Thriving too

A new fluxus starts with mushrooms

Calling all mushroom enthusiasts! We have a project for you called StrataSpore, a platform for collective knowledge about mushrooms. Initiated by Kate Cahill, Christopher Kennedy, Athena Kokoronis, Caroline Woolard, and mycologist Gary Lincoff, Strataspore uses mushrooms as material and metaphor for latent potential and unseen infrastructure. Right now, mushrooms are eating oil spills, connecting members of Fluxus, feeding communities, and growing as alternative packaging material.

We are planning some experimental performances in NYC and are looking for artists, designers and anyone else to join us for mushroom foraging adventures! Join our mushroom network here

OurGoods

  

A very dear friend and collaborator, Caroline Woolard, is looking for barterers and collaborators! Her new project, titled OurGoods is set to launch this September in NYC. Amid constant rivers of negative and over analyzed banter from the US media regarding our economic condition, OurGoods provides a platform for community participation and economic re-imagination in a way that is intimatley tangible and inherently avoids the kind of conventional commodity valuation that has led many communities and nations to this crucial turning point. Artists have the potential to create a revolutionary movement in how we interact economically, trade, barter and form community; OurGoods provides a portal for such action.

"OurGoods is a peer-to-peer online network that facilitates the barter of goods and services between artists. The site matches barter partners, provides accountability tools, and offers technical assistance resources to help artists complete their barters and their projects successfully.

OurGoods emerges in response to the current economic crisis. To some extent, the arts have always existed in a recession economy. Independent artists in particular are experts at making do with very limited resources. As it becomes clear that even those limited resources will shrink in the coming years, OurGoods enables us to leverage what we already do well in order to create a support system for ourselves."

Ms. Woolard's work meets the sea with finesse and pure intention for community and body. Born in Rhode Island, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NYC coordinating an artist's studio space among many other things. Visit www.ourgoods.org to sign up for upcoming news and information about the project!

Good 50X70 Poster Project

This project is brilliant! It combines some great elements - creative commons poster design for charities by members of the public... Anyone can enter.  

This 1 minute video explains.

Via: Osocio

1 small lesson for organisations about supporting network innovation

Two organisations in the U.K. - the Royal Society of Arts and NESTA - are carrying out research in to how people can innovate in networks, rather than either on their own or simply with the person the other side of the waste basket.

In another part of the park, J.D. Stanley at Cisco has been working hard for several years on Digital Swarming: or how to combine inputs from people, machines and other data sources, digitize them and place them on to networks. 

All of this work falls in to the category of trying to understand how people can create, collaborate and share new ideas across dispersed places and spaces.

It's exciting, important and without a doubt what matters in a world in which the connectedness of people, information and technology is all-pervasive. But is there something missing?

Sometimes, animals don't relate but share stuff and copy one another.

At other times, states or experiences change by accident or projection.

In other words, some relationships form on the basis of what writer and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry once called sympathetic vibration and saw in the behaviour of a violin:

The A string of a violin is designed to vibrate most readily at about 440 vibrations per second: the note A. If that same note is played loudly not on the violin but near it, the A string may hum in sympathy.

Put another way, what may matter in networked innovation is not just mechanics or structure, but also tone - a tone that's set not just by trust but also momentum, and the design of a stage upon which people feel able and want to perform.

Image of Eliasson installation courtesy of Anna Maria Leon, horses by grandylion, window reflection by lux fecit.

Redjotter @Thriving too

A New Hub

Only days after posting my strapline at the top of the blog about hubs .... I found a new one!  Pop!tech have launched their own online social network....

I look forward to seeing it filling up with lots of interesting people working on social innovation projects.... there are already some original projects.  

"The Hub is a place for like minded people to come together, share ideas and passions to create projects that change our world for the better." 

Spending power

Ah, remember back to the heady days of my first blog post... I introduced you to Carrotmob - the consumer campaign group that 'mob' a local business with their spending power, on the condition that the owner uses a percentage of the profits to green themselves up and reduce their environmental impact.

*drum roll*

The Carrot has landed.

CarrotmobUK held their first event at one of my local's in East London! Sadly I read about it afterwards so I wasn't there, but I'm hanging on the feeds for information about the next one.

Read more in the Guardian

The ColaLife Campaign

Image: grzegorzkomar

Over the last month, I have been helping Simon Berry (CEO, ruralnet|uk) promote his latest idea, and what an idea it is!

"ColaLife" is a campaign aiming to leverage Coca Cola's distribution muscle to provide life saving medicines to children in developing countries. The idea is so simple, but until now has been difficult to implement. The power of web 2.0 and social networking media however, has allowed Simon to digitally document his progress and to build a digital support network surrounding the campaign.

“We can distribute Coca Cola all around the World but we can’t seem to get medication to save a child from something as simple as diarrhea and I think that that is wrong.” (Annie Lennox)

Since the launch of the campaign and due to the power of a Facebook group, Simon was invited by Salvatore Gabola, Coca-Cola’s Global Head of Stakeholder Relations, to a meeting to discuss the idea further at Coca-Cola’s European HQ in Brussels. The campaign’s Facebook group has reached over 3,890 members since its inception on 18 May 2008. It was nominated for the NewStatesman’s New Media Award in June and showcased at London’s 2gether08 festival on 3 July.

Most recently, the campaign was featured on BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme in May and July, and on the BBC World Service on 13 July. Simon explains; “Before the Facebook group I was getting nowhere at all. The group has changed everything and is the reason we’ve made such rapid progress …Continuing support for the idea is vital if we are to turn this idea into a reality and actually save some lives.”

Image: Nick Gripton

Research and development of the campaign continues to evolve. The next objective is to get an international NGO to engage with the campaign. Meanwhile research is underway in East African into Coca-Cola’s distribution system and the feasibility of the idea is being investigated and reported on the campaign website.

Thanks to everyone who has already shown their support, and a huge thank you to the team at Inhabitat for publishing the ColaLife story and launching it into the blogosphere!

To find out more information and to follow the story, visit the newly created ColaLife.org (thanks to Dave Briggs!). To support the campaign, please please join the ColaLife Facebook Group! To get even more involved and if you have anything you can offer the campaign please sign up to the campaign’s Google Group “ColaLife”.

Collaboration Prize

The Collaboration Prize is worth $250,000 and recognizes collaborations among two or more nonprofit organizations that each would otherwise provide the same or similar programs or services and compete for clients, financial resources and staff. The Prize also seeks to build an information base of effective practice models that can be studied and used by academics, nonprofit leaders and grantmakers to inspire and advance their work.

Nominations close on July 21....

Would be nice to see a similar competition in the UK....

Something to chew on

The humble remote control. Called something different in almost every household across the land - it is often a source of confusion. "Pass me the clicker / doofer / thingy"

Wouldn't life be easier if there were an online living museum showing the development of the English language, including such 'kitchen table lingo'? Wouldn't we all be able to have a deeper understanding, communicate more clearly and get along better?

Hurrah for the English Project!

So get your teeth in, get adding contributions, and let's get talking

Give it Away and Pray

There was a fascinating article by Mike Masnick on the concepts around 'Free'. The article examines the case of a writer, Steven Poole, who published his book on the internet. Only 0.057% of those who downloaded the book 'volunteered' to pay for the book. Masnick argues that Poole wasn't actually giving the book away for free but hoping that people would pay for it, and suggests that this is an unreasonable model to work to.

If this subject interests you I urge you to read the whole article with it's many comments. The world of copyright is changing so quickly with Creative Commons and the explosion of sharing on and through the internet. It is subject which Charlie Leadbeater tackles superbly in recently published We Think. We posted the short We Think film here. The challenge Leadbeater raises, among very many others is: how we earn a living in a sharing world?

Masnick makes a very valuable distinction when he says "you give away the infinite goods, not the scarce goods. Your time is a scarce good. No one is saying that everything needs to be free -- they're saying that infinite goods will be free, because of it's very nature in economics."

I am still completely inspired by 'Free' and am determined to continue making it a major part of the work I do....

All Consuming

Hello everyone! Tessy has kindly invited me to join in the fun and start posting (brave lady..)

By way of a small introduction I am

• a researcher for the RSA
• studying social change
• attempting to take one photo a day for a whole year
• a relative newcomer, but total convert, to blogging

So for my first post, I proudly introduce to you, CarrotMob by Brent Schulkin.

Carrotmob organizes consumers to make purchases that give financial rewards to those companies who agree to make environmentally friendly choices.

People agree to turn up en masse and buy lots of things, to produce the profits needed for the shop in question to convert to a more sustainable way of working. Genius.

Fantastic Co-creating Conversations

Tim Davies is organising a BarCamp on the 17th May in London!

In Tim's words
"BarCampUKYouthOnline is not some big corporate event. It's being created on a voluntary basis by people interested in conversations, co-creation and action connected to themes of online interaction, youth engagement and young peoples lived experience of offline and online worlds."

The possible sessions already include some really interesting themes by Tim, David Wilcox, Alice Casey, Hilary Mason ... and me!

Participate!!

Exploring the business/charity nexus...

The relationship between volutary organisations and private business is a often a vexed one. Neither quite has the others outlook and there is a broader cultural sense that they will inevitably conflict. However, there is an interesting account of the work of Pilotlight in the Guardian Finance section today worth pulling some quotes from:

Fiona Halton, chief executive of Pilotlight, explains: "Small charities reach a point where they are successful, and then the grant-makers, who quite correctly had identified that they were being innovative and were filling a need, have already given them their three-year grant money. So just at the point when they're poised for further growth, they're worrying about where their next penny will come from."

Enter what Halton calls the Pilotlighters. These include people such as Susan Revell, managing director in Morgan Stanley's legal and compliance division, and Jean-Baptiste Renard, regional group vice-president at BP.

The first stage of the process consists of picking the right Pilotlighters to coach the charity. The meetings then begin, and include the creation of an overall business model for the charity.

The next sessions focus on strategic planning, and a business plan is drafted. A review period ensues, followed by a project stage. Finally, a follow-up meeting takes place six months later. The whole process can last two years.

For Tamsin Larby director of a small charity called Tender the benefits are real enough:

"What it's allowed us to do is to step back. It forces us to think about the future. If I wasn't thinking about this now, we would be in trouble in a year's time."

Multi-disciplinary collaboration

Just a thought. Howard Gardner at the MI conference at Wellington earlier this year noted that there was some evidence that techonology was reducing the time to master a discipline from 10 years to 5 years. I think his example was music composition.

Given the focus on innovation and creativity needing the collaborative input from a wide range of disciplines, perhaps there is a chance that in the future that in increasing numbers we could become multi-disciplinary all by ourselves? It seems so many energising people, great thinkers and visionaries of today already are . . . .

Very exciting really. :)