Help us to dig up the most interesting social innovations!

Posted on by October 7, 2009 by jon.brunberg

The world has changed a lot since 1516, when Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, a tale about the most perfect of republics, an island inhabited by the happiest of peoples (except for those enslaved one may add).

You may argue that we have already fulfilled parts of his vision of the perfect society. That we have developed democracy and spent a lot of efforts building institutions to defend human rights and secure peace that goes further than More could have even imagined.

You may argue that most people in this world have a higher level of freedom, education and income than More’s Utopians.

And still: all these checks and balances, the riches and the freedom is granted only for a minority of the world’s population. There is appalling poverty and starvation in this world. Torture and human rights abuses committed every day. An enormous destruction force that unleashed could wipe out humanity. Corruption and abuse of power.

I do believe that we need to test and use new models, strategies and tools to reduce the suffering in the present and pave way for the transformations that our societies will go trough in the future. New ways of organising our societies and distribute our wealth, new ideas how democracy can be further developed, new models for power sharing and conflict resolution and new strategies for tackling poverty, disease, human rights abuse and environmental issues. In short: ideas for change.

The good news is that hundreds of thousands are already working with social innovation, in theory as well as in practise. My task as an editor for Ideas for Change will be to dig up the most interesting of those projects from a variety of internet-based sources. It is going to be a truly delightful task that I expect to be as enlightning for me as I hope it will be for yourself.

Jon Brunberg

Stockholm 30 Sep. 2009