[VBbuilders] Fwd: June 2010 letter to the Globalvillages Community

[Franz Nahrada]

Dear Videobridgers!

I just had a nice chat with Marina.

Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel. 

here is a report about recnt activities from Austria, most of them
targeted at Global Villages.

But also VideoBridging found new fertile ground in Austria. See point 4

If we can establish a national initiative, we might add an international
one and maybe still be able to prepare a Grundtvig Network this year.

I will send a proposal soon

Please filll your country pages!

http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/CountryPages

all the best

Franz


----- Original Message -----

This post went - identically - to the members of the NING Group 'Global
Villages Network' and to the members of the yahoogroup 'globalvillages'.

This is going to be a rather lengthy letter with many messages overdue - 
and therefore it makes sense to start right away with a table of contents:

thank you for the effort to read this!

Franz

===========================================================

Top News
1. State of Global Villages Network, NING and Yahoogroup
2. A look back @ Joint Workshop with Clear Village Foundation in May 2010
3. A new attempt to spell out the vision and mission of a Global Villages
Network

Other News
4. Videobridge Workshops in January (Vienna) and June (St.Martin)
5. Letter from Russian Administration regretting problems with
Videobridging
6. interesting network building processes
6.1 Locals forum on edemocracy
6.2 Intelligent Communities association


=============================================================


1. State of Global Villages Network, NING and Yahoogroup

I just subscribed the 125th member of the NING social network
(globalvillages.ning.com), and I probably rejected at least the triple
numbers of spammers in these recent months. From what I can see from the
profiles we do have a fantastic group assembled here, it is really a good
self-selection/selection of likeminded people. People like these are "thin
on the ground". And there are many that I know in person as groundbreaking
visionaries. It was not even easy to get them into a social network.

In the last months I could really not do much more for this forum than
passively collect, but interest has not ceased in creating this  worldwide
network of advocates of new village development. 

Now all this is in jeopardy, from various sides. Not only from my personal
lack of capacity.

Even before we have begun to intensify our communication and to draw the
benefits from this "collecting activity", the announcement that NING that
hosts our social network will become a purely commercial paysite appeared.
This in fact forces me and all of us to rethink the significance, purpose
and resilience of the GlobalVillages endavour.

The whole NING-based thing seemed to be an easy job, allowing the
evolutionary and gradual collection of likeminded friends - sort of
"on-the-side" - community building. Now it will become much bit harder,
either more energy and dedication has to go into this network building
effort --- or this valuable collection and potential will again collapse
and be extinguished.

One may argue and rant about the brusque style of NING turning arould
180%. 
(In fact NING is most likely destroying at least tens of thousands
networking activities that it helped to build in the forst place. They
would have had much better choices to keep their reputation alive. At
least we still have some time to move or to decide to stay if we can raise
240 dollars a year.)  
But all this requires from us to be creative and dedicated if we want this
networking to continue. Its a wake up call.

If that was not enough, Andrius Kulikauskas, who spent tons of energy in
collecting independent minds and who helped building the globalvillages
mailing list, also is significanly reducing his efforts on online
community building. He relocated from Vilnius to Chicago a few days ago
and will work there one year as a tutor. So he will also stop to maintain
the globalvillages list and leave it up to me how this list will proceed.
It seems to me there is less and less sense for him investing in an
infrastructure for independent thinkers when the evolving social
networking world allows people to connect in so many ways (maybe not the
ways he had in mind) and many of his ideas were taken up by others. The
online collaboration protocols are growing endless, as is the also energy
you have to put in them to be competitive. 

So here we are. The globalvillages yahoogroup has 310 members, by its open
subscription process there might be some spammers and lurkers, but I also
know much effort has been spent mostly by Andrius in bringing these people
together and basically its a great list, too. Add this to the 125 NING
people who went through a little more effort of self - selection: and you
will get a lot of social capital and potential.

In times of information overflow this social capital only survives if
people are actively engaging in relations and have a really good reason to
participate in and maintain this flow of information. It only survives if
it turns out to be "intelligent design", really fulfilling a purpose for
participants. So many things are competing for our attention that you cant
even afford to read this mail. 

I dont know the complete answer how we are going to maintain this online
community but I would regret it if we failed. Its a time to ask for good
ideas, and definitely a time to pool resources and to cluster. If any of
you could help in making this whole thing sustainable in offering
qualified online facilitation or technical help it will be greatly
appreciated. I am working with Ralf Schlatterbeck to build up a server
infrastructure where we can host applications facilitating communication
between globalvillagers in many ways - from spontaneous chats to forums
and discussion groups to serious coauthoring or project management. We
want this community to build on Open Source tools and really own its own
content at the end of the day. But this is costly.

You want to help help? Great! Here is a five point list of how you could
do it:

* Find research projects that can nourish and vitalize our community
relations.
* Find commercial projects that help in a fair way to nourish and vitalize
our community and are in tune with our values
* Help us to get resourceful supporters in politics, business, education,
science.
* Dedicate some free time of yourself and coworkers to take part in our
editorial board or in our technical support group.
* Organize regional or national chapters or simply local groups of Global
Villages Network and start to explore and observe the change towards
"revillagiatura" with us. (See further below for a new short purpose
statement).

If you wish to respond, send me an email to f.nahrada at reflex.at and I
publish all responses grouped by theme in a neutral wiki space that will
survive and will be accessible to all. You all will get notified about the
result.


2. Joint Workshop with Clear Village Foundation in May

I reported having been invited to Barcelona last November to the first lab
of the Clear Village foundation. (See short film if you scroll down at
http://www.clear-village.org/). It was a fabulous time, because for the
first time I saw the full range of my - and hopefully our - joint
aspirations manifested in a gathering of dedicated people with
extraordinary capacities. This was not about preserving remnants of the
past, this was about designing and building a powerful future of villages
! Thomas Ugo Ermacora and his people were really targeting at a creative
process that works. The idea is  integrating major technological and
social changes together with old wisdom into a human framework that makes
it possible for us to work for a better future together. They speak out
daringly what supposedly everybody of us knows and stands for: the village
is the optimum form of human development, and if the village currently is
in crisis then we have to reinvent it!

I stayed in touch with Thomas and offered to work for an integration of
our works.

So recently Thomas sent two of his collaborators, Chris Garvin and Karsten
Stampa to Vienna where I had spotted an opportunity to have our message
heard in a spatial planners conference named CORP (an acronym that points
to computers and spatial planning). Not to our worst luck this conference
was also connected to a major real estate developers trade show, the REAL
Vienna.  We did a workshop together and also visited many of the
exhibitors and confronted them with the new ideas of participatory village
development. So in many respects, this was like a test run for possible
cooperations, in theory and in practise. 

I must say the echo was not bad at all. At the workshop, we had quite a
lively discussion with planners about the antithesis to sprawl and
suburbia that we are suggesting. At the show floor, we found some
tendencies towards village development, but also quite a lot of interest
among other exhibitors. The bunch of Eastern European regions exhibiting
there seemed a bit frustrated by the trade show, there was definitely no
short supply of great ideas and projects, but a shortage of investors and
money. So they were - at least sometimes - very open and eager to dicuss
with us - and there was some acceptance of our provoquative points that
there must be an alternative to traditional industrial developments, both
in form of the process as well as in content, shape and size.

We might see this as an opportunity to build fruitful collaboration in
future, offering support to planning departments, real estate developers,
local communities, politicians and others who seek a way out of the
current unsustainable ways of living.

Also, the complementing nature and slight difference of the "Global
Villages" and "Clear Village" approaches has shown in practical
intervention as a beacon: While GIVE (as the Vienna research center and
initiator of the Global Villages network) puts a lot of emphasis on the
structural - technical, spatial, institutional, psychological, social -
requirements of the village building process including the geopolitical,
geographical and cultural "birds eye view", Clear Village is open and
sensitive to the best opportunities to launch participatory design
processes around a given real estate project - to create and implement
local community power already in the phase of design. 

Its almost like attacking from two sides, and its more than just doubling
the energy, its a mutial multiplication that can work even better because
each side has its own tactical stands of arguments and points.

So we are discussing a deepening of collaboration. Maybe we can establish
a worldwide working research structure as the operational rationale of the
Global Villages Network. I do not know how much of you really support
that, but it is clear that we have to strengthen our base in research
institutions and think about joining in working groups with thematic
areas. And we have to team up with those who seek to practically implement.

3. A new attempt to spell out the vision and mission of a Global Villages
Network

After and through the workshop with Clear Village, it has become even more
obvious to me that the Global Villages Network makes a lot of sense. If
you want to boil its meaning down to one sentence, and you have to explain
it to somebody in less than 20 words, you could use the phrase: 

"These are the people that seriously are going to debunk the 2050 myth". 

You all know that in the official predictions 2050 is the year where not
only half, but 75 % of the worlds population are predicted to live in
cities. 

This prediction sounds to me like if some observers would say in 2050 a
comet will hit earth. It seems like inevitable fate that we simply have to
adapt to. Whilst in terms of our manifold social crisis/es at least there
is pretension of action, here there is a widespread acceptance of this
strange fact that 75% of the global population would cluster together in
2% of the planets surface! Official UN position, scientific consensus, dot!

Why does almost no one dare to say that this is in itself another horrible
prediction and forecast ruining the most essentials achievements of
humanity? That this is a deep crisis and loss of landscape and humane
environment? Why does no one point out that we have to introduce a set of
measures of very complex dimensions to prevent this destruction of grown
cultured landscape including existing and future man - nature relations,
but this is by all means possible, considering our achievements in
science, technology, culture and creativity?

This is basically what the Global Villages Network should stand for. At
least it is created to network NOW all these brilliant people that know we
cannot change the future by mere politics, but we have to combine politics
with design. This design is complex, it has many dimensions. It is
physical design of spaces, it is design of communication possibilities, of
applications, of technologies, even and by far not least, it is social
design. And the most important thing is: all these partial designs play
into each other, they build on each other. Design is not possible without
experiment, without local action. So we are not a networks of mere
academics, we are scientist-artists.

Thats why we are here, thats why we seek to cluster. We have an important
cause together, and its far beyond simply "preserving villages and rural
areas". In fact you cannot preserve them without deeply change them, make
them "competitive" (not what *they* think that means!)  in terms of
attraction and liveability with urban areas and their amenities. We want
villages for everyone, not just for the diehards!

So the idea of this community is to create subdivisions for design and
policy and arts and whatsoever - but be united in this important goal,
being able to speak with one voice and no less than contribute the best it
can to the ongoing efforts to change the path of civilisation. It is like
a game with an almost impossible challenge - but with many many potential
co-players.
 
We have to learn to play together and see that we have a lot of strength
on our side if we have the right point at the right time made, by people
that focus on them - but need to be in touch and recognize each other. I
want this to be a network of excellence where people challenge each other
on their fields of excellence - and I hope we will get there despite all
the technical troubles (and personal time scarcity) that we are facing
right now.

Again - we will not survive without strongholds and strong centers. So
far, many people have expressed their enthusiasm, but no single chapter or
organisation besides GIVE / Globally Integrated Village Environment Vienna
exists. That is definitely too little. Please come up with nice surprises.

Other News

4. Videobridge Workshops in January and June

One of the main reason I could not devote much time to the globalvillages
list and network in the last months was the fact that we focussed on a
workshop in January around the issue of VideoBridging. I think this is a
theme custom - tailored for the "point of view" of globalvillagers. In a
nutshell: Videobridging means the connection of learning groups that are
focussed LOCALLY, involved in LOCAL face2face-interaction, by a hybrid of
videoconferencing and TV transmission, using the capturing of local
atmosphere to spark and catalyze the local learning circles everywhere. We
did it for 5 years, it worked.

See the Grundtvig Workshop pages here, including subpages for outcomes and
country pages for activities:

http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/GrundtvigWorkshop
http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/GrundtvigWorkshop/Outcomes
http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/CountryPages

In fact Videobridging is what I would call an example of essential
subgrouping of a Global Villages Network. At the core of any successful
village there will be a place that allows people to create global
connections as a learning and working group. We see the emergence of these
places and the fact that they develop entirely new methods of
communication.

If you want to have a taste of it, browse to http://www.dialoguecafe.org/
and see what they just now started in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro!!! This is
the place that we want to see in villages.

VideoBridge is most likely one of the preferred formats to enable
knowledge sharing and cooperation of villages. It is custom - tailored
because it puts the local agenda in front and in focus. That is why I
spent (and still spend) a lot of effort to build this community - but I
stretched my potential for some time too far. I hoped for some local
support here in Vienna to maintain this community, but it did not quite
work out.  Also, in the January workshop we decided to leave the future of
this network up to the completion of some homework. Unfortunately what
hapened until now was not enough to justify our coming together in August
in Greece as we envisioned. Problem.

But there is a new hope arising.

The exciting news that I want to share with all of you is that we are at
least well on track with our Austrian homework (We are not the only ones,
see http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/CountryPages). We will
hold a new workshop this month with participants from about 8 Austrian
regions ("Broadband Content in Rural regions"). The venue will be the
village of St. Martin in northwestern Waldviertel, where they have created
a dream infrastructure in terms of existing and operating fiberoptic
networks to about 1500 houses of the remote rural microregion. This was a
strategic plan that worked on the base of combination with sewage system
building. They are already offering Internet, High Definition TV and
telephone. They can provide each house with bandwidth up to 1 GB/sec!!!

Now this infrastructure is there and as ambitious the microregion
(actually 3 communities with about 20 small villages took part in that
buildup) acted on infrastructure, it also wants to act on content. We have
been commissioned to bring our experience and guidance into this
content-seeking process. This will hopefully help us to create a "Virtual
Academy of the Regions" with p2p lectures shared between places of
excellence. We also seek to establish a training program for "Community
Media Operators" in the participating regions. All these efforts may well
be duplicated to the Europea level, but it is my strong conviction that a
European program makes sense only when there is a certain reality and
experience and strength on the national ground.

It seems that we are well on track in Austria to create that. A very nice
postscript to this workshop is that we will do a second workshop on
building a new settlement in the village of St. Martin - living within
nature and living well-connected within cyberspace at the same time. I
will keep you posted.

5. Letter from Russian Administration regretting problems with
Videobridging

Recently our friend Gleb Tyurin organized a high level meeting on
innovative ways in rural development in the Region of Vologda (between
Moscow and Archangelsk). A group of experts and local and federal policy
makers awaited dialogue with external participants via videobridge. To my
bad surprise, Gleb seemed to be very nervous in the morning when the
conference started. We could only connect shortly and he said there were
going to be troubles and cut the line. I witnessed fervid arguments in the
room. Then I heard nothing any more. I went and collected Professor
Gerlind Weber, one of Austrias leading experts on spatial planning, from
her lecture in a nearby multipurpose cinema and lecture theatre. We sat
before the black screen and there was no way to connect. Equally a number
of members of our network in various parts of the world that we had
alerted to this occasion also found no way to connect.

It turned out that the local administration was afraid not to violate a
law that forbids public foreign connections that are not reported to the
foreign ministery in Russia - especially if an event has official
governmental status. No comment on that.

Later there was a sign of hope. The local government apologized for the
whole situation. The attached letter at the NING page below is in English
and has official character.

http://globalvillages.ning.com/profiles/blogs/message-from-russia

I found it necessary and appropriate in this situation to also add some
clarifications - please also read this one:

http://globalvillages.ning.com/profiles/blogs/a-clarification-especially

Well, I hope very much that somewhere in this world a strong dedicated
nation understands that the way to finally win is to share and to
transform according to the principles of sharing. It might be Russia, you
never know. They have already surprised the world several times.


6. interesting network building processes

I think this current time is utterly important because of the almost
evolutionary struggles of networking memes to define the future we are
heading to. Whilst the political class and the economic system is in a
crisis globally, the struggle for the most convinving alternative has just
begun. In my personal view, the alternative that will arise from this
struggle is the one that encompasses the most solutions to the needs of
people and manages to present them in a workeable, compelling way. I think
of GlobalVillages not only as a limited scheme of village development, but
as a integrative metaphor that gives sense to social changes and delivers
a unifying metaphor and goal for the whole world. Lets outgrow the urban
monetary economy and reduce it to 20% again, turn the centers of commerce
and economy and science to vast "mothercities" of a web of lively and
largely self-supporting regions around the world where people would dwell
in local cycles of material and energy optimized by global knowledge!

In this process, we are part of an enormous stream of parallel visions and
developments (as Andrius expressed it, the seeds of a new culture) and is
hard not to get overwhelmed by the new and serious networking processes
that arise almost daily from some corners of this world. We will see the
fusion and resonance of hudreds of networks before we know the final
outcome. Beside the Dialogue Cafés above (http://www.dialoguecafe.org/)
let me point your attention to two remarkeable networking developments of
the last weeks:

6.1. "Locals" forum on e-democracy.org

The first is an iniative by Steven Clift of e-democracy fame
(http://forums.e-democracy.org/p/stevenclift1/) who introduced new fora
for community builders and the managers of local community networks:

http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/locals

"We do local. We connect our neighbors. We are fundamentally two-way
because we are building real community where we live."

Locals will lead to another community called "community builders" which
will then talk about global cooperation of local-foicused community
builders. I think this is very close to what Global Villages network wants
to achieve: and in fact only this connectedness in general will enable us
to also rediscover and reclaim the beauty of rural areas which is the
"bonus" that we contribute.

6.2. Intelligent Communities association

I learned about another exciting association from a post from the
community informatics list:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=D029E56C-1A64-67EA-E42DACEE2A7A9219

NEW YORK -- The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) has named Suwon, South
Korea, as the 2010 Intelligent Community of the Year. Suwon has built the
world's fastest, large municipal network, improving connection speeds from
an already impressive 32M to 1Gbps. The infrastructure is being used to
enhance education, library development, and e-government.

The theme of this year's annual conference, held at NYU Poly in Brooklyn,
was "The Education Last-Mile: Closing the Gap from School to Work." 
The conference also announced the formation of the "Intelligent 
Communities Association," a league of 86 cities and regions worldwide
to foster communities moving forward in the broadband economy. 
Its first chair will be Waterloo, Canada Mayor Brenda Halloran. 
Waterloo won "Intelligent Community of the Year" in 2007.

I think that we need to learn about the potential of broadband
infrastructures even though many villages of the world are still far away
from it. We should aspire nothing less than to really be able to convey
all the tacit and resonant information that comes with good audiovisual
conections to each other.

So I hope I will be able to report about good progress in Austria this
month and I will gladly enjoy to hear from you. Please write your response
to: f.nahrada at reflex.at

in the meanwhile: happy summer to you all!

Franz Nahrada
GIVE  
Jedleseer Strasse 75
1210 Wien
skype: globalvillagesinfo