wrythings

As Blog Action Day - 2008 draws to a close I write in solidarity with all who took up the cause of Poverty, today. Blogging is powerful, and the freedom to blog is something we should not take lightly. We are exercising a significant privilege.

While thinking about poverty two points come immediately to mind. First, we live in a world of great abundance. Second, and not unrelated to the first - the impoverishment of our repertoire of ideas and options is something we must take seriously - our symbolic or cultural impoverishment.

We live in a world of great abundance. In the context of recent global financial news we’re prone to forget this. In the context of the many effects of poverty we are drawn in to the immensity of the gap we must surmount. I return again and again to the work of Amartya Sen - in questioning the distribution of resources. Hunger and want more often than not is about a breakdown in the distribution and exchange of needed resources and rarely a result of insufficient resources for populations. Greed gets in the way. People are unwilling to let their wealth flow. We have the wrong idea of what wealth is.

Material Impoverishment persists largely through a nefarious “Symbolic Impoverishment”. This does not mean that social justice (or injustice) is not an active factor. So much more is possible for us as individuals and collectively as a species than we generally recognize. We accept limited options in the face of difficult circumstances. We reinforce the imagery of limited options for others. We find ourselves goaded by urgency and compelled on tight time-frames. Sometimes we accept external limiting definitions of ourselves, our station, what we deserve. We are distracted from our connectedness and what we ow to each other. (Georg Simmel’s notion of the relative decline Subjective vs. Objective Culture is relevant to this question - and reframes the challenge as acutely modern.)

We must set the highest goals and pursue them diligently, steadily. So much human potential is squandered. Life is squandered. We’re more caught up in maintaining a status quo, or keeping up with the current than growing together.

We must ask what human dignity demands of us when we bear witness to poverty and human suffering.

My call to the world of social and civic entrepreneurs with whom I find myself in common cause: let us each pursuing the social good work ourselves one by one out of a job. That’s my vision for the not-for-profit and social entrepreneurs - successfully closing the books on as many causes as we can so we may turn to higher challenges with the full complement of human creative potential.

This is the great urgency I see. These are two compass points on the map I follow.

Excellent video!

By: Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

This is all a necessary part of the path towards social justice… I was moved to share. Thanks Mickki for pointing it out!

These are the words of Chicago’s CIO, speaking on the need for cooperation between public and private sectors for high capacity and high bandwidth communications networks.

Is there anything new here? The ring of “public-private” partnership or cooperation is flat…

Chicago should have started wiring (and unwiring) itself 10 years ago. What happened to the promise of CivicNet? Promises, promises, and more platitudes?

This is not to impugn Mr. Bhatt - it’s just that we’ve been singing this song for a long time and we still don’t have the communications infrastructure we need in Chicago (or nationally). I’ve written extensively on how this language obscures the process of addressing civic needs, I won’t belabor the point here.

As far as not expecting a bailout for infrastructure - true - we ought not be holding our breath - but the need for general infrastructure investment is pressing, and lack of action disadvantages our economic well being and quality of life as we compete in global markets. This applies not just to communications infrastructure but to transport and especially public transport. If we want to jump start the economy, this is where we need to make investments - where we’ll create jobs doing the work we need. The “markets” will take care of themselves. Isn’t that what we’d been told all along? I don’t believe the markets take care of everything nor that they take care of things according to our national (or local) values.

What would you do with $700 Billion?

We need bold civic leadership. Bailing out the financiers won’t help any of us in the short run nor over the long haul.

Green investments in energy, transit, and communications infrastructure coupled with decisions that are grounded in meeting the needs of the community with mechanisms for community planning, oversight and accountability are the best way out of our current mess. Indeed, they are the best way forward in any weather.

Gerry Gleason, everyday philanthropist, concerned citizen, and open source dreamer … interviewed at the SourceTree Commons gathering in Breckenridge, Colorado (July, 2007).

I interviewed Angela at the end of 2006 - at the CAIDA Commons workshop…. a little bit of history (unearthed from my backlog), but the issues are still valid. One of the biggest points is that we can’t just throw technology at people or problems. Part of the interview goes into the work she was doing while executive director of Grassroots.org.

One Web Day is here! I’ll be headed up to the Old Town School of Folk Music where the Future of Music Coalition has convened an education workshop. I’ll be speaking on a panel there. (What will I say?)

I’ve just posted on the Catalytic Communities blog a little bit about OWD from the CatComm perspective.

As part of the Chicago NetSquared/NetTuesday meetup group I’ve posted several interviews of participants as a small contribution to this global collaboration. Here they are:

And a story told by Melvin at the September 9 Net2Chi meetup:

You can find OWD video interviews of Chicagoans from prior years if you dig back a little.

Happy One Web Day Chicago! Happy One Web Day everyone!