Future Salon

Future of Democracy Salon Tue Feb 23 6pm PST

 

Major shifts are happening right regarding democracy and our freedom. Please join us on the 23rd of February at 6pm PST, where we together will try to make sense of what is going on and where we collectively discuss what we can do to nudge our society towards a positive future. [Zoom Link]

This event is a collaboration between the Next Now Network around Bill Daul; POW! Power Our World! Impact Forum around Zann Gill; and Mark Finnern's Future Salon.

Mark Finnern will host and lead the event this month.

We are collecting links to good content that helps us frame our conversation. Please add your own and ideally make yourself familiar with that content, so we can have an informed conversation.

We have three main presenters to set the stage. All coming from different perspectives:

• John Robb, dialing in from the East Coast, goes first: There is a big danger that Long Night is near. To prevent that we need A Digital Bill of Rights as he detailed in this report.

• Ismael Gahlimi makes a case for a New Rationalist movement: with courage, unity, and rationality we can chart a different course and overcome our current problems.
• Lauren Cory in conversation with Mark Finnern will share her insights from leading the Mid-Peninsula ACLU organization for many years. (She stresses that she sharing her own opinion, not the ACLU one that night). One of her insights is: To lower distrust we must change our approach to problem-solving. More information, more “facts”, are not the majority of the answer.

Each will have 10-15 minutes to share their perspective before we open up for discussions.

Find additional and more up to date information in our Future of Democracy 2.0 Future Salon document.

Fighting for more freedom is nothing new, the many pro-democracy songs from years past attest to that: We have a collection of songs in English and German for you to enjoy and play/sing. We started a small YouTube channel where we introduce some of these songs.

Mark Finnern will perform one of them as the opening act of the Future of Democracy 2.0 Salon.

We are also collecting cartoons, screenshots, or funny tweets that give us comic relief. Add yours too!

Can't wait to discuss with you what our best way forward is on the 23rd of February, Mark.

P.S. Walk down memory lane: Many years ago in 2004 we had an Extreme Democracy Future Salon with Tom Attlee introducing the Tao of Democracy; Ross Mayfield his chapter in the Extreme Democracy book, and Zack Rosen introduced Civic Space.

P.P.S. The official program is set for 90 minutes, but if you would like to hang out longer afterward with your favorite beverage or snack, please do!

P.P.S. Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84244802475

Here is a little promotional video I recorded:

Jaron Blogs ...

If you check the Internet Archive where many of our Future Salon videos are stored, the one with the best Batting Average as in how many people have viewed it in comparison to just look at the page with over 20% it is Jaron Lanier's talk. Here some more details about that interesting evening.

Turns out he just started to blog at the Huffington Post with some really good insights for example about Science and Intelligent Design. 

Good To Know Blog

As I wrote before I am invited to speak to 13 year old students at the National Youth Leadership Forum next Thursday the 30th of June.

I have 1.5 hours and there should be an interactive part. I came up with this Good To Know group blog with links to things that hopefully help while growing up. (Aren't we all still?)

The interactive part comes in by giving them author rights and let them post their own Good To Know stories.

After all I am three times as old as they are and what do I know what is good to know for them. I just post what I would have liked to know earlier.

Ideal would be if this blog would also function as a focal point for them to stay connected to each other after the days spent together here in the Bay Area.

Please add one good idea as a comment to this post of the Good To Know blog the students will be thankful.

Search the Future's Past

Inspired by Jeff Nolan's Blog I added search to the right hand side bar of this Future Salon Blog. Thanks, Jeff.

No Flicker No More

Often it's the little things that make me happy. Today two: The banner image on top of this Weblog is not flickering anymore. Hurray. Typad provided a fix and I implemented it. Second you can no reference to the Future Salon Weblog without the triple Ws. http://futuresalon.org now works. How nice.

But then it is always the same. You are tweaking your Weblog and being there, you could just change this additional little thing like direct link to AC2004 and the AC2004 Weblog ups, forgot to do the changes in the category pages too ... and before you know it 2 hours are gone. I think I have it now and am happy.

Time for the Circus band at the Odeon :-)

The Doc was in

Had a bit of a lousy day, nothing major, just a couple of smaller things not going my way and so I was frustrated clicking around on the Internet. Reading here and there, checking what Doc is writing. - And there it was a link to my post from yesterday. Wow, instant cure to the blues. Thanks. Didn't know how much uplifting power a simple link can have. A link from Doc for a fellow Blogger is like a blessing from the Pope for a devote Catholic. Well, may be like a blessing from an Archbishop :-)

Technorati: Mavens and Connectors

In his book The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell analyzes how ideas spread in the society. He writes that mavens (experts who love to teach) and connectors (people who know a lot of other people) are especially important for how fast an idea gets propagated through society. Examples in the blog world would be Matt Haughey with his PVRblog is a Tivo maven and Glen Reynolds is clearly a connector as noted in the Tipping Blog. There John Heiler also concludes and I agree, that online the lines between connectors and mavens are blurring.

Congratulations: Technorati tracks over Two Million Blogs

Wow, didn't think it would go so fast: Sifry's Alerts: Technorati Tracks Two Million Blogs Current Number: 2,007,819 weblogs watched.

The blogosphere continues to expand at an amazing pace, with about 12,000 new weblogs being created every day. We're tracking over 150,000 weblog updates every day, and growing.

As David told us at the Future Salon 30% of these will be abandoned within the first 3 months, but the other 70% wil be alive and kicking.

Technorati: Be of Service

Set strong guiding principles at the beginning when creating an organization, live by them and the organization is going to be strong.

Similar to Google's "do no evil" David Sifry at the Future Salon on Friday said, that "be of service" is probably going to be the main principle for Technorati.