We are building a collective awareness platform for sustainable communities.
I think it is useful but I believe there needs to be a balance between social networking through the web and actual face to face communication with people. Information and knowledge flow faster, but nothing can replace human contact, and real life experiences (at least until the present time).
Not yet ! But here in Wageningen we have a huge international concetration of young environmental expert ! I think it's a good place to start a environmental social network ! Where we can share information, contact, reference, build up partenership !
Great. We have platform for collaboration and for evaluating experience.
Have a look at www.communigram.net
it would be great if your group could join.
We would like to specify a reference model in parallel of experiencing...
That's a very interesting point and I would appreciate a lot to participate on this discussion. I work with communities and the first obvious thing: they don't have access to internet. Actually, it's a bit more complicated than the simple fact of having access to a connection to the web. It's possible (but not necessarily easy) to give them an access point, however it doesn't mean at all that the productive people of the community would make use of it. I'm not convinced that internet would be helpful to the communities regarding their experience. It's obvious though that they ought to have access to the Internet, but the expectation regarding some kind of improvement on their life quality due to the Internet shall be reduced.
Having access point could be helpful for sustainable communities who are focussing on expertise or goods bartering.
What area of sustainability are we addressing? I mean is the using of social webbeing linked to environmental sustainability? If so i think information on the social web moves very fast, the use of facebook (ON MOBILE PHONES) in developing countries is one such medium. Internet connections are limited and if available very slow. Youths are quiet instrumental in making decisions and influencing society on making sustainable choices starting from homes and therefore their active participation on the social media as has already been highlighted
Re: Flavio's point. I am not sure that communities not having access to the internet is a valid statement, we should remember that community in iteself is a contested term. Some people who belong to these communities will, and other wont, surely. If we are talking about those groups of people with common interest or associations, then the social web provides a world of possibilities to engage and be informed by. New types of communities are indeed being generated through the web, or at least existing communities with little opportunity for physical gatherings are helped greatly by virtual portals. Its all part of super diversity I think. Is it possible to have a sustainable community in such changing socail times would also be an interesting question.
I think that you should connect and exchange with the global eco village network. (http://gen.ecovillage.org/)
I think it is useful but I believe there needs to be a balance between social networking through the web and actual face to face communication with people. Information and knowledge flow faster, but nothing can replace human contact, and real life experiences (at least until the present time).
For some sustainable communities, it is not possible to have face to face communication due to distance between people.
Anything which will assist the efficient use of resources will assist in sustainability. One issue that is involved here however is the inevitable effects of distance on using the web as a forum for using resources. Ultimately sustainability must be primarily a local issue, and there are web models that work on this basis for instance Craigslist in developed economies. Still one must be very careful whenever one talks about transporting goods any distance as the effects on sustainability become negative.
What the web may be particularly effective in advertising is the sustainability of communities, just as labor flexibility and mobility have been considered advantages in the past citizen mobility should be considered an advantage in the future. The ability for people to find better places to live should be emphasized. In a world of reduced transportation options for goods it makes much more sense to move people to where higher qualities of life may be achieved.
I'm not sure what kind of communities are we discussing her. Anyway, and perhaps changing the focus, I try to be founded for developing an idea: sustainable development for some communities could be better accessed if their resources and potentialities are "placing in value" and showed via internet, in a 2.0 or 1.0 manner. It's the case of communities with basic necessities, but so rich in touristic resources for contemporary ways of tourism (rural tourism, heritage and culture tourism, for instance). Communities that are quite close from "civilization", but so far away in develop. In my opinion, it's time for sustainable planning of their resources, capabilities and skills, for not to repeat the experiences of other destroyed-areas by the unsustaible tourism of sun-and-beach classic model.
Sustainable community best practices could be applied to many kind of communities. Do you have any reference model for sustainable planning ?
Perhaps not a "model", but so the aknowledgement that linking respect to (and using of) local resources to local population has reached succesfull experiences in several parts of the world, from non-developed countries to nordic countries. Actually UE, from the 70s, are linked sustainability to local management of local productions and resources.
Another dimension of sustainable community is the collective awareness aspect.
There are 2 different sub topics here
real communities in people life or good methods of extracting communities in theory and by data sets?or both!
If you need extract real communities,i have some ideas
1- it`s better to develop your own social web! Where you can add some relevant fields or every thing that you need for a real dividing the whole net to communities .
2- using more resources will help you to have better view of the people: for example using their keywords in papers and their cited papers in journals together.
What do you mean exactly by sustain communities?
This is an idea that appear to me reading a couple of years ago writing a research project. If I meet a paper or reference, I put it here. Whilst, this is a real experience: http://www.projectoquerenca.com/pt/index.html , as a kind of "experiment.
We provide a social web platform for education and NPO/NGO. The target is best practices for sustainable communities
I think this page could be interesting in this discussion: http://www.worldfavor.com/.
But one interesting view of this question is how can the current social platforms be used for marketing sustainable business. My belif is that the is much potential in this as the consumers with sustainable thoughts often is young and used to this form of information technology, social networking. And if you live or act sustainable you want to talk about it!
Anyone have any example of this, it would be most interesting to watch and learn from.
thank you for your input. Worldfavor is interesting but not so collaborative and not so promoting collective awareness. It would be interesting to collect some examples of sustainable communities doing some bartering on services and goods.
I understand what you are looking for and I'm kind of sure that there was such a community lunched in Sweden quite resiliently. I'll get back if I find anything.
It is also part of the overall discussion on sustainable communities
A social web platform is great, just keep in mind that it has to be simple and easy to use. I have found that even average 'internet literate' people do not use platforms built for education and information exchange purposes. The reason why this happens is because they do not want to take the time to learn how to use these tools that often look complex and somehow intimidating. Twitter is an example of an extremely simple, short and fast way of sharing all kinds of information and thoughts.
I agree. the communication functions can be very natural. procedural learning is based in experiencing and doing.
If would be interesting to define collaboratively a reference model for sustainable communities.
The Transition Towns model is an interesting one you could look into. The idea is that community members come together to form a grassroots movement to make their community more resilient to peak oil, climate change, and global economics. It builds community through relocalising the economy (including barter/local currencies), and through promoting local solutions. There is an online site to promote awareness and share experiences at http://www.transitionnetwork.org/
here are other interesting references:
[1] Sidney Fels. 2010. Sustainable communities: where does communication fit in?. In First Interdisciplinary Workshop on Communication for Sustainable Communities (IWCSC '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 1 , 2 pages. DOI=10.1145/1951493.1951494 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1951493.1951494
[2] Olivia Fachrunnisa and Farookh Khadeer Hussain. 2010. A framework for creating a sustainable community in virtual environments. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 735-742. DOI=10.1145/1967486.1967604 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1967486.1967604
[3] Kuei-Yang Wu. 2010. Constructing evaluation model for sustainable development in community health and welfare. WTOS 9, 10 (October 2010), 1073-1085.
[4] Teresa M. Harrison and James P. Zappen. 2005. Building sustainable community information systems: lessons from a digital government project. In Proceedings of the 2005 national conference on Digital government research (dg.o '05). Digital Government Society of North America 145-150.
[5] Sharon Dawes and Natalie Helbig. 2009. Building a sustainable international digital government research community. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government (dg.o '09), Soon Ae Chun, Rodrigo Sandoval, and Priscilla Regan (Eds.). Digital Government Society of North America 348-349.
Thank you for the references Frederic! About the suggestions on building more sustainable communities, no doubt the web is a powerful tool, but people's organization for collective action comes from everyday sharing. I do agree with the fact that websites contribute to enhance communication, but cannot see how the web can have a central role in this. I am thinking about the millions of people in the world that do not have access to the web and whose cultural roots are orality and not literacy.
I couldn't agree more with Evodia. Nice answer. BTW, I would like to point out that we are in a multinational program to map sustainable communities, initially in South America. Please take note of this website and give it a look at: www.apreis.eu/essas
Unfortunately it is not in English yet since we've turn it on since 3 weeks only, but it's coming up soon. Basically we are mapping sustainable activities in small communities, normally pretty isolated ones.
We have a lot of job to do and honestly I'm particularly looking for a way to use the Internet to help out those people. Even though some of these communities have access to the Internet, only the youngest people use it and just for chatting or equivalent.
The most recent community that we got to know is called a "quilombola", which means they are all afro descendents living there for more 150 years when they ran away from slavery farms. They do have actually a pretty wonderful system of food production, many sorts of vegetables and other stuff. However, they don’t do good business with their product. The government buys 30% of everything and pays a very good price actually, which is enough to give them a minimum earning, but the rest of their production is simply thrown away, which hurts my feelings. We could try to find some way to help these people to do better business with their products, but we cannot ask them to access the Internet to sell things out. Here is a real problem. We must keep them in their own culture, which is wonderful. In my opinion, it is not fair to ask them to go to the city to trade anything. How to proceed? How could the Internet help them?
Dear Flavio
why not try the Slow Food Communities? It is a large network that tries to help marginal communities to survive!
dear Evodia,
Thank you for your great reply. of course, there are still millions of people in the world that do not have access to the web (Internet for all is very important) but the majority might be able to access to mobile telephone world easier where SMS exchange can be the way to exchange information.
Any interest to create a project in order to define collaboratively a reference model for sustainable communities ?
Great idea Frederic. Have you visited the website we're building with the localization of small communities: http://apreis.eu/essas ?
Multi-lingual issue is an important target. We are focussing on multi-lingual and multi-cultural issues for sustainable communities for open collaborations.
Dear Frederic,
Could you be a bit more specific about your multi-lingual and multi-cultural issues regarding the sustainable communities? Sorry but I didn't get it.
Any member might be able to access to his/her environment in his/her own language according to his/her cultural context
What would be the requirements analysis for such sustainable communities ?
Like I mentioned before, perhaps a tool similar to twitter. Few words transmitting powerful messages. It can also be very visual - try to do it without words, but with images, leaving more for the mind to reflect, imagine and create. There is no need to give solutions but to motivate people to think, differently. Different cultures have different preferences and interests, so you also have to consider this. Quite a challenge. Why not start with just one culture as an experiment and see how it goes?
We can collaborate with some communities on image message exchange. it will be great.
Agreed. What about a selection of images aiming to provoke some sustainability related thoughts?
Hi,
Is this net , itself the forum that you are looking for?
Just expand and present new ideas, I think it is better stsr for questions.
Put the question , show a problem to resolve, and using this and others webs you may make a huge brainstorming. The method is known and the place it's here at our keyboard. Do you agree?
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