Networking A Sustainable Future
How can the Internet be used to mobilize global citizenry around other critical issues affecting our future: ecological destruction, resource depletion, human rights and economic justice?
How might we use the financial resources of a newly networked global citizenry to implement system-wide transformation?
How can the Internet allow us to see ourselves, and our collective aspirations, even more directly and productively?
What communications strategies would best enable us to mobilize networks, draw attention to specific issues, envision alternative solutions, and bring about change?
The Planetwork Conference in San Francisco like me, attempted to address some of the most interesting and fascinating issues available to us today.
While I will be announcing in the coming days the launch of Robin Good's Communication Agents Initiative, I remain extremely fascinated and craving for more from what has been going on at Planetwork Conference in San Francisco last week.
(It is unfortunate that the official Web site leaves much to be desired about finding detailed reports about the Conference and the discussions that stemmed from it.
Information is skimpy, navigation is very confusing and one is left baffled with so much desire to give a contribution and the outmost frustration of not being able even to find the key content of the Conference itself. I did not like the fact that each section of the site opens up in a new browser window and I encountered broken internal links and an overall confusing set of resources. I will not eve mention the hurdles I went through last week to register in the Collaboratory, and I am thankful to Marc Baber for having been extremely supportive on this front).
So much for the bashing. The conference and the people who made it remain an oustanding effort to bring about much needed change through the effective leverage of new media technologies and social networking tools.
I must still prompt you to give a serious look at the key core paper of the event:
"THE AUGMENTED SOCIAL NETWORK (ASN):
BUILDING IDENTITY AND TRUST INTO THE NEXT-GENERATION INTERNET"
which is an outstanding document outlining the path available to us to move this process in the right direction. I will myself be tapping and integrating my work along the lines suggested by the ASN white paper with the soon to be launched Communication Agents Initiative. This is a modest step in the right direction and for whatever I can I will model my project along the lines clearly indicated there.
I am a great supporter of this idea and I invite you to analyze, question it and criticize it too.
Download here the Augmented Social Network paper (PDF - 72 pages - 470 KB).
