Development Blogs.com

I think pretty highly of John Robb. I don't always agree with him -- and sometimes I think he's way off base -- but I think he's really grappling with the new realities of violence, conflict and system instability in our times. In particular, I find his on-going series of posts on Resilient Community a source of both worry and insight. First, the insight. John's posts themselves tend to focus on work-arounds for brittle infrastructure, things like smart local networks (sort of the information equivalent of energy smart grids), community scrip and local fabrication. There are some really thought-provoking ideas here, new thinking applied in new ways, many of which fit well with a strategy of increasing neighborhood survivability. The world is getting bumpier, and preparedness,...

We're big fans here of road trips, citizen journalism, and micropatronage. When you want real insight into happenings on the innovative fringe, mainstream media (whatever its other strengths) proves essentially useless: instead, go listen to the folks actually moving through it. For instance, if you want to get a sense of what the global free/open cultural movement feels like on the ground, you could do a lot worse than spend an hour reading the blog On the Luck of Seven. 29 year-old blogger Noel Hidalgo set out from New York about four months ago for "an open-source journey around the world documenting free culture, social innovators and global change." Along the way, he's posted not only the usual sort of travel entries -- musings while staring out the train window -- but reports...

by Worldchanging New York blogger Mark Caserta Well, WNYC's experiment in Crowdsourcing, in which New Yorkers hit the streets and counted the SUV's on their block, is over and the results have been posted online. On average, it seems that participants found that 30.6% of all of the cars counted were SUV's. Strangely enough, only 25% of all vehicles sold in the country are SUV's. That's right, it appears that New York City residents own more SUV's, on average. Interesting, huh? Scary, too! Of course, the results were not scientific. Let's face it, most of the participants were WNYC listeners, which is kind of easy to tell from the map (okay, that's unfair but, seriously, look at the pattern). Plus, it is likely that many of the participants were anti-SUV, which could have skewed...

Title: Overclocked. What it is: Cory Doctorow's latest short story collection. Why it's important: First, because there are some excellent stories here, such as Anda’s Game, After the Siege and When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. Second, because it's all available for free. Citing Tim O’Reilly's quote that "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy", Cory has released the entire collection under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. Telling quote: "The next day, they started to rebuild. And months later, they started over again, when disagreements drove apart the fragile little group they'd pulled together. And a year after that, they started over again. And five years later, they started again. Felix dug ditches and...

Everybody loves a "how-to." Simple instructionals and DIY projects are a requisite occupation for self-sufficient hipsters and hackers. From constructing personal PV arrays to generating pedal-powered electricity, brewing biodiesel to knitting scarves, worldchangers like to do things ourselves. Hence, my elation at discovering the nascent online project, Howtopedia.org, set up by a Swiss non-profit supported by Practical Action (formerly ITDG) and the International Network for Technical Information (INTI). Howtopedia's building a wiki-style library of DIY recipes that promote sustainability by helping us all become a little more independent. Howtopedia describe themselves as: A collaborative platform for practical knowledge and simple technologies, (i.e. technologies that require no...

Eben Moglen, Professor of Law & Legal History at Columbia, recently delivered the single best talk I have ever heard about the meaning of free/libre/open source software and its role as both a model and a means for righting social inequalities (or, as we have put it, redistributing the future). Moglen makes the point that in a world moving into collaborative production, the rules by which we govern the distribution of benefits from the use of ideas will have enormous implications in the lives of billions -- that in a world where innovation, technological progress, and access to resources, energy and materials all flow from access to knowledge, the kind of access communities have will largely decide whether or not the people there eat: "Now we live in a different world. For the first...

The Worldchanging Blog Network is growing – a terrific set of volunteers have come together to create regional teams extending the Worldchanging mission through local editions, initially in cities we've visited as part of the just-completed tour supporting our book. We'll be adding more cities, and extending globally, over the next few months. We have three local editions that are still coming together, and need more blogger for their local teams. Two have already launched, the Denver blog (which is the regional blog for Denver, Boulder, and the Colorado Rockies) and Washington DC. The third is Seattle, which hasn't launched yet, even though Worldchanging Central is located there (the cobbler's children have no shoes!). If you're interested in joining a local Worldchanging...

Why business models are critical to innovation in emerging economies – From social entrepreneurship to building an idea or a business – Part 1 Emerging economies represent new challenges for ideas and businesses, which is why new social entrepreneurship opportunities are now the Petri-dish for what is emerging. Some examples exist of great......

Facilitating United Nations reform through partnership. That's the title of a recent report presented on December 2005 by the United Nations on how "United Nations partners with business and civil society in order to advance a cause or to place an issue on the global agenda. Such partnerships leverage the reputation and networks of the United Nations and key stakeholders to promote vital development issues, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As cases profiled in this report show, business can make an important contribution to agenda setting not only through financial support, but also through its expertise and extensive reach. This holds true both for the demand side, through outreach to its consumer base, and for the supply side, through its relations with suppliers...

I am extremely appreciative of the Digital Vision Program by Reuters and Stanford University. As a young researcher, advocate and believer in the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in changing the socio-economic landscape of communities, I am also grossly aware of the lack of participation and collaboration across stakeholders of ICTs-supported programs and projects the world......