#Campaigning

I’m sitting here a spoiled brat compared to this woman. I am smack on the doorstep of the world’s largest urban park whereas this woman fought a hard battle of urban renewal to not just bring the first piece of green space adjoining the river to the polluted, overindustrialized and woefully badly urbanly “planned” South Bronx in sixty years (try and think of living someplace with nothing green for 60 years), but has also led an entire “green the ghetto” movement which has revitalized the area proving that not only is green sustainable, it’s also commercially profitable and good for the inhabitants.

While I find it hard to believe that there can still be sceptics on the climate change front, the fact is climate change deniers are on the uptick as the mighty PR machines that fuel lobbyists and crackpots swings into line against solid scientific evidence, major environmental campaigns and movies like An Inconvenient Truth (check out for instance, these very scary ads from a fossil fuel funded lobby group (dead link unsurprisingly).

A few days ago, Google combined its amazing GoogleMaps technology with the satellite technology Keyhole which allows you to zoom in geographically with near-time satellite imagery on things from space.

While this is, for instance, very handy for figuring out what your apartment looks like from space and where to direct the aliens when they finally arrive, but obviously not the most practical application of the technology.

More practically and more ethically, imagine you’re an activist. I know more than a few of you are who are reading this. Now imagine using this to show the geological devastation apparent from say, clearcutting, or an oil spill or another sort of environmental disaster. You need a dramatic visual because you know that “if it bleeds, it leads” is the only way you can get media attention on critical issues these days. How about some context? What this thing looks like from space ?

Ah yes, combining popular civil disobedience and positive environmentalism, I am *compelled<*to point to the this great little howto on setting up your own solar panels and feeding back into the grid. Very handy if you’re out in the boondocks and no one is looking. Of course, today is the first sun we’ve had in quite a few weeks here.

As pointed out in the article, this is probably not legal where you are without proper permits, but let’s face it, microgeneration and conservation are probably a big part of the future and aren’t you just a little tired of the big dead dinosaur co’s and big utility inc. dragging their feet over making it easier for you ? I know in the Valley here, Fortis has yet to allow net metering which is a crime.

Bit of a tardy post, but considering the time of year and the fact that we should be thinking about the less fortunate at this time of year, definitely topical…

A really fantastic and financially responsible organization, Architecture for Humanity recently announced its finalists for the Siyathemba project (dead link) whose aim is to battle AIDS in Africa with a low cost, combined sports facility and healthcare project. The finalists are linkied from the front page.

I’ve been doing some pro bono work lately for (what I’m going to call for the sake of their stealth) a campaigning/advocacy organization which is trying to get off the ground and giving them some advice as to how to set up IT systems to make sure they can leverage their rather sparse human resources. It’s been interesting. Some choices have already been made at other levels as to what things should and shouldn’t be used and I have to admit that I’m not always in agreement that the best of breed things are being used.

Following up on Social Software Interfaces , I’ve been looking around at different classes of software (blogs, wikis, collaboration spaces, social softs) to help self-identify, self-create and self-publish a large, de-centralized global community. While outsourcing to a “private label” Blogger, TypePad or LJ (if they had it) might be an option, it seems silly even considering it with all the amazing open source tools out there once you abstract infrastructure and admin.

Joel on Software has a great usability article on the difference between designing social software interfaces versus user interface design. This is on my mind a lot right now as what my potential employer is asking me to, while fixing their corporate backend, is build software to power their society.

Whereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail.

Often, even useful software never gets used, because it does not align with the way people want to work together. Getting the social interfaces right is critical. Creating belonging is key. We’re really building communities with social software .

Since my plane buddies from the other night and I talked at length about what could be done to stop this slow, terrible erosion of democracy we all seemed to see and help resurrect public discourse about real issues :

Adbusters, the anti-consumerism culturejammers , have launched a legal challenge against the major Canadian media outlets which refuse to let Adbusters buy airtime on Canadian networks for airing their ads.

How important is this case? For a generation of people, and a growing social movement that sees the media as its main battleground, a victory here will change everything. Without media democracy - which means genuine public access to the most powerful forms of communication - we can’t raise healthy children, create good public policy or hold elections that are legitimate or that matter. We lose power to shape our consciousness, our culture and our future. We even lose the power to imagine what that future should look like.