I saw this presentation live a couple of weeks ago at the Personal Democracy Forum and would suggest that it’s worth 25 minutes of your time to take a listen. I really like a lot of what Pesce is trying to say, even though the verbiage gets in the way at times. And it really pushes my thinking about cell phones in general. Have a look.

Here is the overview from the PDF presentation page, which has some great talks by Rushkoff, Shirky, Lessig, Zittrain and others:

In this keynote talk at Personal Democracy Forum 2008, Pesce situates the current moment of transformation in the context of 60,000 years of human civilization; argues that our innate tendencies to connect with each other, copy behaviors and share ideas are now on hyperdrive; and projects a near-future where “hyperempowered” individuals and networks transform politics. As he concludes: “Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.” The text of his talk is available on his blog here. He has also posted his slides on Slideshare, here.

In light of the Obama campaigns use of social tools, Pesce pushes the thinking quite a bit…

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Interested in this news story from our position here in Huntsville, AL. The NASA Space Shuttle timetable formally announced now up to the final mission on 31st May 2010.

Follow the links to the NASA Constellation / Ares / Orion project.
The Huntsville connection ? Wernher-vonBraun / Operation-Paperclip / Redstone-Arsenal / Marshall-Space-Flight-Centre / Apollo / Saturn I & V and now the J2X engine to power Ares V.

Interesting on the MSFC home page to see the obituary of Ernst Stuhlinger, vonBraun’s No.2, who died recently 25th May 2008 aged 94. This lively old boy made an impression on Sylvia when she met him last year, amongst another things waxing philosophical about the ironic sign o’the times changing for the better as he considered that the doctor working to prolong his life in the 21st century … was Jewish.

Interesting also to see also the SpaceX / Falcon / Dragon project may run privately-funded space-station missions in the meantime - hadn’t noticed that before.

We were discussing at an extended family meal week before last how the Godfather trilogy was quality drama - perhaps Godfather III being the weakest. Sylvia and I recalled and discussed it further for some reason over the weekend and noticed we had only a VHS recording of the trilogy, and no longer any video player - so we resolved to obtain a DVD set of the trilogy.

Night before last Godfather III was showing late, 2 hrs 45 mins ending about 01:20 on a commercial-free, free channel - so I watched it … out of sequence as it were. I guess it must have been some sort of director’s cut, becuase there were extended and additional scenes not quite how I recall them. It was and still is excellent.

That silent scream in the penultimate scene - haunting - more haunting than its immediate cause, the death of daughter Mary. Michael really had gone straight - as legit as a capitalist can be anyway - in the whole Part III plot. Every cross with the dark side was his being dragged back in by those still involved with the family history, and his involvement based on balancing duties. The touch points with real contemporary history add to the drama - God’s Banker and the election of Pope John Paul I and so on - like the Batista overthrow in Godfather II, but now I digress.

It was 40 years ago today …
Cap’n Bob rode his bike away …
So let me introduce to you …
The one and only ZMM …

On the 8th July 1968 Robert Pirsig set out on the road-trip that became Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The rest as they say, is history.

1. Awareness: Do you know the facts about climate change -- what it means to your business and to our whole planet, and what the regulations are that affect your business and the businesses of those you deal with, and how important an issue it is to your customers, to your employees, to your competitors (and what they're doing about it) -- and to your children and grandchildren? This is the most difficult step, and it's rare I get an unqualified yes. If I don't:
• I take the exec through the effects of climate change on crop yields, forest and ocean resource productivity, the spread of hot-weather plant, animal and human diseases (like the mountain pine beetle threatening the entire Canadian boreal forest) and pandemics, on water availability, on demand for air conditioning, on ecosystem crashes and biodiversity losses, on weather patterns, drought, flooding, severe storms and desertification, on glacial melt, permafrost stability, ocean currents and global sea levels, and on
  stability of infrastructure and transportation
• I talk about the business risks associated with climate change: insurance cost spikes, risk of shortages of natural resource production inputs (and cost increases as they become scarce), disaster preparedness, recovery and contingency costs, business interruption risks, supply chain disruption risks, transportation interruption risks and cost increases, business relocation costs, and dirty-tech retooling costs
• I explain the reputation risks of companies perceived to be behind the curve, and the competitive advantages that clean-tech innovators and early-adopters can achieve
• I tell them what long-term investment fund managers and bankers are looking at in determining investment and credit worthiness of companies, and how securities authorities are responding to these investors' demands for more disclosure of what companies are doing about climate change
• I walk them through the current myriad of regulations in effect around the globe, and how they are quickly becoming more stringent and requiring more information collection and disclosure
• I provide current emission information for Canada and its provinces, along with reduction targets

2. Acceptance: Once I have the exec briefed on the facts, I ask: What do you think is the responsibility of your company to tackle the challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability? What is the responsibility of governments? What is your personal responsibility as a business leader, and as a citizen of Canada? How does that responsibility extend to other jurisdictions in which you do business? How do you trade off your short term responsibility to shareholders against your long-term responsibility to future generations? When I first started asking these questions, it was to surface global warming deniers, who even a year ago were fairly common. Now I'm astonished to discover this is quickly becoming one of the issues keeping executives (especially those with children) awake at night. When there's no microphone or camera on them, they will tell you they care about this issue. Most still think government needs to take the lead, to create a 'level playing field' they'll gladly comply with. But increasingly they'll admit that there is no level playing field, that cheats will always cheat, that greenwashing can work, that it's one thing to make complicated environmental laws and another thing to enforce them, that 'free' trade agreements can render environmental laws null and void, and that this troubles them. They're accepting responsibility, and now asking, not what do they have to do, but what can they do?
3. Compliance: Once they are aware of the issues, and accept responsibility for dealing with them, I ask them: Are you in compliance with climate change and other environmental laws in force at each level of government in each of the jurisdictions in which you operate? This is a fairly straight-forward discussion that depends, of course, where they do business. They need to learn about caps, emissions levels (absolute and 'intensity-based'), reduction targets, fines and penalties, credits and 'carbon' taxes. The frustration with the myriad of different regulations, and different types of regulations, is palpable. Most executives I speak with would prefer more stringent, but simpler, more consistent rules to the current situation.

4. Mitigation Strategy: I'm now finding that most businesspeople, even those in small businesses and those that do not directly emit pollutants or use large amounts of raw materials, water or energy, are ready to tackle steps 4 and 5. To explain mitigation, I say: To the extent a company is responsible for significant GHG emissions, or depends on suppliers that are, it will be essential to find alternative ways to produce goods and services that do not have such a negative impact on our environment. What programs do you have in place to measure and voluntarily reduce your carbon footprint, including that which originates from your suppliers' production and is incurred in foreign jurisdictions. There are some really novel programs out there, as well as some really poor ones. There are even some incentives available, aside from the reputation and innovation and first-mover advantages of bold mitigation strategies.
5. Adaptation Preparedness Strategy: Where mitigation is about reducing the company's negative impact on the environment, adaptation is about reducing the impact of environmental crisis and climate change events on the company. These impacts depend on the nature and location(s) of the business and include the matters described in step 1 above such as disease and pandemic outbreaks, chronic shortages of (and price surges for) water, energy and natural resources used by the company and by its suppliers, extreme weather events, flooding and water shortages of cities in which the company operates or sells products, chronic blackouts, brownouts and telecom and other infrastructure failures, loss of insurance coverage, market and rate instabilities, and threats and attacks from desperate individuals, groups and nations (the poor will suffer the worst consequences of climate change, and have the weakest social safety nets). No one can be prepared for all such eventualities, but simulations and other applications of complexity modeling, and disaster and contingency planning, can help companies be as ready and as resilient as possible. I've seen a fascinating simulation of how a global pandemic outbreak of influenza or a once-isolated tropical disease can cripple the global economy, not because of the number of deaths, but because of human panic bringing economic activity to a standstill.
   
6. Holistic Sustainability Strategy: The discussion of steps 4 and 5 above is usually all most businesspeople can handle at this point in our understanding of sustainability. But there are a few companies that have seen where this is all leading to, and I'm ready for them. The chart at the top of this article shows the Cradle-to-Cradle model that Interface Carpets uses. This is the ultimate resilience strategy: reuse and cycle everything, and produce more energy and cleaner water than what you use. This approach acknowledges that we are all part of a complex and interconnected economy, and that the environmental impacts of our suppliers and customers are as important as the ones we are directly responsible for. If you need no new materials or resources to operate, and if you take everything back from your customers and reuse or recycle it, then you have made your entire cycle of production endlessly renewable. Not only does this mitigate your environmental impact, it makes you relatively immune to the impacts of environmental crises and climate change on your suppliers and even your customers.
7. Zero-Growth Economy Strategy: Climate change is making us aware that there truly are limits to growth, and that no company or economy can keep 'growing' forever. Our current economy is completely dependent on consumers buying more and more 'stuff' every year, and it is truly unsustainable. Likewise, our capital markets, and shareholder expectations, are based on large annual increases in profits. So how can a company make the transition to a steady-state economy, and thrive with the same profit each year? Economists like Richard Douthwaite, Herman Daly and Peter Brown have suggested what would be needed to make such a transition at the macro (country) level. Businesses need to start thinking about how such a transition will affect individual businesses, industries and markets, and make the structural and strategy changes necessary to make that transition too.

Jared Spool has written several articles on what he calls a Weighted Differences Matrix.

From part 1: The process we’d use is to compare the designs side-by-side and list the differences. A method I’m fond of is to do the comparisons with two sites at a time. In this case, we’d probably start with the current design and alternative #1. We’d put them side-by-side and ask, “What makes these designs different?” Once we’d exhausted our thinking, we’d replace alternative #1 with alternative #2 and repeat the questioning, looking for new differences to add to the list.

From part 2: The quality of the weights will depend on what information the team already has. In the case of the project I described in my presentation, the first time that team sat down to create their matrix, they had done very little user research (as in virtually none) to work from. So, to some extent, they were going to guess on the weights. However, they had been in business for years with a web site that was attracting millions of visitors a month, so they knew something about their users and the users’ needs. It’s with this information that they’d start the process of assessing weights.

Richard Dennison has asked whether it is better to recreate or integrate web 2.0 services within the organisation. To quote: The balance between recreating and integrating I think is going to be what makes or breaks our internal social media tools in the future. We need to give it some serious thought … I need to give it some serious thought. I don’t think we’ve got the balance right yet …

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be doing a live streaming interview with Clay Shirky this Thursday at 11 am at my Ustream Channel. I’ll be picking his brain on how what he sees are the educational implications of the changes and shifts set out in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” and I’m hoping you’ll participate as well. Most UStreamers know that there is a chat window that comes with every show, but I’ll also be opening up the cohost feature for those of you with camera and mic that want to come on and ask a question as well. (I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know ahead of time if you plan to do that, just for organization sake.)

If you’d rather just leave a question in this comment thread, I’d be happy to try to work it in.

Hope to see you on Thursday!

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Last weekend the press reports told of a young man our local long-weekend police gates arrested and subsequently probationed for carrying a chest-pocket amount of this fungi. I'm sleeping so much better now. Absolutely, we don't mind you kids swarming off on bleary-eyed havoc sprees or getting into piss-drunk mass-brawl public knife fights or even stress tensored adults wound tight like the coil of a rifle, them sort is just fine by our local mores and stuff we understand and expect, but dag-blast it, the last thing we need around here is folks like his sort:

"... more than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a 'full mystical experience' as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant."
[ Spiritual Psilocybin ]  read more »

Been trying to get my brain around last week’s NECC experience for a few days now, reading some of the other post mortems, thinking about what the lasting impressions are and will be for my own thinking and learning. For a variety of reasons, mostly personal, San Antonio was not a home run for me, not like last year in Atlanta when the energy and ideas seemed to be flowing more intently, more spontaneously. And before anyone starts throwing things at me, let me just say that was my experience; I’m sure that many, many others found this year’s event to be a celebration, perhaps a transformation in their thinking about teaching and learning and education. In that regard, I’m sincerely happy that more voices have been added to the chorus, and that more practitioners have entered the conversation. We need more voices. We need more good pedagogy and thinking.

I came to NECC in a bit of an edublogger funk, and that funk continues in some respects. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that’s not unusual. My interior monologue is fills with peaks and valleys, and right now, I’m once again struggling to define and focus where the best use of my time and thinking is. For the past two months, I have read very little from the education folder in my aggregator; simply, not much has been resonating. To be honest, very little in the last six months or so has felt new, a view that a couple of others at NECC seemed to share. I’ve been drawn to reading outside the usual suspects, thinking hard (once again) about the scope of this community and its reach. Thinking hard about change, about what is and isn’t changing, and how maddeningly slow it all seems.

The good news is that the level of passion among those that count themselves in this community is, in a word, amazing. It was evident from the conversations I eavesdropped on in the Blogger’s Cafe to the late night debates on the River Walk, to the back channel chats, the sessions on how to put the tools to good work, to the collective efforts to capture as much of NECC as possible for those who couldn’t attend. I don’t think it was possible to sit in on the sessions or walk by the Cafe and not simply admire the level of engagement of both long standing and relatively new participants in this conversation. All of us, whether evangelists or practitioners or even the naysayers, are deeply invested in trying to make sense of these giant shifts that are occurring, and that is all good.

And there was an international flavor to NECC this year that seemed stronger than in years’ past. (BTW, I don’t count the Canadian contingent as international, thought I know I should.) It was great to see folks from Australia and the UK and many, many other far flung spots around the globe. We need more of their perspectives as well, and that seems to be happening.

But for me, at least, at the end of the day, I’m still left wondering, “what’s really changed?” And, where will we be a year from now?

NECC is the echo chamber writ large and in living color; more than any other conference, it’s where we feel “big.” But the reality of it is, as Dean suggests, the powerful learning that most of us experience in these online communities is still little more than a blip on the radar screen. (I wonder what percentage of the 8 million+ educators in this country are aware of these shifts on a basic level.) And this is a tech conference. As I read through some of the back channel conversations, some were asking about presenting to school boards or parents or even town councils. Others were talking about getting out to non-edtech conferences. Some were, again, searching for that elusive tipping point that will get the conversation jump started outside the chamber.

And I think it’s time we get serious about all of that. No doubt, the vendor floor in Washington will be filled with “Web 2.0 in a Box” and “Safe Social Networking” and control, control, control. And I’m going to guess that, like this year, “Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts” will be “Hot Topics” as well as a few other new tools. And we’ll be talking once again about new standards and 21st Century Literacies and all of that. But while we as a community have no control over some of that, is that what we aspire to? Is that what we want the emphasis on NECC 09 to be, once again? Or do we want it to be more?

I hope it’s more. More about learning and figuring out what it means to be connected. More about what we can do to begin systemic change. More tangible, non-toolsy, results oriented thinking. More models that work, models that provide realistic options for educators to wrap their brains around.

More like what Chris Lehmann presented in his session, a session that since it had a “specific pedagogical focus” felt like it was “high stakes,” in an of itself a comment that should get us thinking. More like the conversations on leadership that Scott McLeod and Chris and others tried to have at EduBloggerCon on Saturday. More about ideas and connections.

And in general, without speaking for others, I again think I need to do more to try to get these ideas and these questions outside the walls of my learning community. I’m afraid we’re stalling because without some larger force or lever, these ideas have no where (or very limited routes) to go in a comprehensive discussion about what schools need to be and to do in response to the scale of change that is upon us. (That thinking is influenced heavily by Sir Ken Robinson’s latest presentation to the RSA, btw.) For me, at least, I think it’s time to start writing. (I know; I’ve said that before.)

Change on any level is not easy, and I’m not suggesting that there is one way to change or one thing that needs to be changed or that we all need to change in one particular way. It’s all incremental and personal, I know, but it’s also about doing what will create the most change, do the most good. I’ve been thinking about Lessig a lot and his attempt to attack the root cause of the smaller problems. I wonder what the root impediment for school change is? And, reffing Sir Ken again, we are at a moment where we all must change if we’re to sustain this existence. Along those lines, I’ve also, strangely, been thinking about all of the devoted carnivores that I hung around with last week in steak and barbecue land, thinking about how much healthier they would be and how much better off we’d all be if they and everyone else, for that matter, ate lower to the ground. But that is tough change as well.

Anyway, proposals for NECC ‘09 are only a couple of months away…

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About a year ago I looked for Tools to find similarity between two texts (weblog and papers) - I wanted to find a relatively objective way to judge how much of my weblog writing ends up in the dissertation.

Between other things I experimented with generating and comparing tagclouds from texts that were supposed to correspond to each other. I tried several tools, but ended up with tagCrowd since it allowed using generic and custom-made lists of stop words.

As an experiment I used text of five dissertation chapters (draft versions as of April 17, 2008) and the text of blog posts coded as corresponding to those chapters to generate a visualisation of most frequent words in each case. After removing stop words (general English plus those from my own list that I was stupid enough not to save) 65 most frequent words are visualised.

For example, two tagclouds below are those from the blogposts related to the Microsoft study and the draft chapter with the results of it.

In total I had 5 pairs of visualisations. I then mixed them and asked five people familiar with my research (supervisors and collaborators) and eight students (taking a class with Anjo) to find matching pairs. The results are below.

Some comments:

• I guess there is a connection between PhD chapters and blogposts :)
• The high score for the methodology chapter is explained by its qualitative difference from the rest of the dissertation.
• The low score for this chapter is explained by the fact that the coding of weblog entries in relation to chapters was done prior to writing it. As a results it included many “might be relevant” posts, while for other chapters the focus was more clear. In addition, the draft version of the chapter used to generate the visualisation was the first draft, while in other cases those were revised several times.

It was nice to see that although many of the visualisations looked similar (with blogging and weblog being big ;) it was actually possible to match the pairs. But the nicest thing was simply making all those pictures, laying them on the floor and thinking that I actually had some version of 5 chapters out of the 7 :)

• Methodology chapter: blogging practices
• Apprenticeship in weblog networks
• How blogging makes my life difficult

Britt Parrott has written an article on integrating social media into a web content strategy. To quote: Any individual or organization that sells products or offers services should value open communication as a goal. If your client or company does not have an existing communications plan, or even a mission statement that includes nods to openness or transparency, a social media strategy might be a good starting point for developing one. (If open communication is not a value of the organization, social media could still be an important part of monitoring the online world, but that is a topic for a separate article.)

(Thanks to Russ Weakley.)

Michael Hawley has written an article on preparing for user research interviews. To quote: Interviewing is an artful skill that is at the core of a wide variety of research methods in user-centered design, including stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, and focus groups. Consequently, a researcher’s skill in conducting interviews has a direct impact on the quality and accuracy of research findings and subsequent decisions about design. Skilled interviewers can conduct interviews that uncover the most important elements of a participant’s perspective on a task or a product in a manner that does not introduce interviewer bias. Companies hire user researchers and user-centered designers because they possess this very ability.

As mentioned in my last post, I'll be running a workshop in Denmark in September (before heading across to present at KMWorld & Intranets in San Jose).

I'd like to make the most of the 24-hour flight from Australia to Europe. I'll have some time free on the week of September 8-12, so please do get in touch if you'd like me to:

• present a public session
• run an in-house workshop in your organisation
• provide a day of consulting or mentoring

I'll touch down in the UK, but can easily get to pretty much anywhere in continental Europe with some advance notice...

In September I'll be presenting a two-day intranet workshop in Denmark (17-18 September 2008). Organised by IntraTeam, this is going to be a great event, for both novice and experienced teams.

A wide range of topics will be covered, including all my latest thinking:

• evolution of intranets
• understanding staff needs
• 6x2 methodology for intranets
• innovative intranets (including the 2008 winners, announced that week.)
• managing intranets
• improving search
• intranet design principles
• open Q&A session

The class size is limited, so you'll want to book quickly.

• The Great Depression, by Pierre Berton. In 1929 we thought the good life would go on forever, and eventually everyone, not only the upper classes, would benefit. We were wrong, and this book explains why, and shows us what will happen when the US dollar crashes.
• Figments of Reality, by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit; our brains are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.
• The Two Income Trap, by Elizabeth Warren. Families now need twice as many members each working twice as hard just to have what their parents had.
• The Idols of Environmentalism, online essay by Curtis White. How the very nature of our work mitigates against our environment.
• Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt. Correlation analysis dispels many of the cause-and-effect myths that underlie much of our modern society's and economy's behaviours.
• The Megacity, online essay by George Packer. A portrait of Lagos, Nigeria, the world's fastest-growing city, an endless sprawl of slums in a ruined country, whose people survive only on their wits, workarounds and the propaganda of hope it might somehow one day get better.
• The Other Side of Eden, by Hugh Brody. What we can learn from the world's aboriginal cultures.
• The Idea of a Local Economy, online essay by Wendell Berry. Why relocalization, bottom up, is the only way to reform our economy.
• Waiting for the Macaws, by Terry Glavin. Stories of the dawning of the sixth great extinction.
• A Theory of Power by Jeff Vail. A free downloadable book. How we can overcome the Frankenstein monster of our industrial corpocracy through a revolutionary rhizome (network) social structure based on self-sufficient, egalitarian non-hierarchical communities.
• The Logic of Sufficiency, by Thomas Princen. A set of principles, assumptions and connecting theory for rationally and collectively self-managing complex adaptive systems (like societies and ecosystems).
• Heat, by George Monbiot. A specific plan to reduce CO2 emissions by 90%, but it requires everyone's cooperation to work.
• Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe Bageant. Why the working class of the US, and perhaps of all nations, suffers quietly and resists all calls for action to deal with the outrages of our time (of which they are the primary victims) and the crises that threaten is.
• Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. What it means to be human, explained through the author's personal stories.
• Life is a Verb, by Patti Digh. Say yes, Be generous, Speak up, Love more, Slow down, and Trust yourself.
• The Anglo Disease, by Jérôme Guillet. How corporations, governments and citizens have become co-dependent on a dysfunctional economy built on five fraudulent deceptions.
• Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work, by Dave Pollard. My new book on how to discover the work you were meant to do, and then start an ethical enterprise to make it reality.

• [1] Full House, by the late Stephen J. Gould. The presence of man on Earth was an unlikely and random occurrence, and after the next Extinction Event life on the planet is likely to evolve very differently. We are not the Crown of Creation.
• The Wealth of Man by Peter Jay. The life of pre-historic man was easy, idyllic, and very pleasant. Hunt big slow game an hour a day, relax and enjoy the rest.
• The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, (online) essay by Jared Diamond  Why the adoption of agriculture was 'a catastrophe from which we have never recovered'.
• [4] The Story of B and Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Also the IshCon discussion forum. The first two of these three books are fictionalized stories about human history from a different, anti-civilization perspective, with penetrating, astounding analysis and insight. Ishmael is more popular but I prefer The Story of B which recapitulates the entire theses in a series of 'lectures'. The two critical lectures are online here. 
• Original Affluence, by Marshall Sahlins. If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy, agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery, wouldn't you try to portray the alternative life as 'short, nasty and brutish'?
  
• Extinction, by Michael Boulter. Our planet's history is one of cycles punctuated by massive extinctions and new beginnings. Our only choice is whether to end this one sooner (a century) or let it end later (several millennia).
  
• The Axemaker's Gift by James Burke and Robert Ornstein. How innovativeness has been increasingly corrupted to concentrate and retain power, instead of making the world better.
• [12] A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright. A survey of past civilizations makes clear that savagery and short-term thinking are responsible both for humanity's evolutionary success and its destruction.
• [13] Straw Dogs, by John Gray. While we have a responsibility to try to make the world better and joyful, for those we love and leave behind, we cannot be other than what we are: a fierce, brilliantly adaptable species destined to bring out the next great extinction, and annihilate ourselves in the process.

• The Unconscious Civilization, by John Ralston Saul. How and why we've become helpless slaves of the political and economic system we built.
• Ockham's Razor, by Wade Rowland. What's wrong with our modern values, and where to look for new ones.
• Beginning Again, by David Ehrenfeld. A biologist's plea for a new partnership with nature, and prediction of the mechanized world coming apart like a broken flywheel if we don't heed his advice.
• [5] A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. A profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our current predicament won't work.
• [6] The World We Want, by Mark Kingwell. Why we are best served by trusting our instincts rather than what we are persuaded is moral or rational.
• People Before Profit, by Charles Derber -- How rampant corporatism ravaged the vast majority of people worldwide in the 1800s, and is doing so again.
• State of the World, by WorldWatch Institute, The 7 trends that most threaten eco-collapse: population growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinking cropland per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the extinction of plant and animal species.
• World Scientists' Warning (online), by the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.  No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.  A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."
• Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry. "We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.  We are in between stories.  The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective.  Yet we have not learned the new story."
• Healing Time on Earth, by David Brower. An argument that life without wilderness is meaningless and unsustainable.
• The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria. How cultures change, and why they don't.
• The New Rules of the World, by John Pilger. A devastating portrait of how the world really works.
• The Demon in the Freezer, by Richard Preston. How vulnerable we all are to individual acts of terror, chaos and sabotage.
• [10] Against the Grain, by Richard Manning. How and why grain monoculture evolved, and how it's ruining the Earth.
  
• Population Projections, by US Census Bureau. They're no longer assuring us that US and Global Population will level out at 300 million and 9 billion. Would you believe 1 billion and 12 billion by the end of the century, and still rising?
  
• Global Warming, by NOAA. An online synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming.
• This Overheating World - Worried? Us? (online essay) by Bill McKibben. Article in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and cynical political expediency, of denial.
  
• Are Cities Changing Local and Global Climates?, (online) by NASA. Studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local climate change and instability.
• Restoring Scientific Integrity (online) by Union of Concerned Scientists. The Bush regime's distortion of scientific research to forward its own political agenda, and how it threatens our planet.
• Climate Collapse, by David Stipp (online article) from Fortune Magazine. The possibility and chilling implications of global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts.
  
• Conservative Myths on Global Warming (online) by Blogger Carpe Datum. A brief but thorough explanation of the science behind global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant instability
• The Empire Strikes Out, by Kenny Ausubel. Corporatism and acquisitiveness run amok are ruining our world, but nature always bats last.
  
• The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garry Harding. The commons, that which belongs in common to all of us, is disappearing -- Why nobody really cares.
• Elizabeth Costello, by JM Coetzee. Why we tolerate a holocaust against our fellow creatures on Earth.
• The Machine in Our Heads, by Glenn Parton. How the ecological crisis is rooted in a human psychological crisis.
• Rogue Primate, by John Livingston. How anthropocentric cultural prosthesis has led our species astray, and how we can find our way back by rediscovering "the sweet bondage of wildness".
• In Defiance of Gravity, by Tom Robbins. An (online) essay that argues we must "insist on joy in spite of everything."
• The Slow Crash, by Ran Prieur. An (online) essay that explains how civilization will end, not with a bang, but with a series of whimpers.
• [15] The Long Emergency, by James Kunstler. The story of our dystopian future, caused by our cultural incapacity for preparedness, and sparked by resource scarcity and cultural conflict.

• [2] When Elephants Weep, by Jeff Masson. Compelling scientific evidence that animals feel deep emotions.
• Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich. Compelling scientific evidence that animals are intelligent, complex, rational and communicative.
  
• The Sacred Balance by David Suzuki. A passionate explanation of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, the need to redesign how we live, and the importance of spending more time in nature.
  
• The Hidden Dimension, by Edward Hall. We need space and a natural environment to be healthy and human. When we're deprived of them, we get mentally ill.
  
• [7] The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. How to reconnect with nature, and rediscover wonder.
• The World is Dying, by Richard Bruce Anderson. Online essay about our instinctive grief over knowing what we are doing to our beleaguered planet, and our feelings of helplessness about how to remedy it.
• The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. A scientific explanation of global warming, how we are causing it, and the possible consequences.
• The Truth About Nature, by Dave Pollard. My own essay, synthesizing the ideas in this reading list.

Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We Can Use to Save the World

• [3] Freeman Dyson's Brain (online interview), in Wired Magazine. The twin keys to building a better world are (a) establishing viable self-sufficient local communities to replace big centralized states and governments, and (b) selective more-with-less technologies like solar/wind energy coops and biotech medicines.
• The Developing Ideas Interview (online) with economist Herman Daly. An economic and tax program that favours communities and commons instead of corporations, and a 'contract' to reduce our population and ecological footprint.
• Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan Illich. "The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit." Full book is online.*
• Beyond Civilization, by Daniel Quinn. A prescription for creating a post-civilization world, starting with preparing yourself.
• The Unconquerable World, by Jon Schell. Why non-violence and consensus-building are the only viable way forward.
• The Support Economy, by Shoshana Zuboff A model for a post-capitalist economy.
• Unequal Protection, by Thom Hartmann. The case for denying 'personhood' to corporations.
• When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten. The need to get corporations out of politics and create localized economies that empower communities within a system of global cooperation, overcoming the myths about economic growth and the sanctification of greed, and focusing instead on overconsumption, poverty, overpopulation, and reining in untrammelled corporate power.
• Radical Simplicity, by Jim Merkel. How to free yourself from possessions and wage slavery without sacrifice.
• The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. What makes things change.
• The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. Why collective wisdom is better than accepted wisdom and expertise at solving problems, and how to tap it.
• Ten Ways to Make a Difference, by Peter Singer. A pragmatic recipe for change.
  
• [8] The Truth About Stories, by Thomas King. The truth about stories is that that's all we are. Want a new society? Write a new story.
  
• The Boycott List, by Responsible Shopper, and Good Stuff, by the WorldWatch Institute. What not to buy, and what to buy instead.
• The Corporation, by Joel Bakan. An action plan for undermining corporatism.
• [9] Humans in the Wilderness, by Glenn Parton. How we might reintroduce humans, well-spaced-out, into a primarily wilderness Earth.
• At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman. How self-organizing, self-managing systems work.
• EarthDance (entire book online), by Elisabet Sahtouris. Eleven steps to cultural metamorphosis (my summary is here)
  
• eGaia (entire book online), by Gary Alexander. How to achieve peace, cooperation and sustainability (replacing war, competition and growth, the fuels of our current culture) and a future state vision with vignettes from individuals' lives in a balanced and harmonious future world.
• [11] The Commonwealth of Life, by Peter Brown. A 14-point plan for stewardship of the Earth based on an accepted set of duties, responsibilities, and universal rights.
• Cradle to Cradle and The Hannover Principles, by Bill McDonough. Cradle to Cradle outlines a 5-stage design and materials usage approach to sustainability. The principles should drive the way we design, develop and operate cities.
• [14] Creating a Life Together, by Diana Leafe Christian. How to create and sustain model Intentional Communities.
• The Growth Illusion and Short Circuit, by Richard Douthwaite. A blueprint for creating Sustainable Local Economies. Short Circuit is free online [my summary is here].
• Biomimicry, by Janine Benyus. Lessons and approaches from nature that could transform and inspire our processes for food production, harnessing energy, manufacturing, health care, education, collaboration and entrepreneurship.
• The Cellular Church, by Malcolm Gladwell. An online essay that suggest cellular organization principles might allow us to accomplish, bottom-up, what political entities cannot.
• Is Your Genius at Work?, by Dick Richards. A guide to deciding how your talent and passion (your 'genius') can be applied to your purpose, and hence how you can best help to save the world.
• To Be Of Use, by Dave Smith. A sustainable entrepreneur's explanation of why creating natural, sustainable enterprise is essential to our planet's survival, and hence to our own peace of mind.
• Sustainability Within a Generation, by the David Suzuki Foundation. Eleven public policy programs that could achieve this extraordinary goal. This essay, by me, explains how these programs, along with my own four proposed programs (a sustainability information exchange, sustainable enterprises, personal sustainable living programs, and sustainable intentional communities) could bring both top-down and bottom-up synergies to achieving sustainability.

Craig Thomler has written a post about choosing social networking tools. To quote:

I apply some fairly rigorous criteria. Any system must:

1. Meet W3C, Federal, Department and Agency web standards
2. Support at least AA accessibility (and preferably AAA)
3. Meet our ICT requirements for interoperability, stability, bandwidth use and technology platform
4. Integrate with our identification system
5. Be server lite
6. Track usage by user

wait, there's more ...  read more »

So many years later, and y'know, the jury is still scratching their heads over the man who called himself Guinea Pig B and guided his transformation through a simple self-query, "If the fate of humanity depended on what I did, what would I do?"

Some still call him an expert midway barker and a master of self-promotion, they call him 'amateur', 'naive', 'dreamer', 'hoaxster' and 'charlatan' even, but there's one thing about the man Time called "America's Friendly Genius": For a nearly-blind man, he saw the world with incredible clarity, not only for what it was, but for what it could, for what could be done, starting now, and given only the small efforts of nearly-blind, nearly peniless, nearly alone and unknown personal failures such as himself.  read more »