I
have been to the excellent Planetwork
conference in the Presidio, but somehow my schedule or was it the Planets never aligned with the
monthly Planetworking
gatherings until last week. They were even kind enough to give me a spot on
their agenda to present the Future Salon as well as the upcoming Accelerating
Change Conference.
I talked about my motivation: To do my little part to make the world a better place, about the lever that technology is offering us to extend our reach, about the shortening of the event horizon because change is accelerating, about the importance of foresight to steer development in the right direction ...
One thing I totally forgot to mention was, that it is just plain old fun. It is fascinating to wrap your brain around possible futures and hear experts of their respective fields talk about what they are cooking at the moment, bringing people together that work from different angles on the same problem. That is just super interesting.
Talking about interesting, there were additional projects presented at the Planetworking event:
Equal Access is giving satellite radios to rural villages in Nepal and Afghanistan and produce native language educational programs for them. They joked, that their program is smack in the middle between CNN and Fox News on the radio dial. Sounds like a great program with some unfortunate side effects, like the introduction of television to Bhutan a couple of years back:
One third of girls now want to look more American (whiter skin, blond hair). A similar proportion have new approaches to relationships (boyfriends not husbands, sex not marriage). More than 35% of parents prefer to watch TV than talk to their children. Almost 50% of the children watch for up to 12 hours a day.
PBS did a program about these changes. Unfortunately I didn't get around to ask them about there take on these side effects of their worthy project.
Filmmaker Karil Daniels showed an excerpt from here documentary: Voices of Dissent- Activism and American Democracy. Which of course that evening was a bit preaching to the choir. I wish her lots of luck.
Joshua Grossmann introduced Voter Punch where you can check the voting record of your representatives from a progressive viewpoint. Interesting are the algorithms they use to find out, what a progressive vote constitutes.
The bigger question for me is how we can get citizen more involved in the decision process, more engaged in finding solutions to our current problems, beyond just going to the voting booth every couple of years. Some answers will be given at the Extreme Democracy Plus Future Salon Thursday in a week the 16th of September 6pm at SAP Labs in Palo Alto.
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