Category Archives: international

Build Peace 2015 Conference: Peace through Technology

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We want to make our network aware of an exciting community and conference that we know will interest many of our NCDDers, especially those of us oriented toward conflict resolution and technology.

Build Peace is a community that brings together practitioners, activists and technologists from around the world to share experience and ideas on using technology for peacebuilding and conflict transformation as well as an annual, international conference. The Build Peace 2015 conference will be taking place April 25th & 26th in Nicosia, Cyprus, and we want to encourage anyone who might be interested to consider attending.

Build Peace 2015 is titled Peace Through Technology: By Whom, For Whom and will be focused on alternative infrastructures for peace. Here is how the conference planners describe the gathering:

Where Build Peace 2014 aimed to demonstrate the potential of using technology for peacebuilding in terms of ‘breadth’ of initiatives and ideas, Build Peace 2015 will begin to examine issues of ‘depth’: How is the use of technology resulting in the creation of alternative infrastructures for peace? To this cross-cutting theme, the program adds three sub-themes:

  1. Empowerment. One key reason to use technologies in peacebuilding is that they can empower a larger number of people to engage and participate. But there are also tensions between state uses of technologies for surveillance and security implications of some grassroots uses. Who is empowered, by whom and how?
  2. Behavior change. And empowered to do what? Technological tools can affect behaviours that pertain to patterns of violence and peace: by shaping the peace and conflict narratives, through training or education, or by helping shape alternative identity formation processes.
  3. Impact. Another assumption underlying the use of technologies is that it can help ‘improve’ peacebuilding, with the caveat that there are associated risks and ethical issues. What are the actual or possible impacts of using technologies for peacebuilding? How can we measure them?

We have designed the program to weave these guiding themes through the different types of content. Because the themes are interrelated, some sessions are guided by more than one theme. Different sessions are designed to offer different modes of interaction. Keynotes aim to be thought provoking and allow for deeper exploration on one aspect of a theme or themes. Panels offer an overview of one theme and permit interaction with the audience on the broader questions raised by that theme. Short Talks provide concrete evidence of practice and/or research in a particular theme. Working sessions are more practitioner-oriented and will produce a concrete output that contributes to practice in one thematic area.

We know that there a plenty of folks in our NCDD network who would gain and contribute a lot by attending this great gathering, and we hope that some of you can make it! You can learn more at www.howtobuildpeace.org/program or get registered for the conference at www.howtobuildpeace.org/tickets.

Want to really contribute to the gathering? It’s not too late to apply to be a short talk speaker, to host a stand at the Technology Fair, or give a presentation during the Peace Lab at Build Peace 2015! But you have to act fast, because the deadline for application for speakers, stands, and presenters is this Monday, January 5th, so visit Build Peace’s call for speakers today!

We hope that some of our NCDDers will be able to take advantage of this great opportunity, and we thank Build Peace for inviting us to be part of it!

Degrowth, the Book

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In industrialized societies, where so many people regard economic growth as the essence of human progress, the idea of deliberately rejecting growth is seen as insane.  Yet that is more or less what the planet’s ecosystems are saying right now about the world economy. It’s also the message of an expanding movement, Degrowth, that is particularly strong in Europe and the global South. 

A few months ago I blogged about the massive Degrowth conference in Leipzig, Germany, that attracted 3,000 people from around the world. The basic point of the discussions was how to get beyond the fetish of growth, intellectually and practically, and how to transform our idea of “the economy” so that it incorporates such important values as democracy, social well-being and ecological limits.

Several of the movement’s leading figures have now released a rich anthology of essays, Degrowth:  A Vocabulary for a New Era (Routledge). It is the first English language book to comprehensively survey the burgeoning literature on degrowth.  More about the book on its website and an amusing three-minute video.  

The editors -- Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgios Kallis – are three scholars at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, and members of the group Research & Degrowth. The editors describe degrowth as “a rejection of the illusion of growth and a call to repoliticize the public debate colonized by the idiom of economism.”  The basic idea is to find new ways to achieve “the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability.” 

Here’s how the book jacket describes the volume: 

We live in an era of stagnation, rapid impoverishment, rising inequalities and socio-ecological disasters. In the dominant discourse, these are effects of economic crisis, lack of growth or underdevelopment. This book argues that growth is the cause of these problems and that it has become uneconomic, ecologically unsustainable and intrinsically unjust.

When the language in use is inadequate to articulate what begs to be articulated, then it is time for a new vocabulary. A movement of activists and intellectuals, first starting in France and then spreading to the rest of the world, has called for the decolonization of public debate from the idiom of economism and the abolishment of economic growth as a social objective. ‘Degrowth’ (‘décroissance’) has come to signify for them the desired direction of societies that will use fewer natural resources and will organize themselves to live radically differently. ‘Simplicity’, ‘conviviality’, ‘autonomy’, ‘care’, ‘commons’ and ‘dépense’ are some of the words that express what a degrowth society might look like.

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Crowdfunding Campaigns for CommonsScope & STIR

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I don’t normally feature crowdfunding campaigns in my blog because there are so many worthy ones to support.  But here are two projects that I have a special affection for:  An ambitious campaign by CommonsSpark to raise money for a new mapping project called “CommonsScope,” and a set of twelve workshops to build local economies hosted by STIR magazine in the UK. 

Ellen Friedman and her colleagues have done a great job in pulling together an amazing number of maps of commons from around the world, featuring such categories as water, transportation, local commons and art commons. In an Indiegogo campaign that hopes to raise $35,000, CommonSpark plans to build a web catalog of hundreds of commons-related maps, data visualizations, open data, and tools – “a knowledge commons about the commons.”

Friedman also notes that CommonSpark is creating a catalog of commons with thousands of profiles that will communicate the story of each commons (who is the community, what is the resource, what are the commoning practices, where is it located, etc) along with best practices and data visualizations to identify patterns of commoning.

The CommonSpark Collective doesn’t want just want to raise money to build this useful web tool; it wants to attract a larger community to help build and steward the new world atlas of commons. You can help the effort by helping build the inventory of commons, joining the community and contributing to the Indiegogo campaign.  If this is any inducment, I've agreed to be a "reward" for any donor that gives $2,500 or more.

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IASC Commons Releases Six Short Animated Videos

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The IASC Commons (International Association for the Study of Commons) has released a series of six short, artfully produced videos, “Commons in Action," that amount to short advertisements for important commons projects. 

Each begins with the words:  “Commons are forms of governance and governance strategies for resources created and owned collectively.  Commons are a reality today.”

The longest video, at four-and-a-half minutes, focuses on the newly created Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons, which bills itself as “a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project based on studying cases of commons governance for knowledge and information resources. The Workshop and its methods are inspired by the work of The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.” 

Professor Michael Madison of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law is the host of the website.  The Workshop is a collaboration among prominent academic scholars of the knowledge commons such as Brett Frischmann (Cardozo School of Law), Charlotte Hess (Syracuse University), Charles Schweik (UMass Amherst), among others.

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Global Innovation Competition Seeks Governance Ideas

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We think that NCDD members will be interested to learn more about a great initiative from Making All Voices Count, who will be launching global competition of innovative governance ideas next week. We encourage you to read MAVC’s write up on the competition below or find the original piece here.  

While democracies share common features, there is no single model and the same is true for innovations designed to engage citizens and incentivise better governance.

On the International Day of Democracy September 15, Making All Voices Count, a global initiative that aims to foster and support new ideas to enable better citizen engagement and government responsiveness, will launch its second annual Global Innovation Competition (GIC).

“We’re excited to launch the GIC on this symbolic day and welcome challenging, bold solutions,” says Innovation Director Daudi Were.

The GIC is designed to tackle a different governance and accountability problem each year and invites the public to identify and vote on entries.

Last year’s winner came from a changemaker within government in Pakistan, and the competition sparked a surge of interest that led to a wide range of submissions from innovators across the world, with over 250 submissions received and 60,000 public votes cast.

This year, the GIC takes forward the lessons learned and is seeking ideas for Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia, the Philippines, Liberia, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mozambique, Uganda and Nigeria that relate to the following themes:

  1. Legislative Openness – Inclusive and Participatory Lawmaking
  2. Sub-national Governance
  3. Gender Equality
  4. Building Resilience and Response to Humanitarian Crisis

The competition doesn’t take innovation to mean the fastest and newest technology and several of the ten previous finalists utilised basic tools, such as SMS and a print news bulletin, in their solutions. As Were explains:

“It’s less about the technology and more about how it’s deployed and its relevance to the cultural, political, economic and geographical needs of the end user.

Anyone can come up with up an idea, but it takes an innovator to turn that idea into a working solution and it’s people like this we hope to attract in GIC 2015.”

Awards:

  • £300,000 in grants available to winners
  • Finalists will attend the Global Innovation Week in Jakarta, Indonesia; a programme of intensive mentoring and networking.
  • Winners will receive grants to support their projects, plus expert mentorship.

Making All Voices Count takes learning as central to its programme and earlier this year, a series of think-pieces were conducted investigating the conditions most conducive to the mission of “making all voices count”. This check-list draws on these outputs and has been compiled for GIC applicants.

One major observation, noted by Research & Evidence Programme Manager Duncan Edwards in the think-piece on Making, is that interventions designed to amplify citizen voice and secure government responsiveness are often conducted by outsiders and risk being disconnected from local realities.

The importance of including local perspectives in interventions is echoed by Juliana Rotich, Executive Director of Ushahidi, who says, “when it comes to your community, your society, your country, you are the expert.”

The theme for this year’s International Day of Democracy is “Engaging Youth” and Making All Voices Count is particularly interested in solutions that amplify the voices of vulnerable members of society. In this post previous GIC mentor Fred Ouku offers a disability perspective and urges:

“If you’re talking about democracy – including ALL voices in the public sphere – it’s important to recognize the ‘public’ are diverse, with different needs and experiences.

My vision for this year’s GIC is that entrants, from the outset, design solutions that aim to make services or decision-making processes accessible and open to everyone. That is, for all members of society including marginalized persons or people that for some reason remain hard to reach.”

Applications for the GIC open on September 15, 2014 and close on October 15, 2014.

For further updates on the #GIC2015 sign up here.

For a video recap of the GIC 2014 see here:

The original version of this piece from Making All Voices Count can be found at www.makingallvoicescount.org/news/launch-global-innovation-competition-to-make-all-voices-count.

Melbourne “People’s Panel” Connects Citizens to Public Decisions

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We wanted to make sure the NCDD community saw an article from The Age about an intriguing new development in Melbourne, Australia where the city council is working with the good people at The newDemocracy Foundation - an NCDD organizational member – to create a “People’s Panel”. We encourage you to read more about it below or to find the original here.

newDemocracy logoYou might describe it as Melbourne City Council’s version of jury duty, except it is far easier to get out of.

A panel of 43 “everyday” Melburnians will advise council on how it should spend its money for the next 10 years, when the randomly selected group is given unprecedented access to the municipality’s financial books and experts.

In a Victorian first, 7500 letters have been sent out to randomly selected business owners, residents and students asking them to be part of a “People’s Panel”. The names of those who want to participate will be put into a ballot to decide the final team.

The $150,000 project is being run by independent research group the newDemocracy Foundation, which has run smaller projects around the country including in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney.

The group’s executive director, Iain Walker, said when armed with all the information, juries of citizens had come to very “sensible” decisions.

“We had citizens come back in Canada Bay and say ‘mow the parks less often’,” Mr Walker said.

He said when given the information the residents realised, although they loved the parks, they could save money by mowing them less often and use the extra cash on something else.

Darebin Council, in Melbourne’s inner north, is also in the process of allowing a citizen’s jury to decide how to spend $2 million worth of capital works. But the Melbourne panel will advise councillors on a far bigger spend – a whopping $4 billion over 10 years.

Cr Stephen Mayne said the project would mean that the “silent majority” would have a much bigger say on future spending, as opposed to the usual suspects of individuals and lobby groups who often strive to defend the status quo.

“This casts aside all the squeaky wheels,” he said. “It doesn’t allow people to use a megaphone to dominate conversations.
“It’s genuinely sweeping that all aside and really well informing a group in the community and letting them come back with a fresh set of eyes.”

Victorian Local Governance Association chief executive Andrew Hollows said advertising a budget through the normal channels might allow councils to meet their compliance obligations. But he believes councils need to have a “deeper” conversation with their residents.

Dr Hollows said there was a growing appetite for innovative community consultation as councils faced tough financial choices in the future.

Melbourne policymakers are facing particularly hard decisions as the city stares down a booming population and changing climate, says council chief executive Kathy Alexander.

“There’s no city in the world where it is business as usual anymore,” she said.

Those in Melbourne’s first “People’s Panel” will be paid $500 each for what is expected to be about 50 to 100 hours work. The makeup of the panel will be finalised in about a month, with the jury handing down their recommendations to councillors in November.

Everyone else can have their say through an online financial tool, which allows people to make their own 10-year budget.
Visit www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/participate for more information.

The original version of this article from The Age can be found at www.theage.com.au/victoria/citizens-jury-of-melburnians-will-guide-6-billion-spend-20140707-zsz7i.html.

Announcing Next Stage Facilitation Intensives in Montreal and Boulder

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We are happy to share the announcement below from NCDD Sustaining Member Rebecca Colwell of Ten Directions. Rebecca’s announcement came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Integral Facilitator® Next Stage Facilitation™ Intensives are 3-day workshops introducing the core competencies of an Integral approach to facilitation designed to enhance your capacity to generate greater coherence and increased collaboration and dialogue in the groups you work with.

In this three-day workshop, you’ll learn:

  • How to maintain presence in the face of challenging situations.
  • How to work effectively with group energetics and emotional states.
  • How to effectively build connection and working with tension to deepen coherence and intimacy.
  • How to engage tension, power dynamics and conflict in a group.
  • How to increase the positive impact you have on others.
  • How to bring an integral approach to your work.

As a Next Stage participant, you’ll learn directly from master facilitator, mediator and former Director of Dispute Resolution for the Utah State Judiciary, Diane Musho Hamilton.

Your participation will include a deep dive into your personal presence as a facilitator, including how bring an Integral approach to your work with groups, and opportunities to practice new approaches that will stretch your development as a skilled facilitator. Masterful facilitators with depth and presence are more responsive to the subtleties of group dynamics and can create more rewarding and effective dialogue and collaboration.

Next Stage Facilitation Intensives will be taking place September 8 – 10 in Montreal, Quebec, and October 6 – 8 in Boulder, Colorado.

Sign up for an upcoming Integral Facilitator Next Stage Facilitation Intensive.

Praise from workshop participants:

“The workshop has shifted my perception of issues such as power, and allowed me to understand where my choices lie. I feel confident to run with those issues now as opposed to fighting against them and using up all my energy.” – Marissa Moore, Senior Finance Executive

“This has been my best experience ever in a 3 day training. Diane is an amazing facilitator! I’m currently figuring out how to get myself in the 1 year program as the 3 days were so exciting and promising in terms of my personal growth.” – Tremeur Balbous, Consultant & Integral coach

“Take facilitation to a whole other level. The Next Stage Facilitation three day intensive shakes you out of conventional and stifled facilitation modes and expands your view to multi-perspectival, grows your competencies toward integral–exploring what it means to work with individuals, the collective and the topic at hand in a balanced, elegant and effective way, and, it strengthens your intuitive faculties to sense and trust the energetic field of the room and respond.” – Michelle Elizabeth, Consultant

Watch Integral Facilitator Lead Teacher Diane Musho Hamilton’s recent Google Book Talk on conflict resolution:

For more information, visit https://tendirections.com/next-stage-facilitation-3-day-intensive.

Lessons of DIY Urbanism in a Syrian Refugee Camp

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Governments are so accustomed to dictating their will, through coercion if necessary, that they find it unimaginable that people might willingly – and with creativity and enthusiasm – self-organize themselves to take care of urgent needs.  So pause a moment to behold the remarkable Zaatari Refugee camp in Jordan.  This settlement of 85,000 displaced Syrians is showing how even desperate, resource-poor people can show enormous creativity and self-organization, and turn their "camp" into a "city."

In many respects, Zaatari bears an uncanny resemblance to the DIY dynamics of the Burning Man encampment in the Nevada desert – an annual gathering that attracts more than 65,000 people for a week.  Both eschew "government" in favor of self-organized governance.  Both confer opportunities and responsibilities and individuals, and facilitate bottom-up initiatives through lightweight infrastructures.

As the New York Times reported on July 4, the Zaatari camp has “neighborhoods, gentrification, a growing economy and, under the circumstances, something approaching normalcy, though every refugee longs to return home. There is even a travel agency that will provide a pickup service at the airport, and pizza delivery, with an address system for the refugees that camp officials are scrambling to copy.”  Times’ urbanist/architecture critic Michel Kimmelman declares that “Zaatari’s evolution points more broadly to a whole new way of thinking about one of the most pressing crises on the planet.”

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Interview on Games & Engagement

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As children run through sprinklers and enjoy fireworks (safely, we hope) over the holiday weekend, we thought it would be appropriate to share a post from the Davenport Institute’s Gov 2.0 Watch blog on games and engagement. As we know, civic participation can be fun, too! You can find it below or read the original here. Happy Independence Day, everyone!

DavenportInst-logoLast month, Project Information Literacy at the University of Washington Information School published an interview with Eric Gordon, a professor at Emerson College and Executive Director of Engagement Lab:

In his role as the Executive Director of the Engagement Lab, Eric leads play-based projects, spanning everything from community engagement in Detroit to disaster preparedness in Zambia. As he explains, the projects are “designed not just to facilitate official processes, education, and real-world action, but to natively be real-world actions themselves.

Through participatory action research in the United States, Europe, and Africa, Eric and his team are partnering with communities and organizations to understand how and where technology, play, and civic life intersect.

You can read the interview here.

The Commons as a Growing Global Movement

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This is the fifth of a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press. The essays originally appeared on CSRWire. I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released.

Our last essay outlined the great appeal of the commons as a way to deal with so many of our many ecological crises. The commons, readers may recall, is a social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity.

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