Sustainable Gardeners and Farmers

Problem: The Challenge:  implementing an efficient and effective program to provide free support for many working groups with many projects. Long-standing problems such as declining natural resources and deteriorating watersheds, prove how challenging it is to build effective collaboration across governments, civic groups, and business. To address this, new independent programs are being formed to focus collaboration by several agencies on a specific problem.  Suddenly, people in different agencies an...

Action: Move from talk to action, effectively. Design, implement, and deliver a web-based collaboration workspace to help a community of working groups to manage their strategic program and to measure their progress toward mandated goals. The S4S workspace is not a free-form environment; it provides structured collaboration with accountability. This business-like approach supports: designing strategy and process, tracking internal and external projects, coordinating participants, reporting progress, ...

Problem: The fractured social enterprise sector with a focus on accessibility to those the social enterprise sector intends to help. 

Action: To formalize a network of organizations and individuals that constitute the institutions and players within the field that have a sector wide perspective. To develop a strategic plan of action and working relationships to foster the sector wide development of avenues and paths available to social innovators at all levels and entry points.

Problem: Attaining --and maintaining-- financial stability is very difficult for grassroots civic groups/projects; more generally, the world faces a Democracy Deficit. Our world, increasingly globalized, hightech, fast-paced, accelerating, faces unprecedented challenges from Climate Destabilization to Peak Oil; yet the internet has been underutilized as a means for facilitating bottom-up, decentralized, yet coordinated actions. Both principle and pragmatism argue in favor of harnessing the fuller pote...

Action: Thresholdware is software which allows citizens to coordinate intentions and actions on a mass scale. It works by securely and privately storing individual commitments, and then putting the aggregate of those individual commitments into coordinated action when a specific critical mass or threshold has been reached. These can include financial transactions, such as fundraising commitments, or "action transactions'" such as strike votes, product boycotts, civil disobedience, provisionally joini...

Problem: Neuza Nascimento era solicitada permanentemente pelo seu filho de dez anos para freqüentar os bailes da comunidade, ele insistia muito e Neuza um dia cedeu e acompanhou seu filho até o baile. Chegando lá ela pode perceber que aquele ambiente era muito inadequado para um menino. Ela começou a pensar sobre a questão, e ficou muito triste em imaginar que a única opção de Lazer para os jovens, na comunidade, fosse os bailes funk. Então ela...

Action: O projeto Um Olhar Sobre Outras Coisas realiza atividades locais e externas a comunidade.   Atividade local:   A coordenadora do projeto visita a casa das famílias da comunidade e convida as crianças para participarem de uma reunião, que é realizado em um espaço cedido pelo Conselho de Moradores, neste convite as crianças e os pais são informados que durante o encontro serão realizadas atividades lúdico-pedagógicas.   A reunião começa com a apresentação de cada um dizendo o seu nome e a sua i...

Problem: Neuza Nascimento was constantly asked by her 10 yr old son to attend the "funk" dances in the community. He insisted so regularly that one day she acquiesced and joined him at the dance. Upon arrival, she realized immediately that such an atmosphere was unsuitable for a young boy. She began to contemplate the issue, and was disheartened that the only leisure activity for the community´s youths was to go to the funk parties.   Neuza then came up with an idea to change that reality.   Her firs...

Action: The project “A Look Into Other Things” carries out activities both within and beyond the local community.   Local Activity: The project coordinator visits the homes of community families and invites the children to participate in a get-together. In this invitation, both parents and children are informed about educational activities that will take place at the reunion. The reunions take place in an area donated by the Residents´ Tribunal.   The reunion begins with everyone saying their name an...

Problem: How to combine educational software and an operating system in an affordable package that can run on even low-end PC's.

Problem: How to combine educational software and an operating system in an affordable package that can run on even low-end PC's.

Problem: Substantial reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be achieved by encouraging mass transit. Traditional mass transit is better suited to urban areas but less well suited to suburban and exurban areas, and builds hub and spoke rail and bus networks with either expensive fixed rights of way or labor intensive bus routes with significant investment in rolling stock. Smart highway infrastructure is a standards-based approach to technology development for universal mass transit, with t...

Action: How to do it: • Promulgate, in cooperation with industry, open standards for hi-tech companies to design vehicle guidance and collision avoidance systems • Start by deploying standardized fixed transponders along sections of Interstate highway as a test bed that private companies can use for development of such systems • Allow IP backhaul, or use of transponders in conjunction with intra-vehicle communications, provided that compliance with standards is maintained • Establish open standards f...

Problem: 1. Collaboration Research has shown that what we almost universally do in meetings seems right, but actually doesn't work very well.  To be specific, human nature intervenes.  Namely, we all want to tell our story and tend to repeat pet agendas over and over, making the proceedings inefficient and closing off paths to innovation.   On the other hand, highly productive groups tend to be similar, to have similar characteristics.  As Tolstoy said, "All happy families resemble one another".  Thi...

Action: IdeaTree is a flow chart for ideas, a visual wiki, a concept mapper.  It enables project teams to collaborate and brainstorm far more effectively and efficiently.  It also implements a revenue sharing plan to help organizations which use it to also benefit financially.   Think of back-of-the-napkin brainstorming, shared worldwide. Arrange your ideas on a global tabletop in the form of websites, audio, spreadsheets and visually show how they relate.     IdeaTree sits at the con...