The first comment on the cover says:
“This one is a keeper. Buy three. One for you, one for someone you care about, and one for a friend who really and truly needs it.” Seth Godin
I was given a copy of Dave Pollard’s Finding the Sweet Spot by a friend and read it on the plane [...]
Filed under: Commons, Wirearchy, Work | 1 Comment »
I spent the weekend helping out with a few community events. We had our Fall Fair, with some great entertainers and also had a farm field day that saw over 5,000 visitors, followed by an environmental trade show on the street - Green4Generations. The latter included a free showing of Who Killed the Electric Car, [...]
Filed under: Commons, Communities | 3 Comments »
If you want to address climate change, then the best thing you can do is get politically active, according to Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, speaking here in Sackville on Saturday evening.
Some highlights of his presentation:
How many failing states do we need before we have a failing civilization?
It is possible to cut [...]
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A theme on this blog is that of a Commons, or third-space that connects people in their work and living. The Queen Street Commons on PEI was one of the first in Atlantic Canada and a slightly different model is offered by Queen Street Studios in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia:
Fondly known as QSS, its genesis emerged [...]
Filed under: Commons | 2 Comments »
Over the holidays I read Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken. This is a book that is more a reference than a story and what will serve me well after reading the book is the extensive appendix, which is [...]
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This week I’ve noticed that everything seems to come back to our artificially created systems. If I’m waiting for a decision it’s because of poor information flow at some bottleneck in a hierarchy. If I’m not able to take action on an idea that would help many people it’s due to some artificial construct called [...]
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According to this article on The World Cafe, we humans may be more inclined to collaborate rather than compete:
Swedish scientists have done extensive research on this and they found we first lived in small groups of 20 to 100 people who in any given week averaged 2.5 days for gathering and hunting and 4.5 days [...]
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Our little town has been named one of the cultural capitals of Canada, winning $500,000 for the under 50,000 population category. Culture is one of the pillars of our town commons project, along with environment and entrepreneurship. I hope that raising our profile as a town will enable us to secure some more funds for [...]
Filed under: Commons | 2 Comments »
Rob Paterson calls Al Gore’s latest book, The Assault on Reason, a manifesto for public media. In reading this excerpt from Time, I was fascinated by the interwoven threads of issues that I’ve been discussing on this forum. First of all is the need for public discourse, not just improving our existing educational systems:
So the [...]
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The Future of Work has an article on distributed work zones - Zevillage in Normandy and Hidden Tech in Massachusetts. These zones offer a sense of local community to freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs. Zevillage is unique in France in that it is the only rural area with high speed Internet access, something that is available [...]
Filed under: Commons, Work | 2 Comments »
