Categories
participation regeneration

Aiming for potential

Dr Dominique Hes is a Senior Lecturer  Melbourne School of Design, Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning.  She is director of the Thrive Research Hub and co-author of Designing for Hope: pathways to Regenerative sustainability.   We talk about enriching relationships and designing for possibility.

Talking points

Happiness not wealth

We’re not trained to think of ourselves as nature

Enriching relationships

Designing for possibility

Aim for potential – not just solving a problem

The machine doesn’t know how to break the rules

We’re just aiming for sustaining when we need to be aiming for thriving

Identifying the irresistible narrative – the capacity to develop with positive ripples.

Sustainable: Sustainability is a part of the mechanistic worldview of us saying “how can we manage the system better?” I am critical about the definition of Sustainability, I align much closer to the definition for regenerative development which is to work on projects which increase the vitality, the viability to constructively adapt to change.

Success: Seeing the lights go on in my students eyes, seeing them change from passive consumers to active participants.

Superpower: My superpower is networking, remembering who I have met so that I can connect to them.

Activist: No, to be an activist it means if you don’t agree with me I’ve failed, instead I’m a educator. It’s up to you whether this story fits within your life, your narrative and your way of thinking, I’m not going to enforce it upon you.

Motivation: Curiosity, I’m curious about everything and its potential.

Challenges: I’m looking forward to learning how to slow down, as much as I am taking a time cut instead of a payrise, I still don’t really feel like I have the time to really read or reflect. So, I’ll be going back to two days a week as soon as I can to create that time.

Miracle: That people saw their potential in creating a thriving future, that people switched from passive consumption to active participation, being alert and present with the issues at hand.

Advice: Slow down, It’s as much about finding how you can thrive in the system as how you can help the system thrive!

This conversation was supported by Wintec‘s Centre for Transdisciplinary Research and Innovation.

Categories
community leadership participation politics

Generating good

Georgie Ferrari is Chief Executive of the Wellington Community Trust.  Before that she Chief Executive Officer for the Youth Affairs Council of Victoria for 14 years and before that a variety of roles in the not for profit sector in Australia and New Zealand.  But before all that, she grew up in Dunedin.  Home for a brief visit we talked about making a difference through advocacy.

Talking points

I didn’t want to use my labour to turn a profit for someone else.

To use my power for good, not evil.  So that meant working in the not for profit sector – putting my energy into organisations that generated good in the world rather than money.   I’ve been true to that.   I’ve been driven by that.

Engaging the voice of young people…that’s powerful work

It’s easy to live in a bubble in activism world, we assume that all voices are heard.  And so we live in that bubble…an echo chamber, it’s important to remember that there’s a range of views out there.

We have to read conservative newspapers and engage in the conservative debate, otherwise we forget that a huge percentage of the population think like this.  And then we don’t understand what their arguments are or what their mindsets are and we can’t fight against them.

I’m not spouting some leftie Communist manifesto, I’m just making some pretty basic sense, if a child is traumatised in their lives…no one is looking after them, them trauma plays out, then we lock them up. that’s not working, I think that’s common sense.  If even a deeply conservative politician can go and spend a couple of hours at a youth justice facility and come out and see that, then we can change every heart and mind.

Energised by work I was doing.

Ethical investment: If we give money out in the environment space, but we’re invested in a company that’s degrading the Great Barrier Reef…I’m not interested in doing a little bit of renewal in a creek bed if over here we’re funding a corporation millions of dollars to degrade the Great Barrier Reef – it doesn’t make sense.

Or funding refugees and government bonds of governments creating those refugees – it doesn’t make sense.

And ethical investments strategies are doing no worse over the long term than broader investment strategies,  so the argument is going away.   We have to know that we’re not feeding the problem over here and trying to ameliorate it over here.

 

Sustainable: Living gently on the earth.

Success: Growing an organisation in Victoria that it is not only financially stable and productive, but also deeply harmonious and gentle and supportive of all the staff.

Superpower:  Collaborative leadership.   I’m not afraid to make decisions, but I’m very keen to engage everyone involved.

Kind corporate.   Efficient and effective, but care about each other.  We do need training in that.

Activist: Yes.  (in my new job I have to manage that a bit differently) there are causes to champion, how I need to be an activist is to be provide evidence that these are things we need to fund.   Back room diplomacy rather than in your face advocacy.

Motivation: Knowing that there is far more good done in the world than bad, and wanting to contribute to that good.

Challenges:  Reintegrating back into New Zealand that’s different to what I left.   My responsibility as a Pakeha woman.   Philanthropy across New Zealand can be more effective by working smarter and together to make it easier for our grant seekers.

Miracle: Elimination of all forms of violence.  (smallest thing that would make a difference) Live peacefully ourselves.

Advice: Be kind to your mother.  Ring your Mum.

 

Categories
communication community computing participation

Empowering communities

robComber

Working with communities to empower them rather than to change them.

Rob Comber is a a Lecturer in Computer Mediated Communication based at Newcastle University’s Open Lab. With training in psychology, Rob has worked on the role of online communities and now is focussed on food, activism, urban space, and sustainability – all through a lens of civic engagement.

Talking points

How people construct, create, and maintain relationships with each other through some of the mechanisms of pressing buttons and friending each other

How can you create a community when all you can really say is “I like this person” or “I like this thing that they’ve said”?

“Do online communities have the same characteristics as real communities?” is where I started, but I found there’s no real difference between them – same values, people commit to them, spend time building relationships and doing things.

Online, digital, virtual isn’t replacing but augmenting what we are doing in our everyday lives.

Yes it is easier to press like…but you’ve done a lot of work to construct that community around you – so saying it is easier to press like is a bit like saying that if you are already a member of that club then it is easier for you to open the door and walk in.

So the idea that “slacktivism” is easy hides the work people have to do beforehand. It’s public too – you have to make a real commitment to say this is who I am. People can use that quite carefully to construct an image of themselves – this is the person who I am, and this statement is of value because I am making that commitment in front of other people

A challenge of looking at online communities is the romanticisation of offline communities.

Being exposed to poly-vocality, multiple voices and perspectives really enriches the way that we think about the world.

Why do we buy two to get one free, when we only need half?

Trying to find ways to connect communities together to improve the sharing of knowledge and expertise that they already have…inclusion and social sustainability.

Issues of resilience – looking at unrealised and under-realised capital that’s already there

We found a focus on behaviour change was quite useful if you wanted to stop someone from doing something, but very difficult to do if you wanted someone to try something new and to keep doing it.

Civic engagement: not saying “we know best we can tell you what to do and here’s how you can make your city better”, instead it’s “we know you know how to make your city better, we want you to tell us so we can help you do it”.

Working with communities to empower them rather than to change them.

Realise that we don’t have that power to magically change a community, it’s much more beneficial to work together with them.

Role of a Civic University means the local community is not just the place where we are, but it is the place that we are.

We have to engage with the issues that arise here, partly because it is a disadvantaged area, but also because it is fundamental to what a university should be doing.

We have to be really able to demonstrate value and if we can show that it is intertwined and embedded in the lives of the people around the university then you don’t have to struggle to find why you are doing what you are doing, it comes from the people who are there already.

Water, energy and food nexus – trying to understand how these resources come together…how they are connected as systems.

How do you know if engagement is doing good? You get a sense of it, do the people I engage with see value in that engagement? Do they see outcomes they might have otherwise not anticipated? Unlike behaviour change work where we decide what we will change and therefore can evaluate it…but with engagement…what has changed for you?

We try to activate the activists. Find people who will take on that engagement and take on the role of saying “we need something more here, we need something better here” –whatever they decide. It’s being able to say that when we have to leave, that it becomes sustained by the community.

What a community should be…agonism…continually questioning the world around us.

We’re good at looking at ourselves and asking “is it good now”, we’re not so good at asking “will we still be happy with this situation in 5, 10, 50 years?”

A sense of questioning the status quo, but also questioning the future of that

Questioning across scales, but identifying other communities where you might be having an impact is a significant challenge even before you think about what that impact might be.

A sense of belonging is important, place tied to history, but we rarely think of a sense of belonging in terms of future generations.

In the same way that we look to previous generations for our sense of place, future generations belong to us in that way.

People think of technology as the future, so let’s use technology to represent the future back to us now.

Engagement: there’s no simple message of how to convince people to change behaviour, the point is that you’re not really convincing them, they have to convince themselves.

The long term element of engagement is a time scale of 3, 10 or 50 years – compared to nice results after a year or six months or a year for publishing “this is what we did it was amazing”.

We recognise the easy life, but if that was an amazing future then we wouldn’t need to be subversive.

The questioning itself is an important part – we need to take this critical stance in designing technology, even if the response is that we won’t design technology. This is different from a basis (of computing) of selling more new stuff

It is important to say can we sell less stuff? Can we even ask that question?

(Sustainable Superpower): People to be able to see connections between the things that they do – spatially, temporally, socially.

(Success): Being and to work in a research lab that values engagement and in ten years time we might be able to say that we did some good in hat engagement.

(Activist): I wouldn’t see myself as an activist. I wouldn’t see myself as the person who has the responsibility as the person in the community who knows and who knows which action is best. Academic research, when it’s well intentioned, when it’s working best through engagement is facilitative – is the aim of that to facilitate activism? I think so. Am I a facilitator? I hope so.

(Motivation): People. Above all else, taking a humanist perspective, and saying people are good, we need to work from that as a basic principle of what we are doing.

(Challenge): Engagement – being able to demonstrate that engagement is useful.

(Miracle): 100% turn out in every bit of local, national government – for people to wake up in the morning and really think about the society around them and something that they are involved and not to just take the easy life of sailing through it.

(Advice): Think about the world around you, and the people that are in it, and work with those people.

This conversation was recorded at Open Lab in Newcastle in September 2015.

Categories
documentary participation

Participatory documentary storytelling

David Green

Ways of using the structures of documentary storytelling to bring user generated content together…interesting stories and broadening participation.

David Green is a researcher at the University of Newcastle’s Open Lab. His innovative Red Tales is an participatory interactive documentary.

Talking points

I wanted to be an architect, I can’t remember when I changed my mind, but I became interested in photography.

Wildlife photography got me outdoors

Best stories and most engaging stories come from a real heartfelt connection and appreciation.

That’s why I find myself drawn to telling stories about the natural world, I find that’s something I can connect with.

I’m interested in how technology can be used to support people in communities to produce documentaries. So often there are interesting stories that are not getting told because it’s not on the media agenda. Conservation groups working to replant areas on the outskirts of towns – this kind of work is really interesting, and the people doing the work are really interesting, but these stories don’t get told. There must be a way that recent developments technology can enable these stories get out there.

Youtube is good but stories get lost in the vastness of it all.

Ways of using the structures of documentary storytelling to bring user generated content together…interesting stories and broadening participation.

There is value in telling stories, even if no one is listening right now…telling a story to yourself is valuable…and the process is important community building.

The motivation for producing isn’t necessarily to connect with a massive audience.

There’s a complex relationship between storytelling and fact. So does a participatory approach mean letting go of factual basis? Good question, I’ve thought about that a lot. Documentary is a representational form, not fact. There are opportunities for fact checking, to minimise potential for mis-representation.

(Activist?) I consider myself to be a researcher at the moment. I’d love to be an activist, it sounds sexy. I’m doing what I can, I believe that there’s more power in collective action. I’m part of a movement that’s receptive to change. I’m trying to do my bit.

(Motivation?) I’m motivated by what I see are some big problems in the world related to wilful ignorance. I’m motivated by what I see as a serious threat to our existence: climate change; widespread destruction of environment; deforestation – irreversible damage that we’re causing to this planet just by being in it. I’ve come here this morning with a plastic coffee cup – even with the best of intentions it’s very difficult to live sustainably.

Things need to change in a really big way, but this can only start in really small ways. So I’m trying to do my bit, and helping others to do their bit – together we’re strong.

(Challenges?) Political change is afoot.

(Miracle?) Working together, collaboration.

(Advice?) Get out there and photograph things, you never know what might be useful.

This conversation was recorded at CHI 2015.

Categories
democracy participation

Mending democracy

Andy Williamson

Dr Andy Williamson is founder of Future Digital, an Associate at Involve, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester.   He is author of the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s Social Media Guidelines for Parliaments.   He explains why he thinks politics is fundamentally broken, and what we have to do to fix it.

Talking points:

(Am I an activist?). I can be. I can be stroppy and awkward when I want to be. I’m don’t think I’m an activist particularly, my role is perhaps more of an agitator. I have the privilege of working on both sides of the system. I think one of the problems of activists, is they become…activist can be a negative term because an activist can be seen as someone is simply taking one issue a little bit too seriously, and shouting a lot about it – they’re probably right and have a good point, but they can be a bit of a one trick pony, and that can start to be a bit of a pain in the side, and they’re really necessary and they do a really good job, but actually there’s a need for a second lot of people who come along and work with both sides. The future isn’t about us of them, it’s not about citizens and politicians – we talk about “citizen engagement”, it’s almost patronising. We should be talking about participation in the broadest sense, we should be looking at partnerships. The role that I have, and I’ve created a fascinating niche in a way is that I work with both sides. …. So I’m more of an agitator for change across the whole system than trying to be dogmatic about the need to create this revolutionary change.

 

 

Categories
communication participation

Socially enterprising

Louis Brown

Louis Brown mobilises people to do good.

Passionate about getting more people off the couch and active on important community issues, Louis Brown is an inspirational social entrepreneur.

Louis Brown won his first job at the age of 11 in the tiny West Coast village of Fairdown skinning discarded dead calves for $1 a pop.  This set the course for his life, balancing the seesaw of eeking out a living and following visions that make a difference to society.

He studied education and commerce after he finished high school in Christchurch and worked for three years as the Executive Director of the community organisation Social Innovation, which he also co-founded. These were three of the most important and meaningful years of his working life, spearheading the large-scale Love your Coast and Student Volunteer Army social movements.

Louis is working on the Scarfie Army, a new movement for Dunedin students and other start-ups to drive and support thousands more citizens to be a ‘working voice’ for a better future.

 

Shane’s number of the week:  400.  (NASA).

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Back from a whistle-stop tour of Europe, Sam is brimming with things to talk about and people he’s met.  Some great shows coming up.