy who wrote the book and developed the project straight away. He lived 'no impact' for a year and clips from the film below showed him to be a genuine, non-preachy human! 

Fantastic Commentary on Colour

At the completion of French artist Pierre David's residency last May at the Modern Art Museum of Bahia in Brazil, he left behind a interesting and thoughtful exhibition celebrating color and the uniqueness of multiracial cultures. 

In Naucier, Pierre, commenting on racism, photographed 40 people, employees of the Musuem and art students from El Salvador, and displayed their images in classic color swatch fashion. Each individuals color was also formulated into a paint.

Via: Colorlovers

 

  

1 potato, 2 potato, 3 potato, 4

So there's a lot of things being posted in the social media world. Look at the numbers roll up!

Hang on. I just blogged because I saw it. So does that mean my blog is counted in the stats, or is it extra? If you talk about counting it, and more people blog about you talking about counting it, does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy and cause an increase the amount of data on the social web, thereby making the calculations behind it invalid?

Hmm. Ask Gary.

Happiness Hat - Tools for Improved Social Inter-Acting

Behaviour change folks are going to love this! 

The Happiness Hat has been designed by Lauren Maccarthy. 

'It is a wearable conditioning device that detects if you're smiling and provides pain feedback if you're not. Frowning creates intense pain but a full smile leaves you pain free! The first in a series of Tools for Improved Social Inter-Acting.' 

Brilliant on *many* levels. 

 

happiness hat from Lauren McCarthy on Vimeo.

I Met and Liked

Notebooks by Archie Grand

10 Million Optimism Objects

 

Reed Seiffer, of the Optimism Project, first designed and produced 500 optimism buttons as part of a senior art class in 1995.  He has since gone on the produce and dstribute 50,000 buttons. In 2010, in collaboration with one the largest public arts institutions, over 10 million first-of-its-kind objects will be circulated in New York via underground channels.

Be That Woman Challenge

Beautiful video and post from Osocio.

"No high tech but just a few line drawings, with no words, just music. Produced by RP3 Agency on behalf of the Washington Area Women’s Foundation, this tale of one woman’s journey from a position of need to one of strength shows the power of investing in women and girls.

The video is meant for fundraising, goal is build a social media fueled movement at bethatwoman.org. The next phase will involve sharing personal stories of women who have made a difference in people’s lives."

Skill Sharing Goes Big

Basic Raw Food Workshop with Karen Yacobucci at the Brooklyn Skillshare. Photo by edlabdesigner, Creative Commons.

We have lots of examples of smaller skill sharing schemes, including the Bank of Happiness in Estonia.

But in a new article on Goodlifer, the author highlights some new events this year in the US which is attracting 100s of people on a single day.  

As Johanna Björk writes:

"Skillsharing is a new movement of freestanding weekend events featuring workshops and classes, taught by regular people who happen to be really good at, or possess deep knowledge about, something."

In April Boston Skillshare attracted 600 people over 2 days.

Brooklyn Skillshare in the Spring attracted 400 people in one day.

The picture galleries on the sites are great!

Days with My Father

"A journal. An ongoing record of my father, and of our relationship. for whatever days we have left together." by Mr Toledano

For everyone who has a father.

Green School

I see myself as a bit of a connoisseur of schools - I really love them. My parents travelled with their work, and I went with them.  I have attended schools in India, Australia, America, Holland, Wales, South Africa... Altogether I have attended over 16 schools (my  parents lost count).

It seems fitting that I would become an educationalist in later life (I am sure Gladwell would make some sense of that). Over the last few years I have had the good fortune to visit many schools (25 or so), some pretty standard, but others extraordinary. 

I love small, unusual schools, with progressive curriculum in particular, and I believe them to be very powerful testing grounds for ideas.  Some of these schools are *magical*.

Yesterday I discovered Green School.

The school is in Bali and has been open just over a year. It has one of the most progressive curriculum I have ever read about, very focused on environmental issues, creativity and emotional intelligence, in a very practical framework.  The architecture is amazing and the school operates on very low carbon use. The staff to student ratio is 6:1.  

What a blissful educational setting and experience! 

What l have taken away from looking at Green School is how inspiring schools can be when they are built from the imagination and determination of a group of individuals.  I wish more people would take the bold step to do this... 

Educationalists could learn some valuable lessons from the school, regardless of the harshness (by comparison) of their own school's setting.

Good Luck to Green School! I hope they share their experiences!

This school in the Lake District might give it a run for their money on the architecture front.

Tech Missions

Good Magazine are publishing a set of posts under the heading 'Ideas for Cities'.  I like all of them so far, but particularly this one on Tech Missions.  

The idea is: 

"Technology evangelists and coaches could function as a mobile “genius bar,” going out to every neighborhood via exploration buses and provided technologically enabled training and support 24/7. This is an active campaign (or “mission”) to achieve the highest technology aptitude in the world. Tech evangelists are volunteers and part-time workers. Their services are available on a sliding scale; free to many, and supported by a $99-a-year membership fee for those who can afford it."

So, I'm thinking about the *brilliant* Social Media Surgeries being organised for community groups and charities in Birmingham..... and wondering if we can't buy them a funny looking van? Trailer... much better!