Ideas for Change - Because the right idea can change the world » Social Web

Google displays all requests from governments for shutdown

Daniel Daboczy - Editor in chief — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:57:43 +0000

Government requests directed to Google and YouTube

Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. The map shows the number of requests that we received between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009, with certain limitations.

We know these numbers are imperfect and may not provide a complete picture of these government requests. For example, a single request may ask for the removal of more than one URL or for the disclosure of information for multiple users. See the FAQ for more information.

http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/

Just received a photo from Palestine

Daniel Daboczy - Editor in chief — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 11:30:29 +0000

On both sides of that wall, regular people like me and you are stuck.

I am so proud to tell you about this photo that I received from Palestine. This is what you can see there right now.

No one is alone in this world, not anymore. This project shows how a simple idea can move the world and hopefully bring everyone closer and open the eyes.

Please support our friends at www.sendamessage.nl

Project management on the edge of chaos

Invited Contributor — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:46:07 +0000

Project management on the edge of chaos

by Arne Vestergaard and Marianne Smedegaard

We have for a number of years taught project managers how to manage people and processes. We have heard stories from many different organisations describing numerous ways to understand and execute projects. It seems that there exists not a single correct way to manage projects, but many possible ways. One thing, though, seems to be characteristic of most of the cases. Top management expects the project manager to have complete control over the project and to have answers to any question anyone might want to ask. In many cases it is also a requirement that the project manager ensures that members of the project group have clear goals and that the development of the project is on schedule.

In this paper we want to explore to what extent the effort to control and direct a project is useful, and to what extent a project can be restricted by tight control. Perhaps there are other concepts for project management that better fit with the complexity and variability that characterise projects in today’s world. Perhaps it is preferable to see projects as a living system rather than strategically and bureaucratically.

A change in perspective of this kind would mean that the project organisation must relinquish the idea of having control over the project all the time and, if they do achieve control, see it as a temporary state of affairs. Some degree of chaos then becomes a necessary (but not exclusive) condition for innovation and for handling complexity and change. In other words, the project manager must place the project on the edge of chaos. In this paper we will try to understand what this means in practice.

“HOPE – the Obama Musical Story” World Premiere

HOPE-Musical — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:43:27 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

“HOPE - the Obama musical story” celebrates its world premiere on 17 January 2010!The venue Jahrhunderthalle in Frankfurt will experience a sound it has never heard before: formed to a huge percussion ensemble, the audience accompanies US president Barack Obama on his successful way into the White House. The event organizer MOVE GmbH promises a double world premiere: at the premiere of “HOPE – the Obama Musical Story” on Sunday, 17 January at 8:00 pm, the audience will rhythmically participate on specially developed percussion chairs – for the first time ever worldwide. “Hope is the first interactive musical of a new generation”, says musical producer Roberto Emmanuele, CEO and creative director of Move GmbH based in Bad Soden. “This is an enormous sound and a great musical experience for the audience.”

The musical stages two moving and exciting stories in parallel plots. The audience looks behind the scenes of the presidential election in 2008 and follows the career of the present US president Barack Obama. The main character is presented less on a political level, but rather as an emotional person who fights for a new, more forgiving and peaceful world and a better future. At the same time, the viewer experiences the societal events from the point of view of a multi-cultural apartment-sharing community in Chicago. Caused by the prevailing tight political and economic situation, societal and social frictions and emotions arise. The people are given new hope by the new spirit of the age.

Author and composer Randall Hutchins works with the best Afro-American singers and actors of the German musical scene. He produces inter alia for “The very Best of Black Gospel”, “Musical the Gift” and he participated in “Starlight Express” as a musician. In “HOPE”, he combines an affectionately arranged mix regarding taste and aesthetics of different music styles in the field of Pop, Soul, Gospel, HipHop and Rock. The diversified mixture of catchy melodies electrifies the audience right from the beginning. Undoubtedly, the songs have what it takes to become hits.

For “HOPE”, 30 world-class artists, singers, dancers and actors perform on stage. They participate in the production with great enthusiasm and dedication. “The spirit of the show is carried by the spirit of the entire team”, praises the producer Roberto Emmanuele. Della Miles and Jimmie Wilson, known as the dream duo of the Michael Jackson musical “Sisterella”, as well as Dynelle Rhodes, the original lead singer of the Weather Girls, join the cast as soloists. They are supported by well-known performers who are leads in “Cats”, “The Lion King” and “We will rock you”. The rehearsals took place inter alia at mediaArt FORUM in Bad Soden.

The production is realized in German and English, so that the story line can be followed by everyone.

On percussion: the audience sitting on specially developed musical chairsIn the course of the musical, the audience develops to co-musicians. For they sit on a musical instrument with an astoundingly high sound quality. Approximately 1200 of the 2000 available seats in the domed hall of the venue Jahrhunderthalle will be equipped with design chairs which house the smallest set of drums worldwide. The special construction of this musical furniture allows for a distinctive bass and snare sound. The people play while sitting, drumming with their hands on the percussion surface. Inspired by this characteristic sound, Roberto Emmanuele and his partner Patrick Strese call the innovation “BAFF musical furniture”. The other musical spectators do not sit quietly on their chairs either. They are handed out rattles, so that the sound of “HOPE” will fill the entire hall. The producers want all people to have access to music as a strong medium.

As early as in September, the musical company enthused about 45,000 viewers with a first musical foretaste during a successful performance at Commerzbank Arena next to stars like Bob Geldorf and Samy Deluxe. After only a short period of time, the entire stadium swung and clapped along to songs never heard before like “Rock the Vote”. Experts of the German music scene praised the high level of the American Pop music and certified the sound to have “Earth Wind and Fire quality”. The most important concert organizer worldwide, Fritz Rau, says: “Respect and two thumbs up for this musical”. According to the slogan “Yes we can”, the musical is to tour in Germany after having premiered in Frankfurt.

Tickets for the premiere can be purchased via the ticket seller EVENTIM within the price scope of 40 to 149 Euros in several seat categories. Following the premiere, a VIP premiere party will take place, at which special culinary refreshments will be served to the guests and the musical performers can be experienced up close in an “unplugged performance”. The VIP tickets can be bought for 99 Euros directly from the HOPE production.

Important note from the HOPE production team:
The “HOPE musical production” does not pursue any political interests with their production. Being artists, we merely stage a piece of attitude to life of the “historic year 2008″ with topics still prevailing today as well as good entertainment and music!

Concerts for change – Charity entrepreneurship

anders sporring — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:13:23 +0000

….Or how anyone can create something that will make a change

How it started
End of June I was contacted on Twitter by Globalpatriot who told me he was coming to Stockholm and wanted to set up a charity benefit event. He asked me for my email to send me all the details. So I did and when we setup our contact I invited a couple of my friends from Twitter to join us at a tweetmeetup in beginning of July to talk about what to do and how to do it. Out of that first meeting with 9 people a group of three came out, Me (Anders Sporring), Renee Viterstedt and Johan Burell

The mission
We as part of Concerts For Change want to create fantastic events/concerts to support preferably sustainable projects around the World.

How we used Social media both to promote and plan
Planning and organizing the event took place mainly online in the Wiki we setup. In our case we used Pbworks and adapted it to fit our use. A blog is also essential, so we got a sponsored web hotel and domain name from Binero. We added functions like Twitter, Vimeo and Flickr to the blog for added content.

Promotion for the event was mostly achieved online using Twitter and Facebook to link back to our blog and repeatedly making posts with hashtags pointing towards the event.

The Event
Our first production was a concert with two liveacts and two DJ’s which took place at the Hilton Eken Bar In Stockholm. Attending was about 100 people and the revenue to Doctors Without Borders was about $650 A good result for a first try. Next event will be in November and will be a club event.

Anders Sporring
Social Media Facilitator, Social Media Blogger, Project Manager, Mobile geek, Composer, Creative Idealist.

Akvo and the Social Web: In the need of clear fresh thinking for clear fresh water

anders.abrahamsson — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:04:36 +0000

There are currently one billion people living without access to clean water and almost two billion people lacking access to sanitation. In a sense, the ”water issue” is more urgent than climate change.

At the same time, taking another look at it, coming from outer space and looking upon the world, the problem seems to be paradoxical. Lack of water should not be a problem – our surface is covered by 70 percent of it. At the same time, to make it usable and drinkable for humans is lack of two things – desalinated fresh water and distribution with pipes.

When attending World Water Week in Stockholm in August 2009, I was confronted that there were so many ”boxes” in the fair space. Project after project, organization after organization – it seemed like alot of double- and triple job. And still the issues remain far from solved.

A breath of fresh air – or shall I say a sip of fresh water? – was the hangout and the thinking of the guys managing the Watercube.tv, the innovative startup Akvo. They sent live from the fair space, with interviews of keynotes, attendees, organization representatives and bypassers, giving a ”user’s voice” in the front seat directly to the web. Akvo has set up a web solution where field projects related to water and sanitation gets easier matched with funding partners and supportive organisations all over the world, currently with over hundred affiliated organizations.

Their innovative approach made the local community of Norrköping arranging the Twestival – the Twitter Festival – pick one of their projects supported in Tbilisi, Georgia, as a target for the charity fundraising. The social web made for social change, using a social software platform developed by Akvo, matchmaking directly peer to peer. If this was done more systematically, this would move us closer to the solution, rather than just recycling the reports of the problem.

Words produced should be transformed to action distributed, so more clean water can be consumed!

/Anders Abrahamsson

Anders is a serial sustainopreneur and has been the driving force in the conceptual development of Sustainopreneurship, and published its Wikipedia article in 2008. He has published a number of publications on this topic, and is currently authoring a popular book on subject, one blog post at a time. Founder of SLICE Services and Publishing.

Collapsing degrees of separation – the social web as a leverage for sustainopreneurship

anders.abrahamsson — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:03:09 +0000

“The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.” – Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.

One of the strongest society-changing forces from recent time is the World Wide Web. And it seems, if we look upon it with wisdom and perspective, that it could be the most prominent source to create a sustainable world.
This medium is more than appropriate to leverage a collective wisdom and insight-sharing for sustainability. The phenomenon that emphasizes this dimension is defined as “social media”, with blogs, forums, virtual communities, wikis and websites defines and opens up for user-generated contents through self-organized conversation and sharing – as the intention of this website, Ideas For Change.

The online environment also easily allows other forms of media than text, all equally easy to syndicate and duplicate in different contexts, increasing the speed of diffusion and transfer to the various virtual places and empowered peer-to-peer conversation and conversion: pictures, graphics, video and audio are believed to have a higher degree of communicational efficiency and power – especially those techniques which utilize the visualization of complexities.

The result is an ongoing collapse of the degree of separation between individuals, teams, social networks and communities of practice, virtual as well as physical, with humans from all walks of life sharing intentions towards a sustainable world: an increase of the proximity and number of linkages between ideas, innovations, projects, businesses and organizations generated with the intention to find ways to how to sustain the biosphere and its inhabitants. It is anticipated that the “immaterial gravitational force” will increase in this process, with higher density created: A positive feedback loop is created, where more authentic sustainability business forces are attracted – sustainopreneurs.

“We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges.” – Tim Berners-Lee, quoted again.

Still, the majority of the world is still ”unconnected”. In order to release the full force of the social web in the service of sustainability, we need to continue to decrease the part of the world that has not even seen a telephone. It used to be half of the world’s population, but is reducing faster now than ever with the introduction of the cellphone. Internet has the power to not just bridge the digital divide, but also cultural divides empowering global dialogues towards a changed world-view, e. g. more positive imaging of the developing parts of the world, at the same time as transfer of knowledge goes in both directions. So, “digital unification” is powering a cultural shift. It is of priority to put the information and communication tools in the hands of pupils, micro entrepreneurs, educators and doctors everywhere, giving power to their everydayness strives in the quest to improve life quality of their fellow citizens.

Together, we make the world smaller and more connected – and sustainopreneurs are there to make the shift and change.

/Anders Abrahamsson