Ideas for Change - Because the right idea can change the world » Values and Beliefs

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.

Can you feel the winds of change?

Daniel Daboczy - Editor in chief — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:41:37 +0000

I´m not talking about Obama, nor Google leaving China, nor Iran, Thailand or other. I´m talking about We The People.

I´m talking about the new times where more and more people migrate from Facebook, couchsurfing, aimless consumption of media and become involved. They begin to share, to spread, to interact. Never before has the opinions and the knowledge of the grassrots been more effective, saught for or relevant. We are used to listen. We are used to look upwards to leaders for guidance bur now projects like ours builds forces on connecting the dots. On harvesting the wast ammount of knowledge that you and your friends might have.

Please share your cognitive surplus and do some good.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://laughingsquid.com/clay-shirky-on-cognitive-surplus/

http://www.shirky.com/

Today marks an important day in history

Daniel Daboczy - Editor in chief — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:14:35 +0000

As you might all know, building a better world starts with our children. How we raise them, how we teach them, what we show them. Even though it´s 2010 alot of parents don´t have the right, the opportunity or the concept to stay at home with the child when the child is young.

Of all the parents that stay at home, is the numbers of men very low. Men usually get confined in roles expected and built since centuries.

Today starts a campaing (only in swedish at this point) by Carlos Rojas for the purpose to inform, educate and inspire men to stay at home longer with their children.

http://klartjagskavarahemma.se/

If you tolerate this, then your children will be next

Daniel Daboczy - Editor in chief — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:27:39 +0000

Just happened to stumble upon this blog. A guy in the swedish metro stands up for our rights. He was photographing some undercover swedsih policemen who use threat to make him erase footage on his phone.

This kind of actions are what we all need to do.

Stand up for your rights. Or as the Manic Street Preachers sing “If you tolerate this, then your children will be next!”

http://tuggarna.posterous.com/polisen-som-mitt-i-tunnelbanan-star

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Dada revolutions

Daniel Daboczy - Editor in chief — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:33:52 +0000

Without Dada there would be no surrealism, no fluxus, no pop art, no video art, no punk, no performance art, no slam poetry, no conceptual art.

It’s hard to grasp or to imagine what the world would be without the meetings at Cabaret Voltaire at the beginning of the last century. These meetings witch eventually come to stand as symbols to the changes in society and to experiments and movements in the art world, witch have led us to today’s conceptual and contemporary art scene. What would the art world look like without the birth of Dada? This anti-art witch not only changed the expectations of what art could be but also most importantly opened the doors for what art could become.

It occurs to me that the famous Romanian revolution from 1989, the first televised live revolution ever, is like the first Dada – meetings. This revolution is in its form very similar to the birth of Dada. It also sprung out of a frustration towards the existing society, it also started in closed underground meetings and it also started as a chaotic reaction without clear course or direction, only with a kind of utopian dream of freedom and change. But most importantly what they both managed to accomplish is that they opened the doors to what one and society could become.

And even if history is full of these kinds of events, events witch have changed the entire world, it’s still quite hard to pinpoint exact dates or places where one meeting or one group changed history. Personally I can remember to the day, when I first met Dada. When I first realized that everything could be possible. Because Dada for me is of course an art-movement, but most importantly it’s a state of mind, it always was. A way to be. It’s actually a kind of key to everything that might be. It opens up to every possibility imaginable. I can go so far as calling it the perfect kind of freedom.
And I am quite sure that the meetings at Cabaret Voltaire almost a hundred years ago, the meetings led by exiled Romanians where for the simple purpose to change the state of mind. In every way possible!

/ Daniel Daboczy

Holocaust Memorial Day: Some people have actually forgotten

banafshe.zabeti — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:49:22 +0000

Today it is the Holocaust Memorial Day, a day of rememberance of the victims of The Holocaust which is in my opinion, humanity’s worst episod. This date is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Soviet Union in 1945. For me, it is frustrating to know that some people really need to be remembered because they do not even spend one day per year to actually rememember what human beings and ideologies are capable of.

It is even more frustrating to know that people still deny the Holocaust, and not only political leaders such as Ahamdinejad who says whatever he likes just to live up to his fantasim and ideology. Many times, too many times, I have heard people say “My God it was over 60 years ago that the Jews were victim of fascism, racism and holocaust”; what is the fuzz about? Can you imagine that people actually express themselves like this?

Yesterday I saw the awaraded documentary “Mr Rakowski” by Jan Diederen about Sam and Richie Rawkowski, a father who was reffered to as a “survivor from the Holocaust” and his son Richie Rawkowski who belongs to the category “the second generation of survivors”. What was very striking with the documentary, that I will always remember, is what mr Richie Rawkowski said about the term “survivor” about the people who were not murdered during the Holocaust and who are still alive. He said, and I quote “What a bad word, what a wrong word”. In Richie Rawkowski’s point of view, the survivor experience, wheather you belong to the second generation of “survivors” or the victims, it is mainly an experience of rage and bitterness. He says “The real message and goal should not be survining, it should be thriving”.

I agree with mr Rawkowski, let us grow together and re-value our own thoughts about our human beings and their experiences. Let us transform the anger into political and personal will to change this world. Not all human beings were gulity of the Holocaust, but we are all responsible of our thougts and actions today. So let us all remember The Holocaust and what fantasism and ideologies are capable of doing to our fellow human beings. Let us all remember that it is not an innocent comment to say “Oh what is the fuzz about, the second world war was over 60 years ago”.

First of all, 60 years is nothing and you cannot measure one of humanity’s worst tragedy’s, if not THE worst tragedy in human history, in years, seconds, hours etcetera. But you can measure your own thoughts and actions and CHANGE your way of thinking. This is what we need to do. How can someone in a modern world, express themselves in terms like that?

Would the very same person with this fanatic ideas that I would like to call racist, look into his fellow human beings who actually experienced fascism and its horrour and say the very same thing? I do not think so. He or she would not be able to say one word. So once again, please let us all change our ways of thinking about mankind, our fellow human beings and how we think about ideologies. You do not need to be in an explicit racist organisation to be a racist today. New racism is so hidden in everyday comments and deabtes, that it is invisible to many people.

These ideas and thoughts who appears to be innocent, said during the coffee break, or while drinking a glass of wine with some people, are actually dangerous and political. It is in my point of view: violation, racism and oppression. It is visible oppression that is unseen.

So lets make unvisible oppression visible by never being quiet. We are not directly responsible of other people’s thoughts and actions, but by shutting up, we are responsible of in some ways repeating history.

Viola Banafshe Zabeti

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pass It Forward

Arlan — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:07:40 +0000

Now you can volunteer from the comfort of your own home, on your own computer, on your own time www.onlinecommunityservice.org Related posts:

Google displays all requests from governments for shutdown

Important messages are best said through entertainment

emelie.fagelstedt — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:21:44 +0000

I have a theory that people are too tired to take in large pieces of information at the end of the day. If you’ve been working hard or studying since morning it is difficult to come home and be alert to news. What we often have energy for though, is entertainment. We dream of sitting down in front of the television and just relax- we want to be fed entertainment. With that knowledge at hand it should be safe to assume that it is possible to get important information across by presenting it in a more entertaining way.

An example I am thinking about is British Chanel 4 where the Simpsons family (Fox) are involved in a big health campaign to prevent obesity in Great Britain during this fall. By creating a television campaign where the characters from the popular television show strive to lose weight the British Health Department hopes to inspire children and adults to exercise and eat healthy. The British government has sponsored three months of episodes with £640,000. The campaign has already created headlines in the UK, in the Telegraph and the Daily Mail to mention two news sites.

Another example is the Swedish food store ICA who have began a campaign called “We can do more” (“Vi kan mera”). The goal with the campaign is to challenge prejudices in society against people with Downs Syndrome and other disabilities by employing over 500 people with disabilities in stores across Sweden. The campaign marketed itself with a series of commercials where a man named Jerry, who had Down’s Syndrome, came to work in an ICA store. By presenting the prejudices almost like a joke in the commercial it won great attention in Sweden and even made the news. Most Swedish people, who watched television during the two weeks the commercial ran, suddenly new about the campaign. Read more on: http://www.ica.se/FrontServlet?s=butiker&state=butiker_dynamic&viewid=1611120 (in Swedish only).

I think that this could be the beginning of a trend. I think that in a world where information and media is all around us it is important to find a creative way of getting peoples’ attention. Entertainment might just be that creative way. I look forward to seeing the results of the Simpson’s health campaign and of ICA’s awarness campaign about people with disabilities.