FutureChallenges

Correlations between the Megatrends

Demographic Change >

Migration >

Climate Change >

New Governance >

Natural Resources + Biodiversity >

Security + Anti-Terror Policy >

Pandemics >

Globalization >

special
thank you ...
we_special_/ 

... to all our intrepid authors! We know our deadlines were simply lethal,
but you still made them!
... to Paul Morland our indefatigable / copyeditor.
... to Bertelsmann Stiftung whose generosity first made this issue
possible and who gave us the creative freedom we need to let
this magazine grow.

Bea, Dominik & Ulrike

 we_special_/

editorial
we_special_/ 

During the last few years I have been experimenting a lot with networks and
the Internet. Actually, we-magazine was one of these experiments. It still has its
experimental status – it is changing its face, the editorial concept, and the part-
ners WE co-operates with. we-magazine is freestyle – no borders, no limits, no
rules. Topics emerge from the network and WE go for a new edition whenever
WE feel WE are ready.

And here WE go again.

FutureChallenges, our third edition of we-magazine, is dedicated to future-
challenges.org, a new open online platform. futurechallenges.org is about the
most important issues of our time, global megatrends, like climate change,
migration, scarcity of resources, globalization ... and especially the way they
interconnect, reflect and magnify one another which will be decisive in shaping
our common future.
The USP of futurechallenges.org is its focus on these correlations. When people
get hit by the joint forces of these trends – they really are in bad trouble.

So why did WE decide to dedicate this issue to FutureChallenges?

For us it is of the utmost importance that an institution like the Bertelsmann
Stiftung is finally reaching out to the Web, that they embrace abundance and
let the network set the agenda! They are now building a highly connected vir-
tual space based on the principles of participation, transparency and openness.
We want to support this endeavor and help them develop their Webby way of
future funding.
Besides this, WE truly believe that the power of networks, the power of WE, will
have a deep impact on how to handle these challenges, find solutions and
manage safe passage!
content
we_special_/ 

What is FutureChallenges?

What is futurechallenges.org? page_

WE@FutureChallenges page_

How Can WE Handle FutureChallenges? page_

Where Old and New Paradigms Meet page_

Annette Heuser/Henrik Scheller/Jonathan Stevens/Ole Wintermann

Learn

The Network is Challenging Us page_

Interview with Peter Kruse

Fact-Based Worldview page_

Interview with Hans Rosling

From Macro-Challenges to Micro-Solutions page_

Interview with Peter Spiegel

Concerted Action Needed! page_

Surendra Munshi

Re-Thinking Science page_

Alan Shapiro

How Does the Educational System Become Decentralized? page_

Interview with George Siemens

What the East Can Teach the West page_

Interview with John Hagel III
 we_special_/

Engage

To Engage Means to Create! page_

Emer Beamer

Challenging Invisible Boundaries in War and Peace: page_

Social Media in Georgia
Bijan Kafi

The Urban Revolution page_

Niels Boeing

When Media and Citizen Media Meet page_

Solana Larsen

It’s all about People – Cinema Jenin page_

Interview with Marcus Vetter

On a Mission to End Oil page_

Shai Agassi

We Share. We Do Not Censor! page_

Isaac Mao

Milagro page_
Sebastián Miquel & Nicolás Tereschuk

Helping People to Help Themselves page_

Interview by Astrid Ramge
content
 we_special_/

What is

Future
Challenges?
  we_special_/

What is futurec
URL
www.futurechallenges.org

USP
Discussing megatrend intersections and organizing projects
in a trans-disciplinary and international way.

Megatrends
Demographic Change > Demographic change describes changes to the size and structure of
a country’s population through rises and falls in the birth rate and
mortality rate as well as by migratory movements of people..

Migration > The concept of migration designates moving a person’s domicile

within one country or over a country’s borders permanently or tem-
porarily. The reasons for migration can be of an economic, political,
cultural or social nature.

Climate Change > Climate change refers to the permanent changes in the atmosphere
over a longer period of time. Although there have been changes in
the earth’s climate for millions of years, global warming in the th
century must be predominantly attributed to human activity.

New Governance > Broadly speaking, governance includes all forms of coordination
among individual and collective players. Todays governance always
functions in a globalized multilevel system among state and non-state
actors.

Natural Resources + Biodiversity >
Biodiversity describes the totality of living organisms which can
be measured by the number of species of animals, plants and
microorganisms living in a particular region. Natural resources are
raw materials provided by nature. People can mine but cannot
manufacture them. This renders their sustainable use imperative.

Security + Anti-Terror Policy >
War and conflict have always been defining moments not just for
international politics, but also for nation states. The global security
architecture of the future must take account of new kinds of (inter-
national) threats such as cyber-terrorism, chemical-terrorism and
bio-terrorism.
 we_special_/ 

challenges.org?
Pandemics > Pandemics refer to illnesses that occur not just locally or regionally,
but globally. They represent the emergence of diseases new to a
population and containing agents that infect humans, causing
significant, persistent illness that spreads easily among humans.

Globalization > Economic globalization basically describes the increasingly tight

knit economic interdependence of all states with escalating
exchange of goods, services, capital, technologies and workers.
Globalization has accelerated enormously in recent decades.

Points of Entry
Learn – more about the megatrend correlations.
Engage – translate ideas into action.
Connect – with others to realize your project.

Who?
Bertelsmann Stiftung in collaboration with  international
bloggers, scientists and everybody who wants to participate.

Why?
The idea is to foster “science as a public good” and initiate a
broader dialogue between experts and non-experts. For us it is
an obligation to make science public.

How?
The Bertelsmann Stiftung will become part of the Net. It will
no longer provide ready-made solutions, but act as a moderator in
establishing new forms of participatory culture.

When?
Launch: May 

Contact
Ole.Wintermann@bertelsmann-stiftung.de
Henrik.Scheller@bertelsmann-stiftung.de
 we_special_/

FutureChallenges
Correlations between the Megatrends
Jonathan Stevens / Henrik Scheller

E
Economic Globalization Global Governance

Economic Globalization Global Economic Systems Governance vs Economics R

Unified Regulations Global Financial Regulation
Endogenous Technologyn New Economic Governancen

Global Governance Economic Agreements Shift in Major Powers

Regional Agreements Emerging Powers
Economic Stabilityn Social and Civil Movements
Ungoverned Spaces
Concepts of Sovereignty

Energy and Natural Consumption Shifts Common Resource

Resources Technological Models Governance
Alternative Fuels Regulation of Nuclear Power
Shared Responsibility
of GHGs

Climate Change and Decreased Biodiversity Agreements over

Biodiversity Increased GHGs Species Loss
Food vs Fuel Shared Responsibility
on Climate

Threats to Global Cost/Threat Sharing Un/Under-governed Spaces

Security Increased Business Costs Empowered Individuals
Impact on Commerce Appropriate Responses
Security vs Liberty

Demographics and Commerce Influences Governing Migrants

Migration Migrants Regions of Rapid Growth
Laborer Centers Shift Aging World Powers
Cost of Aging Society
 we_special_/
Energy and Natural
Resources
Resources Equal Economic
Clout
Extraction and Use Technology
Shifts in Source and Use
Use Affected by Economic
Climate
Use Influenced by Compacts
Common Geographic
Resources
Nuclear Energy Treaties
Shifting Resource Locations
Alternative Fuels
Carbon Consumption Rates
Resource Technologies
Biofuel Land Needs
GHG Output Growth
Dual Role of New Fuels
Resources Threaten
Sovereignty
Technological Distribution
New Fuels Threaten Powers
Security Influences Use
Energy Needs of Future
Population
Increases in Energy
Use Varies
Resources Drive Migrants
Climate Change and
Biodiversity
Climate Drives Commerce
Climate Change Mitigations
Evolving Climate Technologies
Biodiversity as Economic
Value
International Climate
Compacts
Global Resource Sharing
Green Accountability
Democratization of
Biodiversity
Mixed Impact of Biofuels
GHG and Climate Change
Alternative Fuel Markets
Adaption Strategies
Species Abundance and
Distribution
Land and Water Viability
Unstable Regions Most
Affected
Destabilized
Production/Transit
Worsening Bio-threats
Growth vs Climate Change
Climate Refugees
Decline in Regional Outputs
Space Needs of Biodiversity
Urbanization Stresses
Biodiversity
Threats to Global
Security
Security Increases Cost
Cost Attribution of Attacks
Escalating Technologies
Rise in Sub-state Powers
Technology Empowered
Individuals
Governing Evolving Threats
Threats Transcend Geography
Unstable Energy-Rich
Regions
Dual Use Technologies
Rise in Alternative Fuels
Unstable Regions Most
Vulnerable
Developing World
Consumption
Worsening Threats of
Bio-Attacks
Rising Sub-state Powers
Governing Evolving Threats
Un/Undergoverned Spaces
Nuclear Containment
Security-driven Migrations
Regional Threats in
Demographics
Unstable Regions Grow
Fastest

Demographics and
Migration
Centers of Productivity
Cost of New Migrants
Aging Western Powers
Governing Aging Societies
Growing Unstable Regions
Re-evaluating Citizenship
Growth in Transient
Populations
Fuel/Resource Migrations
Increasing Standards
of Living
Migrants Stress Resources
Urbanization Stresses
Biodiversity
More People Equals More GHGs
Climate Migration
High Population in Vulnerable
Areas
Migrants Challenge Security
Security for/from
Quasi-citizens
Rise in Radicalization
Migrants in Ungoverned
Spaces
Demographic Transition
Rate and Direction of Growth
Aging Western/Eastern
Powers
Growth in Unstable Regions
Kishore Mahbubani
We were living in separate boats earlier. All that
was needed was to formulate rules to make sure
that the boats didn’t collide. The situation has
changed with the beginning of globalization. All
the people of the world are now living in the same
boat, and different countries of the world are like
cabins in the boat. We take care of our cabins with-
out worrying about the boat as a whole. This
needs to be changed.
 we_special_/

WE@FutureChallenges
The futurechallenges.org core team
at Bertelsmann Stiftung explains
what futurechallenges.org means
to them personally.
Henrik Scheller Ole Wintermann Bettina Neuhaus

Yvonne Eich Thieß Petersen Malte Boecker

Jonathan Stevens Xu Ting

we_special_/
Henrik Scheller
FutureChallenges is both a chance and a privilege.
The Bertelsmann Stiftung gives me the opportunity
to think about the current and future risks our pla-
net is facing. At the same time I have the personal
freedom to create and provide concepts on how to
tackle them. To collaborate with a wide range of
partners, to bring people with multiple backgrounds
together and to shape a great team is a thrilling
task. Our commitment: to make the world a better
place. Being aware that it is only a small contribu-
tion, I am convinced that each step matters. We have
to remember the future starts right in our own
front yard and it is up to us to make and drive the
change.
Ole Wintermann
When developing futurechallenges.org, I became
more and more aware of what an amazing envi-
ronment the Internet is. With its decentralized
structure and self-organizing capability, it poses an
on-going challenge to existing processes, eternal
truths and well-defined structures.
Bettina Neuhaus
What I find really satisfying is solving all the knotty
logistic problems involved in bringing people from
all over the world together in a particular spot at a
particular time. Because it’s not enough that people
simply understand one another – what we have
also to deliver are creative inspirational ways of sha-
ring ideas and knowledge and working on joint
projects to make the world a better place.
Yvonne Eich
During my studies a class in global history caught
me. It was all about the idea to rewrite the Euro-
centric narrative of the th century within a glo-
bal frameset and a global version of history occured
to me. The intertwining and interrelations of cultu-
res started long before so-called globalization. I
hope that futurechallenges.org will help me to get
a better understanding of what ONE common fu-
ture might mean.

Thieß Petersen
Working as an economist on the correlations bet-
ween the megatrends, when I was writing the Glo-
belpedia-articles for FutureChallenges, led me to
many new insights about how complex the world’s
economy is. This has led me to increasingly ques-
tion whether the macro-economic growth-model,
which was used over the last decades, fits the needs
of the th century.
Malte Boecker
FutureChallenges is a great opportunity to reflect
on the nature and magnitude of the future chal-
lenges lying ahead in a structured way.
Ultimately, it will encourage all of us who are in-
volved to become part of the solution. My gut fee-
ling is that the platform will call for behavioral
changes at various levels. FutureChallenges urges
us to redefine what quality of life, real economic
growth and progress mean to us and to work on so-
lutions that shift our behavior in the right direction.
Jonathan Stevens
Working on the Megatrend meta-analysis, as part
of the FutureChallenges project, has given me a re-
newed perspective of, and appreciation for, the in-
tricacies that define our future. Like my past work in
Epidemiology and Biostatistics where we examined
the direct and indirect causes of disease, looking at
the six seemingly independent “mega” trends and
how they influence one another has been both per-
sonally and professionally fascinating.”
Xu Ting
Shaping a Globalized World project enabled me
to broaden my perspective and understanding of
important global issues. I have come to realize,
more than ever, the important role of EU-Asia-US;
as well as the necessity of the trilateral partnership
in accomplishing major global initiatives.
 we_special_/

More than fifty bloggers from all over the

world are contributing to futurechallenges.org.
Five of them answered the question:

How Can WE Handle FutureChallenges?

we_special_/
Jacinta Escudos, Mac-Jordan Holdbrookes Noha Atef,
El Salvador D. Degadjor, Ghana Egypt
Jacinta Escudos, El Salvador
I think we have to take advantage of the access to
information we have at present. Never before has
information been so accessible and never before
have there been so many ways to share. For those
who have access to the Internet, sharing should be-
come an obligation!
Civil society must involve itself directly in matters
and propose solutions, projects and ideas to over-
come the challenges of the ever changing situation
in our world. Independence in action must be sought
(be it in a community, in a city or in a country!). The
Web. is, I believe, a privileged space to achieve
that.
Mac-Jordan Holdbrookes D. Degadjor, Ghana
In the efforts of WE tackling issues/challenges
facing us this day, the best tool is the Internet. Mil-
lions of people worldwide are using the Internet to
share information, make new associations and com-
municate. During the recent earthquakes in both
Haiti & Chile, information about the quakes was
made available through the Internet. Ushahidi –
a crowd-sourcing crisis information organization
used the Internet to help/support during periods of
crisis in the world.
The Internet is a part of my every sphere of life now.
I can’t live without it even for a second; therefore
I believe if WE use the Internet effectively, all
challenges/issues can be addressed.

Sonam Ongmo, Alexey Sidorenko,
Bhutan Russia
Noha Atef, Egypt
We can handle the challenges we’re facing by ana-
lyzing them and discussing this analysis. The dis-
cussion reveals who is able to do what, and how
the problem can be diagnosed from different points
of view. Once you measure the size of an obstacle,
you can easily overcome it.
Sonam Ongmo, Bhutan
In my opinion the importance of these challenges
varies depending on where we live and there are a
myriad of approaches accordingly, as well. While
these challenges can be specific to countries, in the
end they affect us all. How can we handle them? By
understanding globalization and the interdepen-
dencies of an increasingly interconnected world.
This should not only impact our policies and attitu-
des to climate change/environment but also eco-
nomics, resource-sharing and putting humanitarian
issues before economic greed. Understanding them
can have profound effects on alleviating poverty,
corruption and greed.
Alexey Sidorenko, Russia
I think, FutureChallenges can be solved if we take
into account the following three basic things:
patience, understanding and education. Patience –
every change needs time. Solving challenges needs
both time and change. Understanding – if people
would realize they’re living in a smaller world, and
there’s no place for violence and political selfish-
ness, it would be a better place. The West should
know more about the East, the South should know
more about the North and vice versa. Education –
without it, we will repeat the same mistakes over
and over again.

Annette Heuser
Annette Heuser is executive direc-
tor of the Washington, DC office
of the Bertelsmann Foundation.
Annette read political science, law
and sociology, and is a member
of the World Economic Forum’s
Global Agenda Council on the
Future of the European Union;
the Atlantic Council’s Strategic
Advisors Group and the European
Council on Foreign Relations. She
also serves as vice-chair of the
Council on Foundations’ Global
Philanthropy Committee.
Henrik Scheller
Henrik Scheller read politics and
musicology. In  he joined
the Bertelsmann Stiftung where
he is responsible for issues of
governance.
>
>
>
>
Jonathan Stevens
Jonathan Stevens is director of the
Demographic Change Project for
the Bertelsmann Foundation.
Jonathan was an epidemiologist
before moving to teaching and
public policy. He worked at the
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.
>
>
>
>
Ole Wintermann
Ole Wintermann read economics,
politics and sociology in Kiel and
Göteborg. He was a research assi-
stant at the University of Göteborg
where he wrote his PhD on the
ability of political systems to react
to crises. After being head of
department for economic and
social policy at the former German
Employees Union (DAG). Ole
joined the Bertelsmann Stiftung in
 to work on demographic
change. Since  he has focused
on the interdependencies of glo-
bal megatrends with the develop-
ment of the Internet. His latest
project is: futurechallenges.org
we_special_/ 

tags > FutureChallenges, opportunities in crises, Bertelsmann Stiftung,

science as a public good, science.

Where Old and

New Paradigms
Meet
www.futurechallenges.org

Demographic Change
Demographic change describes changes to
the size and structure of a country’s popula-
tion through rises and falls in the birth rate
and mortality rate as well as by migratory
movements of people.
Migration
The concept of migration designates moving
a person’s domicile within one country or
over a country’s borders permanently
or temporarily. The reasons for migration
can be of an economic, political, cultural or
social nature.
Climate Change
Climate change refers to the permanent
changes in the atmosphere over a longer pe-
riod of time. Although there have been
changes in the earth’s climate for millions of
years, global warming in the th century
must be predominantly attributed to human
activity.
New Governance
Broadly speaking, governance includes
all forms of coordination among individual
and collective players. Todays governance
always functions in a globalized multilevel
system among state and non-state actors.
Natural Resources and Biodiversity
Biodiversity describes the totality of living
organisms which can be measured by the
number of species of animals, plants and
microorganisms living in a particular region.
Natural resources are raw materials provided
by nature. People can mine but cannot manu-
facture them. This renders their sustainable
use imperative.
Security and Anit-Terror Policy
War and conflict have always been defining
moments not just for international politics,
but also for nation states. The global secu-
rity architecture of the future must take
account of new kinds of (international)
threats such as cyber-terrorism, chemical-
terrorism and bio-terrorism.
we_special_/
we-magazine >
The Bertelsmann Stiftung is launching “FutureChal-
lenges”, a new online platform. What’s it all about?
Ole Wintermann >
Megatrends such as demographic change, econo-
mic globalization, climate change, pandemics,
security issues and migration are shaping the glo-
bal agenda. Even though we gather tremendous
amounts of information about each single trend,
we hardly know anything about how these trends
interact, and how and where they’re interrelated.
How do they connect? What effects do their con-
nections cause? What are their impacts? To put the
spotlight on such questions as these, the know-
ledge we want to share on futurechallenges.org is
no longer focused on the isolated perspective of a
single megatrend – what we want to do is encou-
rage members of the platform to focus on the com-
plex interactions of the megatrends.
What’s more, futurechallenges.org seeks to nurture
dialogue between experts and non-experts. Science
usually generates knowledge in a very exclusive
way in which research results are for the most part
discussed within closed “expert” communities far
removed from any broader audience. The opportu-
nities of the Internet and social networks have not
been taken up by scientists. Our idea was thus to
create a new Internet platform where experts and
non-experts could not only discuss such issues but
also speak with one another in a conversation that
can bring issues of networking, interdependencies
and the complexity of our situation to the forefront.
We also hope that the platform will enable people
to organize themselves better in projects and cam-
paigns to meet these global challenges more effec-
tively on both the local and the global levels.
Our third aim is to explore how the knowledge of
the Web can be used to find the solutions that we
need to meet future demands.
we_special_/
we-magazine >
But isn’t the “exclusive space” occupied by science
one of the main defining features that it needs to
pursue its research undisturbed by outside influen-
ces?
Annette Heuser >
The Bertelsmann Foundation is an advocate of the
idea that science must become more public in its
discourse. Science can’t be founded on a stand-
alone approach because it's highly connected to a
broad variety of fields. Furthermore, all scientists
are obliged to share their knowledge and embrace
other disciplines: We need both Shakespeare and
Einstein to manage safe passage. For us as a foun-
dation this means that we must put still greater
efforts into organizing a discourse that really does
merit being called “interdisciplinary” or “trans-
disciplinary”. Above all it means that we must seek
the active involvement of the general public and
people in politics. We need understanding and
commitment to help overcome the communication
barriers among politics, science and the general
public and create a common (semantic) understan-
ding of the problems facing us all. We are well
aware that each of these cultures follows its own
mode and logic of thought and argument across
the various development phases. So we know that
any attempt to abolish totally such communication
barriers is a chimera. Yet that is precisely why a
think tank such as the Bertelsmann Foundation
should serve to strengthen networking and com-
munication abilities and bonds of empathy both on
its own side and in terms of society at large with a
view to promoting the best possible results from a
discourse of this kind.
we-magazine >
Why did you choose the Internet above the other
media you could have taken to promote this new
form of dialogue between experts and non-
experts?
Henrik Scheller >
Up to now the findings of science have mainly been
published in renowned scientific journals or in clo-
sed events held within specific scientific communi-

ties. Fruitful online debates and interdisciplinary
discourse have been more the exception than the
rule. Bearing this in mind, we argue that the Inter-
net could be a promising way to experiment with
new forms of discourse and participatory culture.
We are aware that the lack of common under-
standing among subcultures might cause some pro-
blems when it comes to evaluating “collective
intelligence”. But we are convinced that the Inter-
net will reveal to us new patterns for explaining the
world in which we live. And finally, we’re also
expecting that this will lead to a redefinition of
how we think of the “expert”!
we-magazine >
Can you give us an example of interdependencies
between global megatrends – of how they impact
on one another?
Jonathan Stevens >
Consider the following scenario: Economic globali-
zation correlates to an increased consumption of
energy and thus a rise in greenhouse gas emissi-
ons. These gas emissions are seen to be at least par-
tially responsible for future changes in the climate.
Therefore economic globalization is one of the
key drivers of climate change. In many developing
countries, climate change results in water short-
ages and famines. People who are threatened with
death by thirst or hunger do not stay in one place;
they seek better, more fertile ground. Thus climate
change will trigger large-scale emigration. The
physical and economic consequences of climate
change will impact negatively on the political and
social stability of the countries most affected by it.
And if such instabilities occur in countries providing
raw materials and resources of vital importance
to key production processes, social and political
instabilities in one country can easily endanger the
entire global economic process. Such a backdrop
should make it very clear that the different forms of
interdependencies in individual countries, regions
and continents can have different effects. So it
makes little sense to look for a single master plan
that covers the whole world. What we should do is
seek out regionally based expertise and engage
with learning from one another.

Pandemics
Pandemics refer to illnesses that occur not
just locally or regionally, but globally. They
represent the emergence of diseases new to
a population and containing agents that in-
fect humans, causing significant, persistent
illness that spreads easily among humans.
Globalization
Economic globalization basically describes
the increasingly tightknit economic interde-
pendence of all states with escalating
exchange of goods, services, capital, tech-
nologies and workers. Globalization has
accelerated enormously in recent decades.
we-magazine >
Doesn’t the development of an Internet platform of
this kind represent a totally new direction for the
Bertelsmann Stiftung? What kind of lessons have
you learnt so far in developing it?
Henrik Scheller >
To be perfectly honest with you, developing this
platform has opened up to us a totally new world
that has little in common with the “old world” in
which we’re used to living and working. Quite apart
from all the technical issues it raises, developing
this platform has been mainly a matter of learning
and understanding what’s involved in the concept
of networking – both externally and, more critically,
internally.
Another central issue has been how we should
handle – what attitude we should adopt for – future
content on our new Internet pages that might not
be completely in line with our own standpoint. By
now we’ve reached a position where we think that
by relinquishing control we can only benefit from
the knowledge and insights that the Internet makes
possible. But it’s been and still is a long and highly
unusual process of letting-go-of-the-reins for
everyone involved. Obviously we will still retain the
option of deleting any content that might violate
public policies. But beyond that we believe that the
self-cleansing power of the Internet will ensure that
any questionable content will be debated in open
discourse by the community.
we_special_/
we-magazine >
What effect has www.futurechallenges.org had
on the way the Bertelsmann Stiftung perceives
itself?
Ole Wintermann >
In future we will tend to act more as moderators.
This means that we will no longer draw up ready-
made solutions for the global challenges facing the
world in closed groups of experts. What we would
rather do is to offer a space or forum for public par-
ticipation where “we are one” means “one among
many”. The Internet is relativizing the status of ex-
perts. This means that our job is rather to network
ourselves with other platforms in the Web in an
effort to generate synergy effects. As a foundation,
we want to be part of the mutual learning process
in the Internet, while also offering our own ways of
learning. The modes of thought and the projects
outlined on our Website are hopefully so stimula-
ting and innovative in parts that through them we
can motivate people, NGOs and social business lea-
ders to realize their own ideas.
we-magazine >
How has the platform changed your daily working
routines and what effect has this had on your own
original work?
Henrik Scheller >
First and foremost the platform has given me a new
experience of time. The sheer speed of the Internet
is sometimes overwhelming. I have to learn new
ways of thinking and prioritizing things. What
really matters and what can I put to one side? What
do I really need to read and what is just trash? Plus
being in dialogue with some  bloggers scattered
around the world who are used to getting an
immediate response to their pressing questions is
also something it’s difficult to bring into line with a
regular nine-to-five job.
When it comes to content, I’m still painfully lear-
ning that the Internet calls for “the courage to
eschew perfectionism”. Results that we used to
publish in meticulously produced glossy brochures
now need to be posted in double-quick time on the
we_special_/
Internet. This has the enormous advantage that
we now get much quicker feedback and can make
corresponding changes to our own work and the
issues with which we deal.
we-magazine >
The platform will have its soft launch at a major
conference in Washington. What’s the conference
about?
Annette Heuser >
You mean our conference on “Opportunities in
Crisis – Avenues to Growth”, which takes place on
 April this year in Washington. This is the second
conference of its kind that aims to bring to the
forefront the opportunities and new perspectives
engendered by global crises. This is another im-
portant message that futurechallenges.org should
get across – that global transformation is an
opportunity for positive change! Broad public per-
ception – whether it be of megatrends themselves
or the ways they interact with one another – always
carries a certain fatalistic element with it. The all-
pervasive feeling of being powerless, of being
unable to change the course of events, is a major
impediment both to individual and political enga-
gement. But that needn’t be so! Take our founda-
tion, which is cooperating with a host of other
institutions, NGOs and social business initiatives
which are already successfully on the ground. The
only thing they often lack is broad public notice
and, of course, money!
we-magazine >
What measures are you contemplating for the soft-
launch of futurechallenges.org at this conference?
Jonathan Stevens >
As a foundation we’re venturing here into comple-
tely new and uncharted territory. The whole confe-
rence will be live-streamed. And we’ve also invited
bloggers from China, Argentina, Kenya, Bhutan, the
US and Europe who’ll be putting out their live
blogs. In doing so we’re following a two-track stra-
tegy. On the one hand we want to enter into a
much more direct form of dialogue with our distin-
guished guests and expert speakers by enabling

people who are not directly taking part in the con-
ference to influence the course of the proceedings
in Washington through their commentaries. On the
other hand we want to facilitate exchanges among
people in the northern and southern hemispheres.
This is a major issue for us and one that should also
be determinant for futurechallenges.org. Our aim
is to round off the day with presentation of a spe-
cific agenda for the futurechallenges.org platform.
we-magazine >
Where do you see yourselves in one year or eigh-
teen months with the www.futurechallenges.org
platform?
Ole Wintermann >
We hope that FutureChallenges will grow into one
of the most attractive of the international plat-
forms, a place where, above all non-experts also
have the confidence to post their ideas and
thoughts on the mutual impact of global mega-
trends. At the same time we are also encouraging
a broad range of academic institutions such as the
Brookings Institution and Resources for the Future
(RFF) in Washington or the Potsdam Institute for
Climate Impact Research and the George Mason
University in Virginia to use the platform for disse-
mination of their work in the sense of “science as a
public good”. The idea of networking has central
importance for us, and we’re delighted that we’ve
been able to arrange partnerships with Global
Voices and other online projects.
 we_special_/

Future
Learn
– about the correlations
between the megatrends
Challenges
 >

>

Photo: www.kubikfoto.de
tags > collective intelligence, networks, semantic, web culture,
nextpractice

The
Network is
Challenging
Us

Peter Kruse

Peter Kruse is founder and managing partner of nextpractice GmbH in Bremen, Germany. He worked for over  years at several
German universities in the field of brain research. His main areas of research have been the processing of complexity and auto-
nomous order formation in intelligent networks. He is internationally successfull as a consultant for over ten years now.

we-magazine >
If we see the Internet as one of the FutureChallen-
ges mankind is facing, what would you consider to
be the most important aspect in dealing with it? Is
the Internet challenging us?
Peter Kruse >
Who are you addressing as “us”? If “us” stands for
the group of individual persons using the Internet,
I think the challenge is primarily a matter of dealing
with too much information. In the Internet the most
striking problem for any single user is the reduction
of complexity. Confronted as we are with the steady
real-time flow of information, overload seems to
be normal and understanding is more of a lucky
exception. To successfully cope with the complex
dynamics of the Internet, it is helpful or even
necessary to understand and apply the principles of
self-organizing systems. Self-organization describes
the capacity of interactions in a system to create
“stable states of order far from equilibrium” with-
out a steering mastermind. Self-organization occurs
when the macro level of a holistic pattern-forma-
tion process interacts with the micro level of a huge
number of spontaneously active elements. By loo-
king at the Internet in a fuzzy, less detailed way it is
possible to get access to emerging patterns in
knowledge domains, communities, societies and
cultures. Being personally stressed by overload is
not a question of the perceived amount of infor-
mation but of the strategy of information proces-
sing deployed. If one is able to behave like an
element in the dynamics of a self-organizing system,
there is a chance to get access to higher levels of
pattern-formation. The Internet is far more than a
distribution channel for a chaotic cacophony of
more or less trivial information which can only be
managed by restriction or the clever filtering out of
real assets. The Internet is an ocean which mirrors
global and local cultural dynamics. The future
killer-application displacing search-engines will pro-
bably be invented as a kind of computer tomogra-
phy for Internet dynamics.
The long-term effects of the Internet may be more
comparable to the impact of the worldwide launch
of photography than to the democratization of
knowledge through Gutenberg’s printing press.
Photography suddenly opened up the aristocratic
privilege of creating a documentation of one’s own
we_special_/
history by being painted in a timeline to everyone.
Photography catalyzed the individual self-aware-
ness and self-confidence of people by giving easy
access to biographical patterns. What photography
did for individual consciousness the Internet is now
starting to do for the self-awareness and self-confi-
dence of society. By being an active part of the
complex dynamics of the Internet it is possible to
realize trends and developments far earlier and
far better than ever before. But please remember,
you should concentrate more on the macro-levels
of order formation and not on every single bit of
information. It is a matter of changing attitudes
and expectancies.
we-magazine >
“Swim with the dynamics and do NOT filter the
information” was the title of an interview you gave
recently. What do you mean by this?
Peter Kruse >
If you want to reduce complexity by filtering out
valuable information, the intelligence of the result
is always limited to the intelligence of the filter me-
chanisms used. You have to understand the pattern
before you are part of the pattern-formation pro-
cess. Filtering is a form of knowledge management.
To be part of the dynamics is a form of entrepre-
neurial risk-taking and artistic creativity: surprise
and be surprised. “I do not seek, I find” as Pablo
Picasso once formulated the difference. Be part of
the dynamics and not the mastermind at the back.
And be certain that the Internet with the participa-
tion of so many people is so quick and complex that
it will always be ahead of you, no matter what you
do.
we-magazine >
When you’re talking about “patterns”, is this some
kind of layer over the Internet? How would you
describe a pattern?
Peter Kruse >
If you look, for example, at a pointillist painting you
realize that it is necessary to step back to solve the
problem of millions of pixels by reducing the com-
plexity to the overall impression the artist wanted
we_special_/
to share with you. It then becomes a landscape, a
group of people or some animals in the wood. Our
brain is extremely well trained in this process of
reducing complexity by order-formation. Like the
Internet, our brain is a self-organizing system. So
the Internet and the brain make a perfect fit. No
need for payback.
What happens when you look at a pointillist pain-
ting is directly comparable to what enables an
entrepreneur to put forward a future business
opportunity earlier than his competitors or what
enables an author to formulate the attitude to life
of a whole generation. J. D. Salinger published his
novel “The Catcher in the Rye” in  as a book for
adults, but the stream of consciousness he gave
to his protagonist Holden Caulfield has attracted
adolescent readers round the world ever since. His
antihero is an icon for teenage rebellion – an
archetype, a basic pattern.
But for me by far the best way of explaining the
idea of pattern-formation as a way of reducing
complexity are the fascinating think tools we call
“metaphor” or “analogy”. They enable the direct
transfer of an insight from one area of application
to a totally new one without substantial loss: “a
new broom sweeps clean”, “the early bird catches
the worm”, or “too many cooks spoil the broth” etc.
we-magazine >
Would you describe the Internet then as a huge
social brain?
Peter Kruse >
No, this would be an analogy with major short-
comings. Our brain is an assembly of single cells
whose architecture is far less complex than the
architecture of the overall system. In the Internet
every active user has – hopefully – a brain and
therefore all users are themselves equipped with a
basic architecture more complex than the Internet
as a whole. Each user is able to create a phenome-
non like consciousness. But the Internet is not able
to reach such levels of order-formation. The Inter-
net is a network of brains that sometimes creates
collective intelligence – nothing more. Mystification
doesn’t help. The brain and the Internet are without
doubt self-organizing systems with non-linear
behaviour and a high degree of unpredictability.

When the Internet started, the first boom was trig-
gered by people’s fascination with easy access to a
rich world of knowledge, ideas and pictures. With
hyperlinks, connectivity in the network exploded
and it started to become increasingly unmanage-
able. The focus of users shifted from the provider
to the search engine, from access to filtering. But
users quickly realized that search engines are not
able to solve the problem of qualitative evaluation.
The structural possibility of connecting bits of infor-
mation via hyperlinks takes information out of its
context and makes it extremely difficult to decode
intended meaning. To describe this loss of con-
textual support, the British sociologist Anthony
Giddens invented the telling term “disembedding”.
The reaction of users to this was to solve the pro-
blem by “rooming in”, giving poor lonesome infor-
mation a caring social environment or community.
The focus of users shifted from search engines to
the social software of Web.. First motivated by
the need to reduce complexity via recommenda-
tions, users were soon inspired by a new motiva-
tion to be present in the Internet: leaving one’s
mark in order to be recognized by others. The first
Internet-boom of access to information was follo-
wed by the second boom of active participation.
The first huge migration of the information age had
begun. People changed from being Digital Visitors
who use the Internet as a tool into Digital Inhabi-
tants who just live in the Internet. The Internet
started to become a cultural area in itself. The
distinction between “real” and “virtual” disappea-
red long before the idea of augmented reality
was born. From a systems theory perspective, the
explosion of connectivity was amplified by the
explosion of the number of spontaneously active
elements. A network was formed with many links
and nodes able to produce non-linear dynamics.
On top of this, by inventing the re-tweet-function,
Twitter-users added the possibility of circular exci-
tation which in the brain is a basic feature of short-
term memory. Merging high connectivity with the
plethora of spontaneously active elements and
the emergence of dynamic engrams by circular
excitation gives a very effective incubator for un-
predictable hypes. This dynamic characteristic of
the Internet opened the door to the famous “long
tail” – suddenly everyone was in principle able to
set off an avalanche to reach the centre of public
attention.
Photo: www.kubikfoto.de
we-magazine >

Leaving behind the individual level, what do we

have to deal with as a society? What is the chal-
lenge from this perspective?

Peter Kruse >

This is the big question. The impact on the personal

level is quite obvious – it’s all about reduction of
complexity and the need to find an appropriate
balance between protection of privacy and the wish
to be personally recognized and powerful. But on
the level of society the impact is far more diverse
and also varies from culture to culture. If you look,
for example, at German culture, one of the most
challenging effects is the change in the status of the
expert. In German culture, proven expertise is a
highly desirable core value. The expert is a person
able to judge the importance of information and
to direct development in promising directions. The
federal government in Germany has accordingly
just set up a group of  experts to work on “the
Internet and digital society”. But they’ve also added
an th member: citizens. Even the politicians who
have long embodied one of the most unquestioned
expert statuses in German representative demo-
cracy now seem to recognize the tsunami on the
horizon. The Internet is a bypass for every gatekee-
per-restricted information flow that does not realize
true added-value. In instable network dynamics
it is impossible to maintain a powerful position over
a long period just by assigning the label “expert”.
Expertise has to prove its value anew at all times
and not just once in an exam or assessment – and
this means hard times for established hierarchies.
To answer the question about the impact of the
Internet on society, you have to think about cultu-
res and subcultures. This is not simple.

we-magazine >

But isn’t there some general impact that holds true

for any society?

Peter Kruse >

To continue the comparison between photography

and the Internet: with enhancement of the visi-
bility of pattern-formation processes in social
dynamics and with the inevitable increase of trans-
parency, the degree of self-awareness and self-
confidence will grow in any society. Quite apart
from the more pessimistic notion of cocooning and
declining interest in political activities, the Internet
thus nurtures the realistic hope that people will en-
gage in public affairs – which does not necessarily
mean that they will engage in political parties.
Democracy is beginning to become more direct ...

we-magazine >

… which is a real big thing…

Peter Kruse >

Self-awareness and self-confidence lower the

threshold to action – in individuals as well as in
societies. The more people are interested in the
dynamics of society and the more they are able to
detect underlying pattern-formation processes,
the greater becomes the amount of distributed
knowledge needed to gain collective intelligence.
One universal contribution the Internet has made
to changing society is the opportunity it offers
for obtaining global insights, while the other is
the chance to trigger avalanches big enough to
become part of public agenda setting. Before the
Internet arrived, every motivation to change some-
thing had to search for ways of boosting its own
impact by attracting the interest of the mass media
or by investing heavily in PR activities. With the
Internet, however, power shifts dramatically from
offer to demand. When there is something of inte-
rest in the “long tail” to many people, the network
will connect immediately and is in theory at least
always ready to release an avalanche effect. So the
situation has switched from an “idea in search for
supporting networks” to “networks in search of
attractive ideas”. Anyone may be the butterfly flap-
ping with its wing in Brazil that sets off a tornado
in Texas, as the meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz put
it. In non-linear systems small causes can have great
effects. With the presence of today’s Internet, it is
impossible to keep the people out. Participation is
king.

we-magazine >

When millions and millions of people are commu-

nicating with each other in the networks will we
have less conflicts in future? Will there be more and

deeper understanding between cultures and will
transparency make it more difficult for govern-
ments, lobbyists and global players to push through
their own interests?
Peter Kruse >
Transparency is a really potent mechanism. In com-
bination with social networks, the fundamental
shift of power already predicted for business more
than ten years ago in the Cluetrain manifesto now
reaches a new dimension. Tactical activities based
on hidden agendas no longer engender the most
assertive and sustainable competitive advantages.
All the stakeholders in society have to learn this and
I am sure it will not be an easy lesson to learn. But I
am very optimistic that the necessary change of
attitudes is only a matter of time. When environ-
mental conditions change, being non-adaptive is not
a healthy strategy as evidenced by the story of the
dinosaurs. The only chance is to set back the clock
on environmental conditions. But as long as no one
shuts down the Internet, the story will go on.
With regard to the second aspect of your question,
concerning the hope for harmonizing the world by
using the Internet to foster the emergence of one
overall culture, I am by no means so optimistic. The
rise of a culture depends on the existence of a sha-
red value system and on an adequate alignment of
semantics (meaning), semiotics (symbols) and syn-
tax (grammar). People have to interact very often,
intensely, and quite redundantly in order to create
a stable culture. This is not given in the Internet.
Hence my proposal about an overall Internet cul-
ture is limited to a commonly agreed netiquette,
some basic attitudes and core values. But in the net-
work there will be a highly sophisticated and diver-
sified landscape of subcultures open to everyone
and ready to interact with each other. Therefore –
not to follow the line of growth into one integrating
culture – there is a high probability that the ability
of the always curious heavy Internet users to share
empathy with others will grow steadily. This applies
to even strange or weird cultures. In this respect
the Internet can be helpful in reducing the conflict
potential in the world. But it also means that ever-
yone has to jump out of the box from time to time,
otherwise the Internet will enhance the danger of
closed shops in which people feel comfortable. And
this would result in an increase of conflict potential
– again no easy answer to a clear question.
we_special_/
we-magazine >
The way you have been describing the network –
this communication infrastructure we’ve created –
what does it mean for the political or the educa-
tional system?
Peter Kruse >
As already mentioned, with its structure and dyna-
mics the Internet poses a threat to any mode of
formal hierarchical power. The attempt to defend a
gatekeeper position without convincing attractive-
ness or proven added-value will be rapidly by-
passed or cancelled. The Internet is not very loyal –
you can be a hero and the most visited node today
and a lonesome nobody tomorrow. Think of all the
Internet giants whose rise and fall we have already
seen. In the Internet there is no chance of building
an unforgettable brand like Coca Cola. Even those
Internet companies which can create a generic term
like “to google” should not feel too secure.
My recommendation for politicians is simply to be
as active an element as possible in the networks.
And please, do not use the Internet as an instru-
ment for self-promotion, just as a place where you
are an authentic, transparent and open minded
partner for interaction. There is no other Web.
strategy apart from “please and thank you” as the
German blogger Leander Wattig boiled it down.
For the educational system I have only one deep-
rooted personal wish: skip the idea of optimizing
the learning process as we did with industrial pro-
duction. The Internet desperately needs people
who are capable of judging information from very
different domains, who are able to withstand the
frustration of overload without disconnecting.
Lateral thinkers, creative fools, people with broken
careers – all the vulnerable people ready to take on
the risk of unpredictable processes should be given
the opportunity of deriving maximum benefits from
educational institutions. We need a new definition
of what is a “social elite”. Don’t be too streamlined
and too target-oriented. Be inconvenient, unsatis-
fied, always in between and able to let things grow.
we-magazine >
But to be not too much ‘in between’, how can one
translate insights into action by using the Internet?
we_special_/
Peter Kruse >
To be honest, I don’t think the Internet is a good
tool for success in the usual sense of professional
project management. Project management means
to strategically minimize the distance between
an actual and a target value. The underpinning con-
cept here is steering and regulation – first order
cybernetics and linearity. As mentioned at the start,
the Internet is a self-organizing system with com-
plex non-linear dynamics. The only remaining key
for enhancing the probability of realizing your own
ideas through use of the Internet is the empathetic
perception of changing states and interactions. The
Internet is not a technical but a human network. Its
avalanche effects are enabled by its system charac-
teristics but are equally driven by emotional reso-
nance effects in the community of users. Early
perception of trends, value drifts and attractive
topics allows striking the same chord on many pia-
nos. This may culminate in the rush of a coherent
wave. It is like transferring from low-energy diffu-
sed light to a powerful laser beam.
we-magazine >
What does this mean for the relationship between
online and offline worlds? Does the difference still
play a role or is it no longer helpful?
Peter Kruse >
The time of the prediction that the Internet will end
up in a perfect virtualization of the real world only
limited by memory capacity is now over. This idea
was nurtured by the dream of a totally uncontrolled
and omnipotent space for personal experiences.
Freedom far beyond reality was the basic motive.
But the enhancement of self-awareness and self-
confidence in society that I mentioned before will
redirect people into taking up more responsibility
in real life once more. Increasing use of smart pho-
nes together with the possibility of putting Internet
layers directly on top of everyday activities are the
key drivers of such a development. But even wit-
hout augmented reality, the fascination of being a
powerful part of the economy, politics and culture
is too strong to allow use of virtualization as a trivial
getaway. Persuading a company to act in a more
sustainable manner by starting a corrotmob (pull)
or forcing a global player to change strategy just by

launching a video on YouTube (push) are both
satisfying ways of releasing endorphins.
we-magazine >
In connection with the added value of the Internet,
the concept of “collective intelligence” is often men-
tioned. What is meant by this and how can collec-
tive intelligence be stimulated through use of the
Internet?
Peter Kruse >
One basic assumption related to the concept of
“collective intelligence” is the existence of distribu-
ted knowledge. Following the Condorcet-Jury theo-
rem, even when no individual person in a group
mandated to decide between two alternatives
knows the right solution, the result is better the
more persons are involved. But this only holds true
when the mean decision-maker in the participating
sample is slightly above random (Delphi-effect).
Especially when it comes to simply estimating quan-
tities, it can be demonstrated that the group-result
is always better than the results of single partici-
pants alone. But collective intelligence is far more
than this and really not a rare freak phenomenon.
Taking collective intelligence as a synonym for cul-
tural performance, it becomes obvious that the
added value of people interacting in the complex
dynamics of a network is not an invention of the
Internet age. If we reject the “great man” theory of
history, the idea of viewing the cultural develop-
ment of mankind as the result of collective intelli-
gence is quite compelling. The Internet is just a
turbocharger scaling this form of intelligence up
to new dimensions of speed and crowd. The only
severe limitation for realization of collective intelli-
gence in the Internet is imposed by the problem of
disembedded information. Without an automatic
understanding of meaning (semantics), the collec-
tive intelligence of the Internet is not able to reach
its full potential.
we-magazine >
Does it really need an automatic understanding or
is the context created by social networks already
sufficient to solve the problem?
Photo: www.kubikfoto.de
Peter Kruse >
The disambiguation of content by recommenda-
tion, annotation, or interpretation in a community
does not work with really large numbers of people
and with value-related information – the so-called
“soft facts”. Look at Wikipedia and it soon becomes
evident that this form of collective intelligence only
works because the number of active editors is very
small compared to the numbers of visitors. Because
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, acting as a watch-
dog to find out whether a fact is right or wrong is
all that is required. Yet achieving consensus in the
case of ethical or emotional questions is far more
complicated and in fact is not possible in a network
with as many active elements as the editors of
Wikipedia. In November  the Wall Street Jour-
nal wrote that Wikipedia has been continuously
losing its editors for some years now. The network
has simply grown too big and its cultural coherence
has dropped below a critical value. Social networks
are only able to solve the problem of disembedded
information when the number of participants does
not exceed a critical threshold and the information
to be evaluated remains as close as possible to facts
and figures.
we-magazine >
What would be your hope if someone really does
find an algorithm able to disambiguate language
and automatically evaluate meaning?
Peter Kruse >
I do not see this on the horizon nor am I sure that
I would like to see it. Things as promising and
powerful as the Internet generally bring dangerous
side-effects with them. There’s no such thing as a
free lunch! Even today the Internet is in a delicate
balance between “what’s in for me” and “what
price do I have to pay”. The semantic Web enhances
the risk of misusing information to a degree that
will not be easy to tolerate. Some big brother may
well grow too big. So I am quite satisfied with the
shortcomings we are now facing. Even today the
mere amount of information is so high that any
attempt to take control quickly reaches its limits.
The real master of the universe is still the entity of
Internet users. If the Internet really does get the
Nobel Prize for Peace this year, it should be dedi-
cated to them and not to any of the professional
players.
we-magazine >
Talking about control of the Internet, we get pretty
close to the question of censorship. Do you think
such forms of restriction will take over or survive
in the long-run?
Peter Kruse >
The Internet is the best instrument to enhance
distributed knowledge in the world and to use the
treasure of creativity in the “long tail”. Confronted
as we are with global problems of high complexity,
I think we really cannot do without the Internet.
Back in  Ross W. Ashby had already formulated
his famous “Law of Requisite Variety” which states
that the system able to solve a problem always has
to have a higher variety of possible internal states
than the system producing it. The complex dyna-
mics of the Internet is a compelling answer to the
complex dynamics produced by modern societies.
Any form of restriction of access or censorship of
content should be prevented as far as possible.
we-magazine >
Would you consider the use of the Internet as a
human right?
Peter Kruse >
For me it simply is equivalent to having access to
air or water. The Internet is a global commons. We
should invest everything to bring it to even the
remotest places on earth.
we-magazine >
One last question ... please give us  characters
on “the network is challenging us :-)
Peter Kruse >
The Internet is a tutorial made by mankind to instil
the need of changing the value system under-
pinning the “subdue the earth” imperative.
 >

tags > Hans Rosling, fact-based worldview, gapminder,

Western, Tintin

Fact-Based >

>

World View >

Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and one of the founders of the Gapminder
Foundation which wants to make statistics used and understood so we get the fact-based worldview.

we-magazine >
How come that you are so involved with the poo-
rest people in the world, Hans Rosling?
Hans Rosling >
I worked as a young medical doctor in Africa where
I participated in discovering a paralytic disease
among very poor people in a remote rural area. We
named the disease “konzo” after the name given it
by the first affected population. Thereafter I spent
twenty years researching konzo epidemics induced
by poverty, malnutrition and insufficiently proces-
sed cassava roots in remote parts of rural Africa. I’ve
done many field surveys in rural Africa. And that’s
when I got irritated with the concept of “develo-
ping countries” that puts Mozambique, Thailand
and Argentina in the same group. That doesn’t
make sense as these countries are so different.
I taught my students a more upgraded worldview.
Instead of sorting countries into two groups, they
should be sorted into at least four. High income,
middle income, low income and collapsed. That’s
how it all started. I wanted to show that the health
and economy of countries today form a continuous
band of variations in the world, from the collapsed
countries like Somalia and Afghanistan and
peaceful low income countries like Tanzania and
we_special_/
Ghana and middle income countries now called
“emerging economies” – like China and Brazil –
through to the high income countries like South
Korea and Germany. The health levels in countries
vary from  years life expectancy to  years, and
you find all health levels between these extremes.
Income varies from  dollars per person and year
to ,. And countries can be found with all in-
come levels in between.
we-magazine >
What is the core idea behind Gapminder?
Hans Rosling >
To use the graphic animation technology behind
computer games to show the changing world. We
apply computer games “enjoyment” to statistics to
up-grade old mindsets and thereby creating a fact-
based worldview. We must upgrade the worldview
from the Tintin view, i.e. the divide between the
Western world and the Rest. But to understand eco-
nomic development, demographic change and
health improvements, we now have to make data
about the world accessible in a new format. Basi-
cally, it’s a new map: instead of north and south, we
display country bubbles on a scale from healthy to
sick, and instead of east and west, we show rich and
poor.
And when those bubbles in our animations move,
it’s like a football game. People can see how fast
Singapore moved in the last decades to become the
healthiest country in the world. I used to talk like a
sportscaster explaining these graphs to open the
eyes of a very broad public on what is happening
in the world.
we-magazine >
What is the driving force behind your work?
Hans Rosling >
Curiosity. It’s extremely interesting to see how the
world has changed. And the conviction that you can
talk about the world without doing advocacy. Some
people make it their task to explain what a city
looks like. When you come as a tourist to a new city,
you want to see museums, restaurants, and thea-
tres, archaeological remains and if you come on
we_special_/
business you want to know where banks and com-
panies are – you need a map to find your way
around. Gapminder provides an updated economic,
social and environmental map of the world so users
can find their way around.
we-magazine >
What are the major future challenges we are facing?
Hans Rosling >
The residual poverty among our  billion fellow
human beings who live in destitution with insuffi-
cient food, no shoes, miserable housing. That’s our
major problem. The second problem is the enor-
mous pressure on the environment, especially the
climate. The third, I think, remains the risk of war.
we-magazine >
War between ....
Hans Rosling >
... a war between China and the United States. We
haven’t organized the world in a way where we can
accept that new nations and new countries reach
the same level of wealth and human capacity. Let’s
see if we succeed this time without a Pearl Harbour.
we-magazine >
Is it a possible scenario for the future that the In-
ternet and its data is a tool for avoiding conflicts
between states? Conflicts between states are con-
flicts between the leaders of states and not bet-
ween the people living in the states. The Internet is
a connection between the people, and the data
gives us the opportunity to understand each others
situations ...
Hans Rosling >
I’m not so convinced that you’re right. People ask
me “Do you reach the powerful people – the billio-
naires, the heads of state?” Yes, I do. And what they
tell, me is – turn around and tell the public.
There is one simply reason for that: we get the po-
liticians the public want. We get the decisions made
that the public want eventually. The big challenge is

not to tell those in power, it’s to tell the general
public. The real danger is not on the leaders’ level.
It’s really that people in the world get the sense and
the trust that we can live together, that we can
share this world in a decent and respectful way.
we-magazine >
But this is more than to change people’s mind, we’ll
need a mindset that will translate into action ...
Hans Rosling >
Good that you said that! I used to honour George
W. Bush. I honoured him for a very specific reason.
In the last month of his presidency – when he was
sitting and waiting for it to end – then the entire
economy blew up on Wall Street. He grabbed his
pocketbook but he had no money. He had lowered
taxes and he had no money for a bail-out. So he
phoned his friends in the G. He phoned Merkel
and Brown and they had no money either. So he
had to call a socialist trade union leader and he
asked president Luna if Brazil had any money
and he said yes. And he had to phone Russia, Saudi
Arabia and China! And then Bush said no more G!
Now we start G! And that’s what I honour him
for. At the end he took the right decision.
This was the true end of the Second World War,
the end of the concept of “the west and the rest”.
It’s gone. We now have a new world. I call it the
“continuous world”; Tom Friedman called it “the flat
world”; Jeff Sacks called it “the converging world”.
It all tells the same story …
we-magazine >
Which is?

Hans Rosling >
The new gap in the world will not be between Ger-
many and China; it will be between China and
Ethiopia, maybe between China and Mozambique.
That’s the big challenge: you have to bring all the
poorest countries with you. You have to realize that
the difference is no longer between the West and
the Rest – it’s between the four fifths of the world
population that moves ahead and the one fifth that
is left behind.
we-magazine >
How would you describe the “WE” today? What
does it mean for you?
Hans Rosling >
. billion people.
we-magazine >
What is “Western”?
Hans Rosling >
“Western” is a very vague and dangerous concept,
because it’s ill-defined. For instance, is Chile a
Western country? Yes it is, it’s now a member of
the OECD. If you look at the economic growth of
Sweden, the Netherlands and Japan, which of those
three countries are closest together in terms of
economic growth? Sweden and Japan. Sweden is
closer to Japan in terms of economic growth than it
is to the Netherlands. Sweden is the Japan of North-
ern Europe. That’s interesting! The Chinese solar
energy system now being built – is that Western
because it’s modern?
I think a major problem in the world is dichotomi-
zation. It’s like the aristocracy who said you’re
we_special_/
either an aristocrat or a commoner. But that was a
false division, because if somebody was clever and
became embarrassing, they made them an aristo-
crat. And in the end we found out that all humans
are equal.
we-magazine >
Would it be possible to define a Western lifestyle?
Not in the sense of Western states, but a modern
lifestyle that has individualism ... like pop culture?
Hans Rosling >
In the middle of your question you swopped from
Western to modern. You see when you dichotomize
the world, you always end up in a mess. When you
categorize it, it’s all so dangerous – so simply make
more categories than two! As long as you divide the
world’s countries into more than two groups ...
Take this as an example: if you were to say that the
Western World was the Netherlands, Britain and
France … And then all of a sudden Germany arose.
I think it’s very interesting that the major conflict in
the last century was the rise of German technology
and German society which Western Europe couldn’t
deal with. Civilisation, Mozart, the democracy of the
Weimar Republic didn’t stop us from entering this
horrible world war and now gradually we are emer-
ging from it. This is Western culture, say my Indian
friends, Western culture is the slave trade, the drug
trade, employment ...
This is a form of self-identity that I think we have to
overcome quickly. And especially we shouldn’t use
that term “Western” when we don’t know what we
mean.
we-magazine >
And gradual change is defined by topics, by develop-
ments?
Hans Rosling >
Abba entered the hall of fame yesterday and they
explained it was money, money, money. It’s wealth,
the ability to accumulate wealth. We got Bach
and Mozart because there were some people in
Germany who accumulated wealth and invested
it in culture. Great classical music came out of a sur-
we_special_/
plus which was used not just for daily consumption,
but for creating something which became part of
the heritage of all mankind.
So what I say about statistics, is that the world will
never ever be understood without statistics. But
equally it can never ever be understood only with
statistics. Because you have those other dimensions
like human rights, culture, dignity, which we can-
not measure. Some things have to be handled as
issues and described in written language. This is
one thing we have to accept ...
we-magazine >
Where do people get such a kind of world view?
Hans Rosling >
You can teach children that child health is good in
Egypt, that Muslim Arabs having been very profi-
cient in improving health, that they have family
planning, that the age for the first marriage in
Algeria now is . Teach them facts. Simple facts!
Tell them that Vietnam has the same health and
life expectancy as the USA in .
we-magazine >
So you are challenging the way we are teaching
our kids?
Hans Rosling >
Yes, we’re not teaching them the truth!
we-magazine >
But the data for this fact-based learning is available
...
Hans Rosling >
Oh yes, it’s been available these past thirty years!
But if you have a “Tintin” head you don’t under-
stand it or read it. And if it doesn’t fit with your old
colonial mindset, you say there’s something wrong
with it.

we-magazine >
Where do you get your data from?
Hans Rosling >
The United Nations. The World Bank. The OECD.
Data is no problem. The problem is that we haven’t
grasped what is happening in the Middle East, in
most of Asia, in Latin America. We haven’t grasped
that healthwise Brazil is progressing faster than
Sweden ever did.
we-magazine >
Isn’t it also a problem that much of this data never
reaches the public? It might be available but ...
Hans Rosling >
It does reach the public, it goes into their eyes, hits
the retina, but the problem is it doesn’t go into
their brains! In nutrition we have a rule that food
not swallowed has no nutritional value. You can
chew it and spit it out – and that’s what we do.
I could end by saying that I have a neighbour who
knows  different types of wine. He knows the
names of the grapes, the families who grow them,
the proper storage temperature ... I only know two
types of wine: red and white. That’s enough – I’m
not interested in wines. But my neighbour only
knows two types of country – Western and develo-
ping – because he’s not interested in the world. And
I know  countries and can tell you the per capita
GDP, the literacy rate, the child mortality rate, the
speed and progress in reducing CO emissions. The
problem in Western Europe is that we have too
many who know wine and too few who know the
world. And major companies in Western Europe
have too many wine-tasting evenings and too few
world-tasting evenings.

we-magazine >
We were talking about birth control. You said it’s
almost solved ...
Hans Rosling >
Yes, the population issue in the world is almost
solved. When I was a young student, it was a major
issue. We were four billion people in the world and
in large parts of the world women had six children.
And the death rate was two were dying, four sur-
vived. Populations were doubling in one genera-
tion. It was completely unsustainable. But what
happened is that technology became available
and attitudes changed. At independence in 
Bangladesh had  children per woman; now they
have .. And the child mortality rate has fallen.
Today there are only a few countries that have many
children per women – mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Vietnam has  children per woman, Iran too – or
even less than two children. Mexico and Brazil both
have two children per woman. What this means is
that the population issue has been largely solved.
The important thing now is to get the minimum of
service for the last billion – mosquito nets against
malaria, vaccinations for children, family planning
access for women – and then we will all get two
child families. There will be an additional increase
of two billion people, it’s just adding one third
more. And then we are done by . This is a
minor problem for the environment.
The major problem is that four billion people live
miserable lives. They sleep on the floor, they don’t
have tapped water, they can’t take a shower, they
don’t have electric light. To increase their standard
of living to a decent level like Sweden in 
would mean increasing the standard of living by a
factor of from  to  for two thirds of the world
population. That’s a  fold bigger challenge than
the number of people. I can’t understand why
we_special_/
people are still carried away by numbers – they
must have some problem with mathematics! But
how do you expect a young couple in India or Africa
sitting on the floor with rats, cockroaches and flies,
and carrying water in a bucket to be satisfied with
this and expect their children to live as they do.
They will work hard, fight hard – do anything to get
a decent life for their children. I’m not talking about
charter tourism or owning a car or air conditioning,
I’m talking about a decent life, not minimal basic
life, but a decent life. Perhaps going to the cinema
once in a while or owning a musical instrument.
That will increase the standard of living and to do
that we need to have new technology. We can’t do
that with existing coal technology. And that is a
major challenge. We don’t have to change techno-
logy by % or whatever: we have to make a huge
leap. But we are not making serious investment: the
OECD countries are putting three to four times
more into agricultural subsidies as they do into
green technology. Green technology is not yet a
serious issue. In fact the corporate sector is more
serious about it than governments at present. So
why don’t we channel the money from agricultural
subsidies into green technology? When we discuss
the car industry, we’re simply not serious. In the
Second World War the United States were serious.
They decided to win and they put their entire indu-
stry into winning that war. If we did the same with
energy, we would solve it. But we’re not serious
about it.
We’re trying to win the next election, not to solve
the problem. And in terms of long-term trends,
people in India and China won’t sit on a mud floor
while we in the richest countries aren’t serious.
we_special_/ 
John Hagel III
We should take the opportunity of Web. thinking
and focus it on how do you build personal relation-
ships in a much more scalable way using techno-
logy. Ultimately, the most valuable networks are
networks of people relationships, as opposed to
just connecting into data or information services
of various types. That to me is the big opportunity.
>

>

>
tags > Social Business, Yunus, Vision Summit, poverty,
development aid

From Macro-
Challenges
to Micro-
Solutions

Peter Spiegel

Peter Spiegel calls himself a “possibilist” – equally proof against blue-sky optimism and gloom and doom pessimism.
What mainly interests him as a possibilist is using the “how” to find the best – and sometimes unexpectedly good –
possibilities inherent in all types of situation.

we-magazine >
Peter Spiegel, you’ve travelled the world a lot and
you’ve put a lot of thought into how you can make
it a better place. So why is the world so out of joint?
Peter Spiegel >
For me the single most excruciating problem is the
issue of world poverty. I find it absolutely outrage-
ous that we can accept a world in which one to two
thirds of all people live in totally degrading condi-
tions. We draw up lofty declarations of human
rights while trampling the same rights in the dirt!
There’s no justification whatsoever for this, not a
single reason! For the past  years we’ve had all
the means we need at our disposal to rid the world
of poverty. Yet we’re not using them! That’s some-
thing that never ceases to amaze me!
we-magazine >
Which countries have the worst poverty?
Peter Spiegel >
It’s a universal issue. For a long time poverty was
something that happened in remote, far-off places
so we didn’t worry our heads too much about it.
But as the decades go by it’s not getting any better,
it’s steadily getting worse and the slight recoveries
it shows are only short-lived. And now in the wake
of the global financial crisis it’s drastically worse-
ned. What most people still don’t realize is that the
interface of the future economic miracle is precisely
focused on the poverty front of the world! That’s
the critical point that concerns our own interests
and our own future – not just the future of the
people who live there.
we-magazine >
So it’s no coincidence that the phrase “we’re all
sitting in one boat” is doing the rounds in the west
now.
Peter Spiegel >
Precisely.
we_special_/
we-magazine >
What kinds of specific action do you need to take?
What kind of approaches do you adopt?
Peter Spiegel >
On the one hand you need to tackle people’s
general lack of commitment and you also need a
fundamentally different mindset to what we’ve
used so far – at least used in the main part of our
responses.
we-magazine >
What do you mean by “different mindset”?
Peter Spiegel >
One aspect of it is that we start to consider “poor”
people as intelligent and highly talented individuals
and not just as aid-recipients in urgent need of our
help. There’s often something slightly disdainful or
condescending about such forms of assistance:
“You poor things can’t make it on your own, we
have to help you!”
The best example I can think of that runs counter
to this mainstream thinking is Muhammad Yunus
and his model for micro-loans. What he did was to
simply ask people what they needed – something
which a development worker would hardly even
dream of doing. He sat down and actually talked to
people to get an idea of what they really need. They
told him that what they needed was a little money
to buy the materials they needed to start a little
business so that they could stand on their own
two feet and became independent in the full sense
of the word. And just imagine what happened –
beggars suddenly turned into entrepreneurs who
were able to take control of their own lives! This
“different mindset” has a very long-term impact in
the countries where it’s deployed. In Bangladesh to
date some  percent of poor people have access to
micro-loans. What used to be the world’s poorest
country until only fairly recently is now one of the
most dynamic of the emerging economies. And the
whole country is showing genuine signs of “lifting
out of the poverty trap”. Psychologically speaking,
micro-loans mean turning the spotlight on people’s
innate human dignity. This can solve a whole raft of
problem issues. There are now many more similar
we_special_/
kinds of projects with similar kinds of innovative
quality than just the micro-loan idea which has now
spread all over the world.
we-magazine >
How can individuals like yourself or small organi-
zations make a difference?
Peter Spiegel >
Look, this totally modest, tiny idea that Yunus
originally had has now grown into a worldwide mo-
vement that has enabled no less than  million
people to take advantage of this kind of empower-
ment. We have to take a proper view of things, we
have to look at them on the micro-level. We have
to try them out on the micro-level and get an exact
idea of their strengths and weaknesses. All these
innovative new works must first function on a limi-
ted small scale. If the idea matches the needs and
development opportunities in a particular country,
then we’ve given birth to something really big.
we-magazine >
Can new technologies play any role in all this?
Peter Spiegel >
They certainly can in the sense that they can quickly
spread the news about these new ideas to large
numbers of people and that cutting-edge commu-
nication technologies are good at visualizing inno-
vative new ideas and explaining them with pictures.
But they’ve also an important role to play in other,
totally new contexts. Take the healthcare system,
for instance. When we want to build a healthcare
system in a country, if we’re stuck with our old
fashioned way of thinking we always start by
building a hospital. Of course we always follow-up
by sending in good doctors and nurses to staff it.
And then we have the feeling that we’ve done a
good deed. Yet because this approach is extremely
cost-intensive, more often than not it remains a
limited stand-alone solution. Modern technologies
allow us to strike out in totally new directions. For
instance, the most important healthcare instrument
in Yunus’s model is the cell-phone. What did he do?
He got doctors in cities to train nurses and coach
them via cell-phone in the surrounding rural areas.

This is a hundred times more cost-effective than any
previous model. Such a training system for nurses is
an extremely efficient extension of the healthcare
system, yet it comes at a fraction of the costs char-
ged by the World Health Organization. So there is
indeed a huge and very close connection between
modern technologies and meaningful develop-
ment.
we-magazine >
What sort of projects do you think deserve funding?
Peter Spiegel >
The innovative value of social projects is the thing
that matters most to me. Having the local people
develop their own projects is of the upmost impor-
tance – and that’s precisely what the development
aid world neglects to do in over  cases out of a
hundred. It’s also vital that the follow-up effects of
the project are immediately felt: they must bring
about a direct change in people’s consciousness –
right from the word go. People must be shown the
way to independence and autonomy.
we-magazine >
But everybody’s suited for an independent life,
are they?
Peter Spiegel >
It’s really quite simple to see if somebody has
achieved a kind of inner independence through a
micro-credit: all you’ve got to do is look them in the
eyes! And if their eyes are smiling that means
they’ve discovered the spirit of independence for
themselves. It’s really that simple.
we-magazine >
How do we find these people? And how do we
locate other projects with similar independence-
making qualities to the micro-credit model?
Peter Spiegel >
A good question. We won’t find them if we follow
the path of traditional NGOs. I’ve built myself a pair

of antennae to field them out. This might sound very
trite but it’s basically true – because my antennae
are tuned and sensitized to such people and pro-
jects, I do keep finding them, one after the other.
we-magazine >
Like the adult education project in Nepal?
Peter Spiegel >
That’s right. People came together in Nepal with
the vision of helping , women out of po-
verty. It was a major pilot project. They instructed
local women in five modules, five training units.
And then these women passed on what they’d
learned – after the snowball or Train-the-Trainer
principle, if you like. What were the five training
modules? The first was adult literacy for which we
also received funding.
we-magazine >
Who did the funding – development funds?
Peter Spiegel >
International development organizations. The second
module was how to set up poor women without
any money in business. The third was setting up a
small banking system.
we-magazine >
Where did this money come from?
Peter Spiegel >
From savings. From the savings of poor people who
used it to set up a system of village banks because
they recognized just how valuable such a system
could be. And they succeeded in what they wanted
to do: in three years they set up over , village
banks.
The fourth module is concerned with making poor
people aware of the state-guaranteed rights which
they have but which in most cases they’re totally
unaware that they have. And the fifth module
is project management for the have-nots, project
management for the poorest of the poor. What
does this involve? It involves enabling them to
we_special_/
define what their real needs are, to prioritize them,
structure them, organize them and finally evaluate
them. All this meant that suddenly NGOs were cast
in a completely different light. They were no longer
the know-it-all beneficent helpers from the great
outside world. And the women themselves were
suddenly the ones making demands and saying
what we need from you is this and this and this.
But all this didn’t exactly endear the project to
the NGOs which saw it more as a direct challenge
to their key competencies – despite its wildly
sensational success.
we-magazine >
A success which showed itself as?
Peter Spiegel >
Which showed itself as an incredible  percent
increase in the income of these women over three
years. I don’t know of any other development pro-
ject anywhere in the world which can even begin
to measure up with the success this project has
achieved. Even so, it still hasn’t become a success-
ful global model. Not yet anyway. We still have
some ways to go before we get there.
we-magazine >
Do you think that you can easily transfer a project of
this type to other parts of the world?
Peter Spiegel >
Yes, I do and we already have proof that we can.
The Nepal pilot project has been replicated in
Africa. Not with an  percent increase in income
over three years but even so with a respectable 
percent increase. That’s a figure that bears some
looking at! This type of set-up is now operating
in over  African countries. But even today this
is the only organization that is driving this kind of
approach. And that is simply scandalous!
we-magazine >
It’s the total negation of the established develop-
ment model as evolved over all the years and
decades.
we_special_/
Peter Spiegel >
Exactly! However, that’s precisely what gives it its
unique innovative quality. And we have to drive this
kind of innovation forward. Even more than in any
other area, we need a completely new kind of thin-
king in the social sector.
we-magazine >
How can that be done?
Peter Spiegel >
Well, for instance we can set up educational insti-
tutions for systematic instruction in the way such
innovations come about. Potsdam has the Hasso
Plattner Institute, the School of Design Thinking.
Hasso Plattner realized that if the western world is
to keep its place on the competitive global playing
field, what it needs more than anything else is
innovations. And he developed a system where
students can learn about the systematic generation
of innovations and pass on what they have learnt
to others. And it’s a huge success! If we adapt new
ways of thinking, if we focus even a part of our
innovation-development on the social and civil pro-
blems we’ve been talking about, our reward isn’t
just that we’re able to deal with a whole host of
problems. Because what we’ll also get is a new eco-
nomic miracle. The benefits we’ll derive on our side
are at least as great.
we-magazine >
What do you think we now have to learn to secure
this new balance that’s now emerging in the world?

Peter Spiegel >
What we have to do was clearly stated by an Indian
economist, Professor Prahalad, when addressing
the CEOs of international corporations. He said
“Do you want to survive in the long-term? Do you
still want to be on the global playing field in ten
years time? Then get moving and start developing
services and products for the needs of the world’s
poorest people. Why’s that? Simply because these
markets are the high-growth markets of our future!”
we-magazine >
What do you mean by “long-term thinking”?
Peter Spiegel >
Long-term thinking for me is a question of survival.
If we all want to survive, we have to think long-term
because short-term thinking destroys the funda-
mentals of life support, destroys systems – the
ecosystem, the financial system, our healthcare and
social systems. If we don’t start to think in the
long-term we can simply write off all our systems.
Long-term thinking also involves sustainability
thinking and above all thinking in terms of global
perspectives and global responsibility. Self-centered
thinking leads us up a blind alley into a trap from
which we can never hope to extricate ourselves.
Systems can no longer function without perspecti-
ves of global responsibility, no matter what form
these might take. An ethical perspective is no
longer the unique endowment of philanthropy or
welfare thinking; an ethical perspective in the sense
of global responsibility is a matter of sheer survival.
This means that global responsibility is no longer
some kind of bedtime story for people of good will.
It’s a matter of direct concern to each and every one
of us!
George Siemens
Since the Internet is a growing point of informa-
tion access and communication, providing new
affordances and opportunities, yes, Internet access
is quickly moving into the realm of a human right.
>

>

>

>
we_special_/ 

tags > global crises, Surendra Munshi, financial crises,

intergrated world view, sustainability

Concerted
Action
Needed!

Surendra Munshi

Munshi, the noted Indian sociologist, was Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC) until .
He has researched and taught in India and abroad in the fields of classical sociological theory, sociology of culture, qualitative
research, and industrial sociology. More recently, he has published with others: The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Good Governance
(SAGE, ). He is at present a Fellow of the Bertelsmann Stiftung.
 we_special_/

We live in a world that is devoid of visions. Economic growth over the

last twenty-five years has been based on false promises. Our educational
system is too fragmentary to impart a broad vision of a really better world.
We need an integrated view of the problems that we are faced with, the
way to handle them, and the direction in which we wish to move.
To see the danger in the direction in which we are moving and to wish to
live in a sustainable world is not enough. We need to be united in intention
and action to move forward, making sacrifices when necessary. Our ways
of thinking and acting need to reflect the reality of the globalising world
that we live in.
The following conclusions can be drawn from a series of interviews with
thought leaders representing major social initiatives selected from different
parts of the world that Surendra Munshi conducted in  on behalf of the
Bertelsmann Stiftung. The findings of the interviews are published as
“Voices for the Future: Global Crises and the Human Potential”.

We were living in separate boats earlier. All that was
needed was to formulate rules to make sure that
there was no collision of boats. The situation has
changed with the beginning of modern globaliza-
tion. All the people of the world are now living in
the same boat, and different countries of the world
are like cabins in the boat. We take care of our
cabins without worrying about the boat as a whole.
This is how Kishore Mahbubani of the National
University of Singapore, one of the fifteen thought
leaders interviewed for this paper, sees the world
today.
I. Present Crises and Borrowing from the Future
What are the three most important global crises
humanity is currently facing. This was the question
formulated in different ways that was asked to
each one of them. It is interesting to review their
responses. While clear responses are given to this
question, there are some who expressed reserva-
tions to this mode of asking the relevant question.
Jerome C. Glenn of The Millennium Project, for
example, draws attention to the fact that in their
Millennium Project an attempt has been made to list
fifteen global challenges that provide a ‘framework’
to assess the prospects for humanity. Anthony
Judge, formerly of Union of International Associa-
tions, sees the danger of listing challenges, for then
it is possible to lose sight of the context within
which a challenge is to be considered. The key is to
see the interconnection between the elements of
the set. The point of interconnection is emphasized
by others as well. Thus, for example, Martin Lees of
the Club of Rome says that from the point of view
of the Club the challenges are interrelated. He pre-
fers to talk of ‘blocks’ rather than ‘bits’ of challen-
ges. The world is facing – according to Walter Fust
of Global Humanitarian Forum – ‘a multidimensio-
nal crisis’ today.
we_special_/
With these qualifications in mind, the crisis that
received the greatest attention was the crisis of
environmental degradation, followed by the crisis
created by persisting poverty. The recent financial
crisis received attention as well but it was not seen
as just as a financial crisis. The other crises that were
noted related to population, water and security.
If this is the range of our crises, how have we
handled them so far? The general response to this
question is that given the gravity of these crises we
have handled them inadequately, bordering on, in
the words of Garrison (State of the World Forum),
‘criminal neglect’. Though some progress has been
made with respect to poverty and local pollution
problems in many parts of the world (Flavin of
Worldwatch Institute), the point to note is that, as
Johnston (Oxfam International) says, we are basi-
cally putting the solution of the crisis into the fu-
ture, borrowing from the future. We are, according
to Lees, passing on to our children and grand-
children not only vast financial debt but also vast
ecological debt by overusing our biological capital.
‘That means’, says Likhotal (Green Cross Internatio-
nal), ‘that we are simply stealing (speaking openly
and frankly) from the pockets of our children’.
The optimistic voice comes out of Asia. For
Mahbubani, ‘history starts a new chapter every
day’ and he believes ‘the world will continue to
move forward’, becoming a better place to live in.
He sees hope in the millions of Asians joining the
middle class with the projection that by  there
will be . billion Asians living in the middle class
environment. ‘And as you know’, he concludes, ‘the
middle classes tend to be responsible stakeholders’.
II. Leadership and Education for Sustainability
Leadership is needed at different levels, from the
village to the international level (Fust). A new kind
of leadership that is identified in the context of
the knowledge economy is what Glenn calls ‘self-
selected leadership’. Unlike ‘out-front’ political
leaders’, self-selected leaders use their knowledge
and possibilities offered by technology to take
individual initiatives to deal with pressing pro-
blems.

Is there any leadership deficit in our world today?
For Karl-Henrik Robert of The Natural Step (TNS),
the key issue to which all other issues are sub-
ordinate is the incompetence of present leadership.
He assesses this incompetence not in terms of in-
telligence or goodness but as the capacity to see
the world in a manner that takes it towards sustai-
nability. What is lacking is systematic thinking to
understand complex systems. Speaking metaphori-
cally, ‘what leaders need today is to understand the
trunk and branches of the challenges ahead of us’.
The tree metaphor is meant to suggest that the
trunk and the branches of a tree help to connect
the leaves, the details. If the trunk and the branches
are taken away then all that one has is a big heap of
leaves on the ground. If this is understood and sha-
red, a possibility for ‘flat leadership’ arises where
people can come together, feel engaged, and using
their creativity to come up with their own solutions.
On education: while the interview partners are
clear about how crucial education is, they are also
aware how an undesirable process of education is
taking place. Television is, as Garrison notes, edu-
cating an entire population to be consumers. The
idea of linking happiness with consumption is de-
structive, especially when goods are produced that
damage our atmosphere. This point is further ela-
borated by Oscar Motomura of The Earth Charter
Initiative. He cautions that counter-education pro-
vided by entertainment industry, advertisement, the
Internet, and through other means is very powerful.
No amount of engagement with the educational
process can be effective unless the process of coun-
ter-education which leads to unsustainable practi-
ces is considered and countered in a strategic
manner.
This does not mean the rejection of these means.
As far as the television and movies are concerned,
we can counter them effectively by using them.
Glenn suggests taking real science to a movie like
Walt Disney’s The Black Hole. ‘If it is true,’ he says,
‘that people get their news from comedians, and
their world affairs from terminator movies, then let
us take those movies and comedians seriously. If
this serves the purpose of education in the world,
then this is the classroom we have to focus on’.

This brings to mind the emphasis given by Judge to
the right way of communicating the message. He
asks: why is there no climate change song? Why
should unmemorable documents not be made
memorable by putting them to lyrics and music? His
argument for sustainability is that unless the docu-
ments concerning them are made singable they
remain unmemorable documents.
There is another kind of education that needs to be
carried out, and this is best illustrated by the initia-
tives covered here, from Amnesty International
to Worldwatch Institute. This kind of education
is concerned with creating awareness about our
rights and responsibilities as human beings, and it
is carried out in different ways. Thus, for example,
Motomura tells us that there is a need for leaders
in different sectors to become sensitive about ‘the
global society of all human beings’. It is not enough
to think of sustainability as something concerned
with protecting our natural resources. The concept
of sustainability as conveyed by the Earth Charter
goes beyond it. We put life, he says, at the centre of
everything. We honor all forms of life. When all
forms of life are honored it leads to ecological
integrity and also to economic and social justice. It
leads to concern about keeping different forms of
violence away from this world. Ecological integrity,
social and economic justice and peace – they are all
connected with each other.
Surendra Munshi
Photos: www.kubikfoto.de
we_special_/
III. Frameworks for Collaborative Action
If we learn to see connections in a world facing a
multidimensional crisis, we need to take the next
step and understand that neither ‘one brain’ nor
‘one organization’ can solve our problems (Lees).
We need to come together. There is a need to work
across disciplines, sectors, cultures, and countries.
The promoting factor is technology. The revolution
in communication technology makes it possible for
people to connect in ways that were inconceivable
only some years ago. For Garrison, while global-
ization is weakening institutions, it is empowering
voluntary networks of individuals. These voluntary
networks can be powerful and harmful as shown
by the example of Al-Qaeda. Voluntary networks
can also play a very positive role as shown by,
for instance, Amnesty International. Through an
inexpensive mode of communication, voluntary
networks of committed people can come together
and achieve much. It is possible to build the multi-
stakeholder approach as well through these net-
works. Networking means serving the chosen cause
together. Though such networks can be strong,
we should not overlook the impediments of pre-
judgments and clichés. Drawing from his experi-
ence, Fust draws attention to the manner in which
many people from the private sector have reserva-
tions about government officials and they in turn
Alexander Likhotal
we_special_/
are hesitant to talk to people from civil society or
foundations, not that the apathy is not reciprocated.
Having noted these problems, there is no reason
not to look forward ... Glenn sees in Wikipedia a
model for making it easy for people to participate
globally in doing what is good. If we are all in the
same boat, he argues, we have to form an idea
about the boat, how big it is, what it looks like, and
how to make it work. ‘How do we make the Earth,
with humans,’ he asks, ‘work as a whole’. A similar
question is asked by Ekman (Tallberg Foundation)
and his foundation: ‘How on earth can we live to-
gether?’ Wikipedia has shown that global colla-
boration can take place cutting across different
boundaries. And yet with all its success, for Glenn,
Wikipedia is just a pointer to what is possible in
the future with the power collective intelligence.
IV. Global Governance Revisited
Why do we need to revisit the issue of global go-
vernance? The question is related in the first place
with the manner in which the world has changed
since the Second World War and the manner in
which the United Nations systems are seen to be
functioning within the changed global situation.
The world has changed in so far as we live in a
world of interdependence and the problems that
Karl-Hendrik Robert Martin Lees

we are facing are far beyond the ability of indivi-
dual nations to handle. For Lees, ‘the national-
international interface’ is going to be a crucial con-
cern for all of us. While different people need their
different senses of involvement and identity, the
interests of all the people of the world considered
together need a collective way of handling global
problems. We are also in the process of adjusting
our perspective on how to approach these pro-
blems. As Johnston sees it, we have had a tendency
to follow absolute solutions, for some socialism was
the answer and for others the market, and ‘both of
these absolutes have been found fundamentally
wanting’. As Lees shows it is now clear that the idea
that the market regulates itself and governments
should step back from regulations has partially cau-
sed the current financial crisis. ‘We have to find a
proper balance’, he says, ‘between the role of the
market and the role of government which is the
custodian of the common interest’. This ideology of
giving the market a free run and reducing the role
of government has had implications for internatio-
nal institutions as well. Lees concludes: ‘it is this
combination of weakening government, interna-
tional governance, and the extreme freedom of the
market which has got us to the point where we are
today’.
There are other aspects that need to be considered
in this respect. The United States, as Garrison

argues, is unable to play for a variety of reasons the
leadership role that the world needs. More basi-
cally, in the analysis of Mahbubani, we are witnes-
sing an important power shift in the world: ‘the end
of the era of Western domination of world history’
and ‘the return of Asia’ to the world scene.
As far as the United Nations systems are concerned,
they find their defense in the voice of Glenn. For
one thing, they are evolving a ‘global culture of
governance’ where people from different cultural
backgrounds learn to work together ‘trying to make
the world work for everybody and not doing it
for just one country’. Secondly, it is important to
keep in mind that the United Nations is not just the
Security Council, for, while there may be valid
reasons for wanting to bring changes in the Secu-
rity Council, it cannot be denied that organizations
such as the World Health Organization or the
International Atomic Energy Agency are serving
us well. Thirdly, the need for global norms to make
global systems work is met by the Universal Decla-
ration of Human Rights and UN treaties that lay out
for all of us the manner in which we are to behave
with each other. Finally, the UN is in a sense like
‘training wheels for global civilization’. We are
learning how to make it work, and if there are
deficiencies that does not mean we should throw
out the baby with the bathwater.
The idea then is to make the United Nations more
representative, more efficient, and more effective.
The most persistent demand is to broaden the
membership of the Security Council. As to the emer-
gence of G, though its emergence is seen as a
good sign, there are demands that if G want
to be global leaders they need to lead by setting
the right example (Brown, Amnesty International).
Also, it is not clear whether G is sufficiently
democratic (Fust). As to institutional change, Lees
cautions, it is ‘a very tough assignment’. There is a
long honorable tradition of efforts to reform the
United Nations, but the results have not been very
encouraging. There still is a long way to go.
we_special_/
The overall purpose of global governance that
needs to be differentiated from global government
which is not under discussion here is served by
inclusiveness, ‘normative diversity’ (Fust), and a
recognition that global governance is emerging
through a variety of mechanisms.
The problem of global governance can be approa-
ched from another end. Robert suggests that we
have to build role models on a smaller scale and
then try to design larger institutions and co-opera-
tive units based on these experiences. He mentions
here his experience with municipalities where
people have been able to transform them and with
them the quality of their own lives through a shared
mental model. A shared vision of what these
municipalities might be like in the future helps
individuals to work towards it with trust in each
other. The need for vision is emphasized from yet
another angle. Lees notes that for designing or
redesigning an institution it is important to be clear
about its objective. While the United Nations
will need to find a way of ‘addressing systematic
problems in an integrated way’, we need at the
same time to develop globally a vision of the world
that we want, the world which is desirable and
hopefully still possible. We are unable to interest
people in what is negative or problematic in the
absence of a vision, for 'there is no fire, hope, nor
excitement’.
V. The Next Sensible Step
We need to make a mental shift. We need to tell
our political leaders, as Brown does, that they
cannot afford to be shortsighted any longer. You
need to think beyond election terms. We need to
tell them, as Glenn would say, to connect the ideas,
people, and resources. ‘There are a lot of good
answers out there, but the world is so full of noise
that we can’t get the good answers through’. Above
all, we need to tell them, listening to Fust and our
other partners, please listen to others, for there is
virtue in listening. We need to listen to politicians
as well. We need to recall what Mikhail Gorbachev
told Garrison when he asked him the reason for his
fall after the Soviet Union had been dismantled.
Gorbachev told him: ‘There were many political
reasons why I fell, but in the end I fell because I
was not analyzing reality ruthlessly enough’.
we_special_/ 

Full Paper available at:

http://www.voices-for-the-future.org
 >

>

>

Copyright © Nick Pugh, 

we_special_/ 

tags > philosophy, computer science, trans-disciplinary, science fiction,

cultural theory

Re-Thinking
Science

Alan N. Shapiro

Alan N. Shapiro is a trans-disciplinary thinker who studied Science and Technology at MIT and Philosophy, History and Literature at
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He is the author of Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance (), widely recognized as a
seminal work in science fiction studies and the conception of futuristic technoscience. He is the editor and translator of The Techno-
logical Herbarium by Gianna Maria Gatti (), a major study of art and technology. He is a practicing software developer and is
the co-inventor, with Alexis Clancy, of the New Computer Science, which promises to be something like a new Manhattan Project.
He is currently founding a utopian company called Shapiro Technologies, which will be based on the principles of friendship and
‘not working’. Alan Shapiro is recognized as one of the leading experts on the philosophy and cultural theory of Jean Baudrillard.
 we_special_/

Influenced by Martin Heidegger’s philosophical
essay The Question Concerning Technology, Theo-
dor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s core Critical
Theory text Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Stanley
Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s epic science fiction
film : A Space Odyssey, I believe that we have
come to the end of the long era of technology
being conceived and developed as a tool for the
‘domination of nature’, regarded as inanimate, and
built to act upon what are assumed to be ‘inani-
mate things’ in the social and natural worlds.
I want to change our way of thinking about and de-
vising technologies, to participate in a quantum
leap in evolution at the beginning of the st cen-
tury, to reconnect with the original meaning of the
Greek word techne (which means the creativity of
craft, art, or skill exercised as the implementation
of theoretical/practical knowledge), to treat tech-
nologies as alive, and as equal partners with hu-
mans in the making of new artificial-natural-
social-individual environments for enabling greater
human happiness, individual freedom, embodied
existence, and the autonomous vitality of techno-
entities and techno-objects. I want to go beyond
the dualism or binary opposition between the
natural and the artificial, and between nature and
culture. I think of the great scientist Charles
Darwin’s book The Voyage of the Beagle, a work
of both science and literature. During his world
travels, Darwin examined with the same keen
observational eye and cool-headedness the objects
of his investigations, regardless of whether they
were phenomena of animal wildlife behavior, geo-
logy, or human societies.
Knowledge in the current Western academic-uni-
versity system, in the natural sciences, in engineer-
ing, in the social sciences, in the arts and the hu-
manities, has been divided into separate disciplines.
Our knowledge is fragmented, and thus we are not
properly positioned to formulate the right questi-
ons about what we need to do as a civilization. I like
the German word Wissenschaft which is used both
for the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and
the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences, huma-
nities). We need a new unified perspective. Science,
as the privileged perspective and methodology for
gaining access to and knowledge of objective rea-
lity, is over. John Horgan made this clear more than
a decade ago in The End of Science. Science goes
from the th to the th century. It’s been a specific
paradigm, and this paradigm is now exhausted.
There’s going to be a paradigm shift, in the sense
that Thomas S. Kuhn wrote about in The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions. A paradigm shift is going
to take place. The coming shift primarily has to do
with no longer excluding art, philosophy, theology,
spirituality, sociology, languages, poetry, literature,
etc., from the foundations of science. Many will find
this to be a controversial statement, but in my view,
applied science during these past centuries has
taken an engineering approach. This is especially
true of computer science, which is not yet a science.
Computer science must paradoxically go beyond
the smug satisfaction of being an engineering sci-
ence to first become a real science, at the forefront
of the new advanced poetico-techno-scientific era
that lies ahead, beyond science.
I believe that the invention of a New Computer
Science, one more powerful than the one that pre-
sently exists, is possible; a more powerful computer
science that often goes by the names of Artificial
Intelligence, Artificial Life, and Quantum Compu-
ting. The goal of quantum computing has been
clearly and explicitly defined by computer scientists,
but the mathematics of how to implement qubits
and superposition states does not yet exist. To-
gether with Alexis Clancy, I am working on the
architecture, design, and coding of Quantum Com-
puting in Software. A crucial characteristic of quan-
tum mechanics known as entanglement occurs
under certain experimental conditions. Subatomic
particles become ‘inextricably linked’ in such a way
that a change to one of them is instantly ‘reflected
in its counterpart’, no matter how physically sepa-
rated they are. Quantum theory postulates a
‘superposition of states’ that destabilizes the intui-
tive sensorial notion of spatial separation. Entan-
gled particles transcend space and remoteness.


Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (translated from the German by William Lovitt) (New
York: Harper & Row, ); Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (edited
by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr) (translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, );
: A Space Odyssey (directed by Stanley Kubrick) (written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke) (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, ).

Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (introduction by David Amigoni) (London: Wordsworth Editions, ).

John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (New York: Broadway Books,
).

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
we_special_/
Copyright © Nick Pugh, 
They belong to a ‘shared’ system that acts as a
single entity. The distance that divides the particles
no longer plays any influencing role that would
lead them to be judged as having distinct identities.
Once the entanglement state is established, the
subatomic duo stays forever bonded. The two par-
ticles will always have either precisely opposing or
‘elegantly complementing’ relative values of key
quantum properties such as polarization direction,
independent of how far apart they travel from one
another.
Quantum physics imposes on us the limitation that
the quantum information in a system is available to
us only with the greatest of difficulties. Since the
th
mid- century, physicists have discovered that
there is a reality of quantum physics, but have had
trouble observing that reality. A measurement of
superpositions yields only one value, and at the
same time destroys all the others. Computer scien-
tists working on quantum computers therefore rely
heavily on the Fourier transform, a mathematical

Related to this conference is the publication Zu einer neuen Quantenphysik des Bewusstseins - Gespräche an den Grenzen der
Erkenntnis (edited by René Stettler) (Lucerne: Edition Neue Galerie Luzern und Schweizer Biennale zu Wissenschaft, Technik und
Ästhetik, ).

operation that transforms one function of a real
variable into another, called the frequency domain
representation of the first function, as the hypo-
thesized way to solve the problem. The quantum
Fourier transform is primarily thought of as being
implemented in hardware. A hypothetical quantum
computing device would have so-called ‘reversible
logic gates’ which continuously allow sequences
of reversible decompositions into mathematical
unitary matrices. There is little progress in the com-
puter industry in achieving this implementation.
In January , I attended the conference “Cons-
ciousness and Quantum Computers” in Lucerne,
Switzerland, organized by the Swiss Biennial
on Science, Technics & Aesthetics (SBSTA). In his
opening remarks, René Stettler, Founder and Direc-
tor of the SBSTA, talked about the trans-disciplinary
work that would be involved in the project of brin-
ging to fruition quantum computing. It is especially
an expanded understanding of consciousness that
would be required to gain a real grasp of quantum

physics. Yet, as Stettler pointed out, universities do
not even seem to be striving for this trans-discipli-
nary knowledge. Hans-Peter Dürr, former executive
Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and
Astrophysics, and former collaborator of Werner
Heisenberg, emphasized in his keynote address that
physicists do not have the philosophical training ne-
cessary to understand what quantum physics really
means. The celebrated mid-th century physicists
who discovered quantum mechanics did not un-
derstand it, they only spoke about it in metaphors.
They settled on the practice of using applied quan-
tum physics statistically without understanding
what quantum physics means.
But quantum physics, according to Dürr, is the most
profound rational knowledge that we have gained
about the world. The necessary expanded under-
standing of consciousness and action would have
to come from engagement with philosophical
traditions like phenomenology, Buddhism, and
Hindu cosmic perspectives like Vedanta. Excellent
talks on the relationship between Buddhism and
the philosophy of science were given at the confe-
rence by Geshe Obsang Tenzin, a Tibetan Buddhist
psychologist living in America and working on
mind/body medicine, and German philosopher
Christian Thomas Kohl.
Only with an expansion of consciousness does a
protected space open up where the impossibilities
of quantum mechanical observation are suspended
(as an act of friendship by the divine towards us, so
to speak). In this protected space, we can do trans-
formations in a different way. It will not be the
Newtonian taking of a measurement that destroys
the state measured. The presumed way of measu-
ring or observing the object (the question of the
media of scientific mensuration) has remained
within classical Newtonian spacetime mechanics.
st
Corresponding to a new  century postclassical
spacetime, the fruitful way to take measurements
on both sides of a created universe, of the model
and its phantom, to access all of the quantum
information that is going on in a system, is to have
a safe, protected space in between where one is
allowed to be, prior to ‘becoming (measurable)’,
other than being disciplined. Here is the answer to

Adolf Portmann, Aufbruch der Lebensforschung: Der Mensch in einem neuen Weltbild (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, ). Italian trans-
lation: Le forme viventi: Nuove prospettive della biologia (translated by Boris Porena) (Milano: Adelphi, ). There exists no
English translation of Portmann’s book.

Walter M. Elsasser, Reflections on a Theory of Organisms: Holism in Biology (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
, ).
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the riddle of quantum physics: not measure, but
perceive. An expansion of consciousness supports
an expanded perception. Quantum behavior is a
reality. Physicists thought that they could not
observe or measure this reality without destroying
the information therein. But they conceptualized
the methodology of observation conventionally.
The space from which one can observe the reality of
quantum behavior without destroying the informa-
tion therein is also a reality, a fact of nature. We do
not have to invent this space, we only have to per-
ceive it. This space of non-destructive observation
really exists, just as quantum behavior really exists,
and we will get it working in software. To perceive
this space, we have to change our consciousness.
That's all that we have to do! We have to recognize
as being scientific some ways of perceiving that be-
long to other traditions that Western science has so
far small-mindedly regarded as non-scientific. This
expanded perceiving includes creative mathema-
tics, Buddhist and Hinduist meditation/ontologies,
Aboriginal-sacred-mystical-expanded consciousness
thinking, and Continental semiotics/grammatology.
The process of preparing for publication the Eng-
lish edition of Gianna Maria Gatti’s book The Tech-
nological Herbarium led me to reflect on the need
for a New Holistic Biology. I translated the book
from Italian into English, edited it and added an-
notations, and interacted intensively with Gianna
Maria Gatti to clear up any misunderstandings of
her Italian text that I may have had. During the time
of doing this work, I discovered two seminal books
which seem to me to be crucial for the future de-
velopment of the New Biology. One is Aufbruch der
Lebensforschung: Der Mensch in einem neuen
Weltbild by the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann,
which Gatti comments on poignantly. The other
is Reflections on a Theory of Organisms: Holism
in Biology by Walter M. Elsasser. I was told about
Elsasser’s book by the sociologist Victoria Grace
and her husband the scientist-entrepreneur Louis
Arnoux.
Elsasser argues that the task of elaborating a truly
scientific biology still lies ahead of us. Physics and
chemistry, in their current states of knowledge, are
truly scientific, according to Elsasser. Physics, for
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Copyright © Nick Pugh and Alan N. Shapiro, 


Copyright © Nick Pugh and Alan N. Shapiro, 
Images from The Car of the Future Project,
Shapiro Technologies; Future Designer: Nick Pugh
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example, reached scientific status with the un-
folding of the th-century theoretical systems of
quantum mechanics and special/general relativity.
Biology, on the other hand – molecular, evolu-
tionary and genetic biology – is not scientific. It is
reductionist. Current biological paradigms reduce
our understanding of the living organism to a com-
binatorial model or formula such as the genetic
code. But the genetic message is only a symbol of
the complete reproductive process. “The message
of the genetic code,” writes Elsasser, “does not
amount to a complete and exhaustive information
sequence that would be sufficient to reconstruct
the new organism on the basis of coded data
alone.”
This reductionism on the part of biologists corre-
sponds to the computational paradigm of binary or
digital computing that has been available to us in
the th century. It is almost as if the biologists de-
cided, since this is the limit of the computing power
that we have, we will devise a biology that func-
tions within the restrictions of what we can com-
pute. It is the question of how do we deal with
complexity. Within the existing or dominant com-
puting paradigm, in order to deal with a complex
problem, we break down the problem into smaller,
more manageable parts. This is essentially the
Cartesian Method. But it is impossible to apply the
Cartesian Method to quantum-mechanical gene-
ralized complementarities like the wave-particle
duality or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Whereas the Cartesian method may work for me-
chanical systems, it cannot be of much use when
we aspire to the understanding or creation of
something that is living. The more correct approach
that would correspond to a breakthrough into st
century science would be to identify relationships
of similarity, to find samples or patterns that cap-
ture something of the vitality and complexity of the
whole without breaking it down in a reductionist
way.
We need a Holistic Biology where we consider the
living organism in its true complexity. The structu-
ral complexity of even a single living cell is ‘trans-
computational’. Elsasser writes that the computa-
tional problem of really scientifically grasping a
living organism (or organic structure) is a problem
of unfathomable complexity. The single living cell
is involved in a network of relationships with all life
on the planet, with the planet itself, and with the

Ibid., p. .
we_special_/
history of life. The individual member of a species
decodes in real-time, as it faces each new circum-
stance, its species-memory. It creatively retrieves
this species-memory through a process of informa-
tion transfer that is effectively ‘invisible’, and does
not take place via any intermediate storage or trans-
mission media. Holistic information transfer happens
over space and time, “without there being any
intervening medium or process that carries the

information.” Whereas the genetic code is memory
considered as ‘homogeneous replication’, holistic
memory is one of ‘heterogeneous reproduction’.
We also need a New Sociology – a kind of quantum
physics sociology. The ordinary macro world also
has a lot of quantum properties. As Jean Baudrillard
wrote in his book America, America is a system of
circulation that “precedes the real” – the real mean-
ing that classical sociological reality in which clas-
sical sociologists believe. Classical sociologists,
who base their ‘scientific sociology’ on a th-
century paradigm (that of Auguste Comte) which
assumes a world of docile objects waiting to be ‘ob-
jectively’ investigated, a classical worldview that
assumes the existence of a social world and social
problems rationally ordered by the sovereign thin-
king subject of social science who is in control. The
New Sociology (in honour of Jean Baudrillard) is
th
also scientific – it is based on the  -century
sciences of quantum physics, special/general rela-
tivity, and chaos/complexity theory. It considers
much stranger and wily objects in an unmasterable
social field governed by relations of radical uncer-
tainty and paradox. The World thinks me; the Inhu-
man thinks me. Everything is relativistic, enigmatic,

and aleatory. Social reality is nearly a total chaos.
Countries, nationalities, immigration, religions,
hybrid languages, identities, gender, sexuality: it is
almost beyond our comprehension, laden with
strange effects.
Some universities – like the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT), for example – are trying to be-
come more interdisciplinary. Well, interdisciplina-
rity isn’t enough. We have to face the fact that the
existing classification of knowledge is obsolete.
Interdisciplinarity in itself is more or less worthless.
It is only an indication, a sign, that something is
very seriously wrong. If, in order to obtain valuable

Ibid., p. .

Jean Baudrillard, America (translated from the French by Chris Turner) (London: Verso, ).

Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange (translated from the French by Chris Turner) (London: Verso, ); Aurel Schmidt,
“Only Impossible Exchange is Possible,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, January  (translated from the German
by Alan N. Shapiro).

knowledge, we need to span several disciplines,
that only shows that what we really need is a major
project to rethink what the categories of know-
ledge should be.
It is not only necessary to broaden science; it is also
necessary to make science more accessible, and to
increase citizen participation in public conversa-
tions about science. Rather than entering into the
economic debate about whether science is a private
or a public good, I focus in my work on another
dimension of the sociology of science, identifying a
hybrid public/private dynamic where the imagina-
tion or ‘collective unconscious’ of popular culture
actively affects technoscience. I emphasize that the
true originality of Star Trek stories and fan commu-
nities engenders a reality-shaping ‘science fiction’
that formatively influences ideas, technologies, and
even sciences like physics, informatics, and biology.
As participants in techno-culture and in the media,
ordinary people are already making science. I wish
to augment our perception of this heretofore over-
looked existing sociological reality as well as to
encourage efforts to enhance and strengthen the
public creation of science. With the military, for
example, there already exists a hybrid public/pri-
vate dynamic in the dissemination of technoscience
that is institutionally operative. The public funds
of the military are invested in the research and
development labs of private universities and private
corporations. The military orchestrates technologi-
cal inventions, uses them for essentially destructive
purposes, and then releases them to the public,
where they tend to be applied more beneficially.
What I draw attention to in my work is a kind of
reversal of directionality of this public/private
hybridity: the origination of new scientific goods
flowing from public cultural resources into the core
foundational assets of the commonwealth where
they can, in turn, endow private entrepreneurial
ventures. The currency of investment in the crea-
tion of new science is not strictly monetary; it is also
symbolic. Capital and wealth are not only mone-
tary; they are also symbolic. There is a media cul-
ture public sphere which is literary, imaginative,
playful, psychoanalytical, creative, innovative. This
literary imagination drives scientific invention.
 >

>

Photo: Bea Gschwend

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tags > connectivism, decentralized, education, knowledge, adaptive

How Does
the Educational
System Become
Decentralized?

George Siemens

George tags himself as “Curious. I’m inquisitive. I like exploring. I’m exploratory. I think I’m resistant in terms of existing trends and
I’m always trying to find some of the deeper issues that arise. I think connected. I emphasize relating to and being properly affiliated
with other individuals and working together.”

we-magazine >
How has your understanding of WE changed since
the rise of the Internet?
George Siemens >
I think it has changed, and one way of showing this
is, I actually grew up in an area that was not very
technologically based. It was actually quite limited
and frowned on technology, frowned on advance-
ment and progress. There was a heavy community
clustering and a real sense that you received your
worldview from listening to your parents and your
religious sense from listening to people in the com-
munity interact. There was a religious framework
that guided you. But this structure, this tight-knit
sense of community has, for many people been lar-
gely fragmented since the rise of media. Media has
a way of fragmenting humanity, at least in its initial
iteration. Through radio and television, and then
with the advent of the Internet, suddenly we were
able to exist in small social subsets. Where we don’t
know the people we interact with at work even
though we are fairly well related to people who
we’ve maybe only met online – through text or
bulletin board systems or blogs or whatever.
I think what WE have now become has been for-
med and transformed by social media so – in a very
ironic sense – the initial fragmentation of media
that McLuhan looks at as electrification is how we
split up our various identities across different plat-
forms and different systems. We acquire our world-
view not through a newspaper only or even not
through a newspaper TV program. We form our
worldview really through weaving networks, for-
ming a narrative of coherence, by interacting with
others in these social spaces in somewhat surpri-
sing ways. Social media, as a very loose term, has a
resulted in a sense in a ‘binding back’. We’re bin-
ding back to the small cluster of humanity like the
very closed community I mentioned I grew up in.
Only in this case it’s occurring in more of an open
space. We have the sense that we now can be very
well connected to small groups of individuals who
guide us, inform us and provide a sense of direction.
I think in a lot of ways that sense of WE is contri-
buting to how we form our understanding of the
world. These individuals that we know, likely global
networks, assist us in forming our understanding.
They’re doing it primarily through social means,
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through filtering information, through amplifying
information, through introducing each other to
their own contacts. In that sense, I think WE as a
concept has moved from the communal hold that
we perhaps had before technology to a fragmenta-
tion of technology created by the rise of social
technologies, to a binding back to small clusters,
social groups.
we-magazine >
Do you see any connection between this new
understanding of WE and the fact that we are
saying that education is one of the biggest future
challenges we are facing?
George Siemens >
I think so, and this is one of the difficulties that I be-
lieve educators face. Not just teachers, instructors
or professors, but really leaders, parents, school
leaders, the funding challenges that arise around
the education system. There’s a sense in which edu-
cation serves several roles. On the one hand, it
serves the advancement and development of indi-
vidual minds – what Edgar Morin calls ‘the vital
combat for lucidity’. But there is a secondary sense
as well in which it serves to elevate the capacity of
a society to meet its own challenges and so, if an
education system isn’t matched, so to speak, to the
needs of a society or the needs of a particular era,
it faces irrelevance on many levels. When we have
tightly structured classrooms that aren’t permeable
– as permeable as they need to be for innovation
because innovation occurs in climates of diversity.
In climates where you get a lot of elements bum-
ping randomly into each other; forming novel con-
nections and novel experiences that come from
those connections. The education system we have
today is based on a duplication model in many
cases.
we-magazine >
Duplicating what?
George Siemens >
Duplicating what’s known. If someone has decided
this is a body of knowledge and this is what you
must learn – textbooks are great examples. If some-
we_special_/
one said this is a textbook and regardless of the
experience and attributes of the individual learner,
individuals are put to mastering this textbook. But
the reality is that even if we can’t put a body of
knowledge into some kind of a structure in a
textbook, each learner approaching that textbook
comes out with a dramatically different set of life
experiences. I think to not to have an adaptive
approach is essentially a model for rendering your
system obsolete, because the world around you
changes and yet your education system is based on
the generation of a certain sense of normality –
which it really is. Education normalizes people, in
many instances, to a certain standard. That’s why
we have standardized testing and things like that. If
we put those concerns aside and start to say, “How
can we adopt a mindset in education that’s directly
related to the needs of society? How can we create
a permeable, loosely coupled system that is capa-
ble of interacting and changing to the needs of
society in terms of the varying skills and experi-
ences of the learners?” – then I think you have a
system that better meets the future challenges.
we-magazine >
How do you think we can introduce this kind of
informal learning into existing classrooms?
George Siemens >
Well, I don’t even know if it has to be informal lear-
ning. I think formal learning is fine, because really
what formal learning says is “Here are a few goals
we have … these are a few outcomes that we want
to create” and in many cases you need that. Part of
the reason is that the education system services
many stakeholders: it serves individuals, it serves
government, at advanced levels it begins to serve
industry and corporate environments. There’s nothing
wrong with some sense of structure. But the diffi-
culty is that you can’t have structure leading. You
can’t have a template created in advance of learner
needs, drop learners into that template and force
them through the outcome. What you want in-
stead, in my eyes at least, is to achieve structured
clear aims largely through a distributed decentral-
ized model. Initially that was very difficult. When
we started fragmenting media to a greater degree,
when we started using different tools and techno-
logies, it became difficult because essentially what

happens when you distribute control and power is
that you also distribute responsibility which means
that now you can’t say, ”Well, it’s the church’s fault
that we have this problem“ or “It’s the govern-
ment’s fault that we have this problem.” Now sud-
denly it’s like, “What am I doing to contribute?”
because there’s a sense of personal responsibility
and ownership involved. In the same sense you can
still say, “These are the goals that industry needs.
These are some of the skills and attributes of an
individual learner.” – that, I think, is perfectly ac-
ceptable. How you choose to achieve that is where
my concerns rest and my concern is that a structu-
red model is incapable of adjusting to the indivi-
dual needs of each student. It always has been but
in the past we’ve been able to ignore it and largely
gloss over it but, I think, we’re now facing the
reality that it’s just not working. It’s not … even if
we can package things nicely, learners will be at
such a different skill level that we won’t be able to
meet those set outcomes.
we-magazine >
Many people have been working on this for decades
now – why do think the change will happen now?
George Siemens >
Well, first of all, I hope it will happen. I wouldn’t be
quite so presumptuous and say this is absolutely
what will happen, but you’re absolutely right.
People have been writing about this and talking
about this for centuries almost. People asked how
do we address this initially and from there you had
individuals such as Piaget who picked up the
emphasis on some sense of individualization and
adaptation in the education system. More recently
we’ve had seen people like Seymour Papert who
have similarly suggested that we need to be crea-
tors, we can’t simply be consumers of this type of
information. I think what’s different today – and I’m

not % convinced it would be the final tipping
point – are several things. First of all, current eco-
nomic concerns are forcing a rethink of the model
we have. There’s a recognition that – and this is
what Ivan Illich addressed in the early s as well –
the education system, the funding costs of the
education system are so enormous that there has
to be a breaking point. We’re now facing certainly
issues around the suitability of funding approaches
to this kind of system and we realize that it’s
perhaps not working as well it could be – especially
considering the outcomes we’re generating. There’s
that sense of a climate of change. There’s fertile soil
for change right now that we didn’t have in the ‘s
when everything was going well. We didn’t have
that same sense of need for change, that urgency.
we-magazine >
Are you saying it has started to hurt?
George Siemens >
Well, I’ve heard it said that we change when it hurts
less to change than it does to stay the same. So I’m
not sure if that’s quite where we’re at. But I think in
some combination – financial is one. The globali-
zation overall. The rise of other countries, they’re
increasingly competitive with what we at one point
largely held to be the domain of Western society.
We’re starting to see that other countries are being
innovative and aggressive and competing and that
we need to change our approaches. Again, I’m star-
ting to become almost a technological determinist.
My view is that in many regards the development
of technology, especially those technologies that
enable us to connect with, to be social with others,
technologies that can partly create and recreate
some of the experiences we have in physical
environments – the inclusion of haptic devices,
touch-based computing, generation of analytics
we_special_/
particularly around visualization – all these do in-
deed change the educational process. We have a
unique condition where we have very fertile soil. In
other periods we’ve had fertile soil for reform, but
we haven’t necessarily had the tools to enact the
change we conceived. But now, as I stated earlier,
we’ve distributed control to a network function.
With that distribution of control, responsibility has
been distributed as well. I think that a combination
of factors may prove to be significant for reform.
we-magazine >
Should access to the Internet, meaning access to
education, be a human right?
George Siemens >
Education is a human right. Education is an equali-
zer, addressing the inequalities that other societal
systems and pressures generate.
Since the Internet is a growing point of information
access and communication, providing new affor-
dances and opportunities, yes, Internet access
is quickly moving into the realm of basic rights.
This raises important concerns about three-strikes
laws for piracy where Internet providers can cut
people off from Internet access. The rule of law
surrounding human rights should not be admini-
stered by corporations. If the Internet is equated
with education, and thereby human rights, the
current legal system around this “basic right“ is
terribly inadequate.
we-magazine >
How can WE make sure, that people in developing
countries don’t make the same mistakes we’ve
made when they establish their education system.
How can they learn from our mistakes?
George Siemens >
That’s a complex question. The education system in
developed country has done many things well. The
now standard of universal educational access for all
children in a developed countries has set in play the
opportunities for technological innovation that so-
ciety today enjoys. The real problem, in my view, is
concerned with creating an education system that
is mismatched for a particular era. For example, the
we_special_/
education model in the developed world was crea-
ted to serve the needs of another era. The pressu-
res and concerns the education system faces in
these countries is one of relevance – i.e. producing
learners with critical mindsets and skills that enable
them to participate in today’s society, recognizing
whole person learning, lifelong and life wide lear-
ning, etc. Education should map the reality of the
society it seeks to serve. For developing countries,
the same issue exists: relevance of approach, pro-
cess, and model of education is the key.
we-magazine >
What kind of impact do you see the Internet and all
these social network kind of things is having on kids
– on their social behavior and their environment?
George Siemens >
The impact, I think, is up in the air. We know – and
Pew Internet Research has put out statements on
the number of hours that an average young mem-
ber of society through the  to  level spends on
these tools – and it’s enormous. Essentially, if a
child is awake, they’re online. The same goes for
me too, and I think for many people. Just walking
down the streets of New York, coming here, I was
watching people with their mobile devices. They’re
constantly connected. They’re checking e-mail,
they’re looking for directions, they’re searching for
information, they’re interacting with others, so no
doubt this notion of the ubiquity of connectiveness
is very close, I think, to being realized. Kids today
are experiencing that and I think that influences
how they view information. But they don’t view
information as I did growing up. You go to a place
to find information like you go to a library, or you
have to find the right journal article and you dig
through university journal archives to find that
article. There is a sense where individuals today –
and I see this in my own thinking at least – no
longer expect to go information. I expect informa-
tion to know me. I expect it to come to me and I
expect – and Google does this quite well – based
on my interactions with information that the
systems that I interact with start to provide me with
context-sensitive and relevant resources.
Now, there are big privacy issues around this with
Google Latitude, for example, at Foursquare and
other services like that. But that’s part of what’s

changing and what’s morphing. How does that im-
pact on youth in the classroom? I think it’s too early
to tell. There are definitely some psychologists who
have suggested that the change is negative – that
it’s changing our ability to socialize. Video games
are changing how we interact with others, in some
cases desensitizing us to violence. There are nega-
tives that exist, but there’s no such thing as change
without a negative disruption. The real question
isn’t, “What are the negatives?” The real question
is “What is possible with this and then how do we
minimize the impact of the negatives?” I think that’s
what I mean when I think of house technology
changing, of how the Internet is changing. I think
it’s creating a global populace of learners who are
aware of what’s happening around the world in a
much better sense than I had growing up at least.
My country consisted of where I lived and my re-
gion and yet now most of us have colleagues all
over the world and we’ve perhaps only met via
Facebook interaction or perhaps on Twitter or on
blogs. In that way there is a growing sense of glo-
bal citizenship that comes from the technologies
the kids are using. One of the drawbacks, I guess,
that need to be addressed is a sense of distracted-
ness – that’s a real concern. Sometimes deep thin-
king requires sustained periods of time whereas
continual distractions can sometimes have a nega-
tive impact. So those are the kinds of challenges an
education system needs to address or must try to
find a meaningful way to navigate around or at
least try to reduce the implications of those nega-
tive trends.
we-magazine >
Would you say that making friends via social media,
not knowing each other, is possible?

George Siemens >
Absolutely. It absolutely is. In fact I think not only
is it possible but on some levels almost preferable
because there is a sense in which when we meet
people face-to-face – and this is definitely the case
at different age levels – we are quick to form opin-
ions of people which are not based on their minds.
We can form opinions on the clothing they wear,
the way they accessorize and so on. All these things
play a role and so we can form an impression of
someone very quickly without actually knowing the
person. I found individuals that I’ve met online, that
I’ve connected with, if you will, on a mental level,
on a social level. I very much enjoyed the friendship
formed with them and then, when I’ve had the
opportunity to meet them face-to-face, quite often
you’ll find it’s the kind of person that you might not
normally – ever – take the time to meet if you were
in different social circles. It strips away some of the
superfluous or superficial ways in which we try and
project ourselves into the world, and technology
generally permits, I think, an increased capacity to
meet with people at an intellectual level.
we-magazine >
What social skills do you think kids can learn on the
Internet, on the social Web?
George Siemens >
I would say any skills that they could learn in a face-
to-face setting. You learn how to be apathetic, you
learn how to be compassionate, you can learn how
to give and take help. I mean that’s sometimes a dif-
ficult thing to do but you definitely can develop those
kinds of approaches as well. In those kinds of spa-
ces, basically you learn the way in which you form
your identity, the way in which you project that
identity and the way in which you interact with
others. There is, admittedly, something about the
we_special_/
initial impact of social networking technologies –
whether it’s your not using your own profile picture
or you might have an avatar image or something.
There are different ways that you express yourself
and some of the accessorizing that we do to project
ourselves in physical settings occurs online as well.
But once you begin to interact with people over a
period of time, then you begin to see patterns and
you begin to form impressions. Much like you can
form a quick impression by meeting a person face-
to-face, over a period of time you can form, I think, a
fairly accurate impression of a person by interacting
with their multiple spaces online. It’s not that they’re
interacting just in one area. They’re likely to be on
Facebook and perhaps Twitter. Perhaps you interact
with them on LinkedIn maybe on Second Life. It’s
the aggregate of all of these multiple representat-
ions that forms our ability to understand a person.
And I think that’s a very real social experience, and
the skills that learners need are really not all that
dramatically different from a face-to-face setting.
we-magazine >
Just imagine you’re a teacher and you introduce
these social Web tools to your kids. Do you think
it’s necessary to have a theory behind all this? How
does a network function? How is it to live within a
network? Do you think it’s necessary to teach kids
this as well?
George Siemens >
Well, first of all, I’m biased towards theory so I
would! I think theory has a very valuable role in in-
fluencing practice and driving practice so yes abso-
lutely I do think that’s important. To what degree is
that critical? I guess it varies. I came from a com-
munity where individuals acquired competence not
by abiding by theory but by doing, and so if you
could fix a tractor or a combine harvester, it didn’t
matter if you knew the theory. The only point of
evaluation was what was the outcome, what was
the end product? I think theory has a particular role
in certain academic settings but perhaps it has a
less of a role in other settings. Even though it’s
worth noting that all technology is, in a sense, em-
bedded philosophy. So whether you acknowledge
the theory that exists or not, it’s still going to exist
because it can be an underlying strand that runs
through the entire experience. I just want to briefly
we_special_/
address this notion of networks because we talk a
lot about networks and we hear a lot about net-
works. I think that’s the wrong focus actually.
we-magazine >
Why?
George Siemens >
The real focus has to be on connections because
networks are patterns of connections. We can’t
interact with networks in the same way that we in-
teract with the connection. To give you an example,
let’s say someone says, “When you take a group of
individuals on various boards of different corpora-
tions, you start to realize there are certain patterns
that exist here”. That pattern is useful but a network
is a high-level abstraction that you can’t directly
interact with. When you reduce it down to a unit of
change that we can control, it’s a connection.
we-magazine >
Two years ago together with Stephen Downes you
started connectivism and connective knowledge.
What’s that about?
George Siemens >
Basically we wanted to apply some of the principles
that we’ve been writing about really since  and
some of the views that we have developed as a
result of participating in these online distributed
systems. These social systems where we were inter-
acting with people from around the world. We
wanted to really push the limits of what does it
mean to learn in an era where – and again I keep
returning to the fragmentation of information –
where information is fragmented, conversations are
fragmented we’re receiving input from multiple
sources – we were trying to make sense of it all,
And we thought that the role of a teacher would be
dramatically different in the future. A teacher
wouldn’t be the person who would create the first
structure of the course anymore and you would
start to move into more of a participative pedagogy
kind of requirement. That’s what we tried to create.
We also tried to duplicate the sense of high infor-
mation abundance. There’s this sense in which we
just can’t manage it all so we wanted to create a

course system that duplicated, or at least created,
that sense of being overwhelmed so the informa-
tion flow was really quite hectic. The first year we
had around – hundred people sign up. Not
everyone participated, of course. But we had the
same number on the mailing list till the end of the
course so I’m assuming there was some level of
interest – unless, of course they just couldn’t click
the ‘unsubscribe’ button at the bottom of the
e-mail! We had a combination of trying to fragment
the course and the content and the conversations.
Then we were experimenting with different ways
of weaving that fragmentation together again. One
was through a daily newsletter we sent out. Second
was through, basically, a system of matching and
trying to group similar topics and themes in regular
e-mail exchanges that people would receive. There
was a grouping of these topics or aggregation
around themes. We tried to look at tags: as on
Twitter or through Del.icio.us or through alerts. And
then we tried to look at social systems as a means
of having learners form connections and gain a
sense of what was happening. With a combination
of the instructor still weaving the fragmentation
into a unified whole, the technology systems that
we were using trying to weave some level of whole-
ness to this fragmentation and the learners,
through their social engagement with each other
similarly forming and weaving some kind of a uni-
fied whole, we tried to duplicate this sense of, or at
least to disrupt this notion of what a course is and
what the role of a teacher is and, most of all, what
a student is. That’s why – based on the comments
and reactions we’ve had – I believe it was a success-
ful experiment and, obviously we’ll continue for the
third year so that probably says quite a bit as well.
we-magazine >
Any surprises?

George Siemens >
First of all, I was surprised at the sheer amount of
natural energy people have and the fact that it
doesn’t take long before you, as the educator, start
to become less important than you thought you
were. And that it doesn’t take long for people to
form relationships with each other and to start
to use those relationships to filter information. To
make sense of complex ideas, to bring diverse
perspectives into an idea that we, as educators, per-
haps set out as being “This is how it is” and then
we get picked away at and we get dissected and
analyzed. I was genuinely surprised at the level of
energy people brought in and the real value of the
diversity. People invested enormous time, indi-
viduals created spaces in Second Life to continue
dissecting the conversation and there were trans-
lations of the course into five different languages,
of the course outline. The sense in which indivi-
duals are eager to participate in something that
is meaningful to them was very evident. It comes
back to this concept that because we distributed
control, we have to distribute responsibility for
the outcomes and that was very much evident. In-
dividuals in a course would really aggressively
take on responsibility by helping pull together
these elements and we started to see groups clust-
ering in different ways. Groups of people based on
different ways of thinking or shared ways of thin-
king. We started seeing that our roles as the
instructors were continually minimized to some de-
gree. We would still comment and offer input, but
students were beginning to filter and address
things through the systems that they had formed
as a means of making sense of this abundance of
information.
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we-magazine >
Do you think you’re now working with the right
kind of model?
George Siemens >
I don’t know if it’s quite the right model yet. It’s a
start of a model though. There are a few things
wrong with it. Scalability is perhaps one. You need
a certain combination of skills as an instructor, tech-
nical and facilitation-wise. You also need highly
technical skills in installing equipment and working
out the program – like for the way the newsletter
was handled. The way that the feeds were pulled in
that’s still too technical right now for an average
educator. When I see certain resources like viral
heat, for example, that are capable of looking at
this massive conversation of voices that is on-going
on all of these different services and all these diffe-
rent platforms and they’re able to present a pattern
of what’s happening. They’re able to say, “These are
trending topics. These topics are reducing. These
are dormant themes and points of view that are
rising.” I think that’s definitely a model that with the
CCK model once we begin to use a little bit more of
that as I mentioned earlier, technology is a means
for me to manage the information. Once we get
better tools for visualizing what’s happening, better
tools for creating a sense of how the language
patterns are changing, as learners begin to learn
how does one particular interaction with another
student influence the formation of a conceptual
understanding. Once we get better at personalizing
the system, the network, in the sense that Google is
able to personalize its offerings based on previous
interactions, then I think we’ll get closer to a model
that has long-term potential.
we-magazine >
Are physical places like schools still needed then?
George Siemens >
Physical spaces are very important. When I was
at the University of Manitoba, one of the busiest
places on campus was the library. The library was
busy because it had Starbucks. It was busy because
it was a comfortable social space where people
could connect. I think any means by which we con-
we_special_/
nect with others for social or intellectual informa-
tion purposes will always be important. So there is
a role for physical space, and there’s a role for on-
line spaces. The challenge becomes how to balance
the various options you have available. Should
schools be the kind of facilities they now are with
cubicles designed and closed in? Or should we have
more open spaces that are driven for socialization
and interactions around complex ideas? How do we
strike a balance? Should students go to school five
days a week in a physical space? Or should they
go for five or eight hours a day? Or should they be
going twice a week and then three days a week to
various online social spaces or virtual worlds or
whatever else. I think these questions haven’t been
addressed yet. Some educators are starting to ask
them but our education system is – like any of the
big systems of society are government, education,
or healthcare – tightly integrated. Integrated with
funding. Integrated with legal guidelines. Integra-
ted with the expectations of society. They’re in-
tegrated with something as simple as both parents
being able to work with children of a young age.
You send your children to school so both parents
can work. These systems are so integrated that you
can’t change one without causing a ripple or cas-
cading effect on the others. In that regard the po-
tential of reform is currently somewhat limited
by the difficulties that we have with the existing
systems we’ve created.
we-magazine >
How do these decentralized structures that we’re
talking about fit in with the traditional educational
system?

George Siemens >
Perhaps a better question is to ask how do the
educational systems fit into this distributed decen-
tralized world that we live in. Because as teachers I
know we always like to squeeze the world into our
classrooms. I think we’re at a point where we have
to squeeze our classroom into the world. Well, not
squeeze! We have to open up our classroom into
the world rather than trying to push things in. That
has I think potential for transformative impact in
terms of how people will create curriculums. How
people will learn, how people will interact with
each other. So there’s potentially a fundamental
shift that could arise out of that decentralized struc-
ture. As I mentioned earlier, the teacher typically
forms a narrative coherence in a classroom, but
when we go into distributed environments, lear-
ners also form a narrative coherence. They under-
stand the discipline by how they connect to each
other, by how they relate to each other, by the
signals they send off, by the amplification of infor-
mation through these social structures. And they
begin to understand the world through weaving
and stitching together these fragmented entities.
The question is, okay that’s what’s going on in
the world as a whole, literally. How do we then
make our classroom compatible with that kind
of environment? The skills required to do so are
critical and that’s what our students should be
acquiring as they move forward.
Peter Spiegel
I find it absolutely outrageous that we can accept
a world in which one to two thirds of all people
live in totally degrading conditions. We draw up
lofty declarations of human rights while trampling
the same rights in the dirt!
 >

Photo: Bea Gschwend

we_special_/ 

tags > cutting edge, shift index, Asia, Western, Web.

What the
East Can Teach
the West

John Hagel III

John Hagel III is an author and former McKinsey consultant who specializes in the intersection of business strategy and information
technology. In , Hagel, along with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, founded the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation.
Hagel is also involved with a number of other organizations, including the World Economic Forum, Innovation Exchange with
John Seely Brown and Henry Chesbrough, the International Academy of Management, and the Aspen Institute. He is credited with
inventing the term “infomediary” in his book, NetWorth. with Marc Singer, published by the Harvard Business School Press in .

we-magazine >
What is the driving force that makes you work on
the cutting edge?
John Hagel >
What interests me is the notion that technology
is continuing to evolve at an exponential rate and is
far exceeding our capacity to actually absorb the
technology and the potential that it offers. The
constant tension between continuing technology
innovation and our capacity to harness it and use it
to help us become more productive and prosperous
citizens is a real passion of mine.
we-magazine >
Without any doubt we are living in a number of
crises. What are the major indicators that we have
fallen into these crises?
John Hagel >
We published a research report last year called
“The Shift Index” which was largely driven by the
fact that business leaders have generally become
very focused on the short-term economic cycle.
Over the past couple of years we have been in the
midst of a major economic downturn on a global
scale. Business leaders are understandably focused
on that and trying to cope with it. But at the same
time there is a much longer-term trend that has
been playing out, and it has to do with the decline
of profitability of companies over many decades.
In “The Shift Index” we looked at the profitability
of all public companies in the United States since
. What we found was a very significant and
sustained erosion in profitability. Profitability has
come down % over that time period.
we-magazine >
Due to what reasons?
John Hagel >
It has to do with the emergence of the new tech-
nology infrastructures, digital technology infra-
structures that help us to connect and communicate
much more effectively on a global scale, combined
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with a broad public policy shift towards more
economic liberalization on a global scale. If you
combine the effects of those two trends, we are
reducing – on a global scale – barriers to entry and
barriers to movement. That intensifies competition.
Typically, if you accept that markets are effective in
dealing with new, unanticipated trends, the fact
that companies over four or more decades have not
been able to effectively respond to this intensifying
competition is revealing.
It suggests to us that companies are locked in
to an old way of doing things, approaches that are
basically broken. We are working harder and
harder and yet we produce less and less return on
our efforts.
we-magazine >
Your reports say that Asia is a good place to look
at. What can America learn from some Asian com-
panies?
John Hagel >
If you think about the challenge for companies in
general, it has to do with how do you connect into
a larger set of relationships and partnerships that
can give you access to new knowledge in a much
more rapid and effective way. Some entrepreneu-
rial companies in both China and India are way
ahead of most Western companies in terms of
management techniques needed to build scalable
networks. We are talking about networks of thou-
sands of partners and relationships, not just the few
key partners in your supply chain or distribution
channels. They have mastered a technique to do a
much broader and more diverse set of relationships
than most Western companies would ever be able
to attempt.
we-magazine >
How come?
John Hagel >
A lot of it has to do with the issues that Western
executives viewed as major challenges for these
companies. When I talked to a Western executives
 or  years ago, they confidently said about
China: “don’t worry. China is not going to be serious
we_special_/
competition for two reasons. First, they don’t have
a well developed financial system, so they don't
have access to loans and money to fund their
growth. Secondly, there is no protection for intel-
lectual property. So any innovation they come up
with will be rapidly copied and therefore there
are no real incentives to innovate.” What Chinese
companies have done is to take those challenges
and turn them into opportunities.
If they don’t have access to a lot of financial
resources, they have been forced to focus on how
they can very aggressively and creatively connect
to as many companies as possible to leverage their
capabilities, and just focus on the things they do
best, and rely on others to provide the rest.
we-magazine >
When you are talking about these Western mana-
gers, what is Western for you?
John Hagel >
Western in this context is the United States and
Western Europe, and potentially even Japan. They
adopted a set of management techniques that are
very much driven by our Western thinking. Japa-
nese executives were very much influenced by the
quality movement that actually originated with a
variety of Western thinkers. So I think that Japanese
companies face as much of a challenge as compa-
nies in the United States.
we-magazine >
What is this Western thinking about? Is it a kind of
value pattern?
John Hagel >
The key assumption that drives Western companies
and created enormous wealth in the th century
is the notion that economic value is largely con-
centrated in knowledge stocks. This view holds
that your ability to create value depends on what
you know today, how well you protect those
knowledge stocks and then how efficiently you
extract value from them. If you look at all the suc-
cessful companies in the th century that emerged
in the US and Europe, they were focused on deve-
loping proprietary knowledge that they aggressi-

vely protected and built scale to exploit. What
we are facing now is a world where knowledge
stocks depreciate in value very quickly because
our surroundings are changing so rapidly. If all you
are focused on is protecting what you know today,
you are going to end up very challenged very
quickly. The opportunity is to connect into a broa-
der range of more diverse and relevant knowledge
flows and more actively refresh what we know at
any one point in time.
That’s a very different way of thinking. If you are
going to participate in knowledge flows, you have
to be willing to share some of your knowledge. If
your mindset is all about protecting what you know
and not letting anyone else get it, it is very hard
to make the transition.
we-magazine >
If you transfer this to political thinking on the
government level, what challenges do you see with
the rise of China? Is the Western world ready for
such a powerful number one Eastern country?
John Hagel >
I don't think we are ready for it yet. We still believe
that China is not an innovative country, that there
is not much economic innovation that we can learn
from. So there is a tendency to diminish or under-
estimate the power of what is being created there.
On the other hand there is an opportunity to learn.
There is no reason that we cannot adopt many of
the practices that are emerging in China that will
refresh and reinvigorate our economic activity as
well.
we-magazine >
What do you see personally as the major challenges
that companies and governments in the so-called
Western world are facing?
John Hagel >
The biggest challenge is this notion of shifting our
mindset, the key assumptions we have about where
economic value is, and how to more actively and
productively participate in a global economy. The
successful Chinese companies that we have studied
are really focused on how to compete effectively

in the global economy. They are not just focused on
the local markets. They started with a global per-
spective of the opportunities to compete in a global
market.
we-magazine >
When technology comes in, and . thinking with
values like transparency, reputation, openness,
what kind of roles does this kind of thinking play
in the way we are dealing with these challenges?
John Hagel >
It has a central role. Web. at one level is all about
how do you connect in to a broader set of networks
and leverage those networks to create more value
for the markets and customers you are serving. That
is a central assumption that we need to embrace
and pursue. A lot of Web. thinking tends to focus
on data and information, rather than knowledge,
because it tends to be developed by technologists.
From my viewpoint the opportunity is to take
Web. thinking and focus it on how to build a
personal relationships in a much more scalable way,
using technology. Ultimately, the most valuable
networks are networks of people relationships, as
opposed to just connecting into data or informa-
tion services of various types. That to me is the big
opportunity.
we-magazine >
If you would have to name one example, one com-
pany in Asia that is doing really well, which com-
pany would it be and where are they really
exceptional?
John Hagel >
Li & Fung in China, which is not really well known
in the West. They emerged over many decades as
one of the leading players in the clothing industry.
They organize customized supply networks for We-
stern apparel designers. What is particularly inter-
esting is they have developed a global network of
more than , business partners, highly specia-
lized companies, that they bring into individual sup-
ply networks on an as-needed bases. One example
is that in the immediate period after / they had
a lot of their activity in Pakistan. If at the time you
we_special_/
had time-sensitive supply network operations, you
didn't want to be in Pakistan. It was very insecure.
Within three weeks, Li & Fung had moved all of its
production activities out of Pakistan and into other
countries that were more secure. That's a degree of
flexibility that is not feasible for Western companies
with traditional supply chains. From our perspec-
tive, the most impressive aspect is the degree to
which Li & Fung is focused on creating a network
where the participants are learning from each other
much more rapidly than they could on their own.
So the value of participating in the Li & Fung net-
work is that, as a partner, you are able to improve
your performance much more rapidly than if you
were operating on your own.
we-magazine >
People who are flexible like this, who are network-
savvy, have to be educated some place. Would you
say our education systems are ready for this? Do
our kids learn the right things at school to be pre-
pared for this?
John Hagel >
In a short answer: no. I think our education systems
are far behind the practices that are emerging in
various parts of the world. So there is a huge op-
portunity to really rethink not just what we are com-
municating, what we are educating our students
with, but even how we educate. One of the trends
that we believe is playing out is moving from a
world of push to a world of pull. In the education
system we are still very much in a world of push.
The notion is that we can anticipate for the entire
educational program of a student, from the day
they born, what they will need to learn when. Pus-
hing knowledge based on a prediction, a forecast
of what they are going to need to know. We believe
there is tremendous need to rethink education as a
pull system, where more and more of the learning
occurs on an as-needed basis. This involves con-
structing the platforms and tools to help students
connect to people and knowledge when they need
it based on their specific situation. It is a very diffe-
rent educational philosophy than most of our edu-
cational institutions are currently pursuing.
we_special_/ 

we-magazine >

When will we get there? There is some kind of

urgency, isn’t it?

John Hagel >

There is a huge sense of urgency. If you go back to

the “The Shift Index” and declining profitability,
the trend is long-term and it is sustained. A lot of
institutional leaders have the view that we are in
the middle of great economic downturn, but that
it is temporary and we will eventually recover. The
key result of our research is that for more than four
decades there has a long-term trend that shows no
sign of turning around, so the pressure is mounting
for us to come up with innovations and solutions
that are quite different from the practices we are
currently pursuing. The urgency is only increasing
and it is well beyond the current economic down-
turn.

Photo: Bea Gschwend

Hans Rosling
Data does reach the public, it goes into their eyes,
hits the retina, but the problem is it doesn’t go
into their brains! In nutrition we have a rule that
food not swallowed has no nutritional value. You
can chew it and spit it out – and that’s what we do.
 we_special_/

Future
Engage
– translate ideas into action!
Challenges
 we_special_/

>

>

>
>

Photo: butterflyworks
tags > co-create, sustainable, design, liberate, maker

To Engage
Means to
Create!
Emer Beamer
Emer Beamer is a social designer and conceptor who founded NairoBits and Butterfly
Works together with Hester Ezra and Ineke Aquarius. Her current post is research and
development director at Butterfly Works, social design studio, Netherlands.
 we_special_/

Thanks to WE for giving us the opportunity and the challenge to talk about
the way we Engage individuals, communities and organisations to provide
sustainable answers to international social issues. Often we are so deep
in doing, that we don’t get around to documenting our approach, so here
goes an attempt to do just that.

One of the major challenges the future is bringing us, and indeed a chal-
lenge already much present, is underutilisation of the talents of millions
of young people on the planet. This is a nice way of saying that there are
way too many people living in stark, totally unacceptable, inhumane poverty
and that they feel real bad about it.

Butterfly Works is one WE, crafting and recrafting an approach with the
aim of developing programs for people to move out of this poverty. Since
 the we of Butterfly Works has, with users, co-created some  programs,
now running or starting up in  countries. The work may not appear to
have a common approach, including as it does, design education for youth
from the slums; national peace campaigns; HIV/aids school programs; tin-
kering festivals in Africa; artisans product export programs and co-design
processes leading to new branded products. There are, however, common
ingredients and methods involved, which I aim to unpack here. The term
we use is ‘Liberate the Creative’.

Liberate the Creative

What’s that? At Butterfly Works we (as I hope you
will be by the end of this piece) are avid believers in
the act of creation (making, doing, concepting) to
empower and liberate people (including ourselves)
in all kinds of circumstances. We also have total
faith in the ability of every child and person to
create, make, design and conceive, we just need
to facilitate opening the door to an individual’s
creative talents and abilities. This perhaps naive
approach has allowed us to work and make pro-
gress in the most unlikely circumstances with all
kinds of topics and people, even with those with
whom we share no common language.
Liberation is only possible when an individual
can see and feel an achievable other state of being
to the current one. Through doing, making and
conceiving, one begins to feel stronger and starts
owning the solution, through seeing others who
have gone before you who have made a successful
choice or lifestyle, one is encouraged that it is pos-
sible. Creating these first role models is essential
to encourage others to follow.
So what does that mean in practice
and how does it work. Here are three
examples from very different programs
which hopefully illustrate how this
can work:

Liberation is more complicated. Liberation from

what? In our case we work with people to help
them escape from powerlessness and from poverty,
which often go hand in hand. Poverty is a circum-
stance but it is also a state of mind, a culture, sup-
ported by a class system, which oftentimes holds
people captive due as much to a set of beliefs about
their position in society as to factual reality.
we_special_/
butterflyworks
Example : NairoBits community
NairoBits, which we founded in  liberates
the creative in youths from the slums of Nairobi
whereby they get jobs, move themselves and their
families out of the slums, inspire others, create cool
Websites and set up all kinds of youth initiatives for
their peers. These are young people who thought
their only option was to become a criminal, a drunk
or both. Now they are movers and shakers. Nairo-
Bits has since spawned AddisBits in Ethiopia, Zanzi-
Bits in Tanzania, Kilimanjaro Film School in Tanzania
and currently in the make are KampaBits in Uganda
and BeijingBits in China. All these schools are built
on the same ethos.
The essence of the program is a one year training in
design, personal development and African culture.
Working in teams and on individual projects, choo-
sing their own topics to design and create Websites
about, each student is challenged to choose, then
design and program their ideas. They learn to pre-
sent and defend their work. All students are selected
on the basis of motivation from a group of  com-

munity based organisations. There is no fee for parti-
cipation, but a tough selection procedure ensures
that only those who are really motivated and genui-
nely have no other opportunity for further educa-
tion get the chance.
What’s interesting in this process, which after 
years can now comfortably be called a movement
(with  plus graduates) is that while many, but
not all of them become employed as Webdesigners,
they do all carve out their own paths, be it DJ,
setting up a youth NGO, teaching, further study
at university, setting up their own business, you
name it.
The other fascinating part is the sense of community
that has arisen amongst students and graduates,
young people from different tribes and parts of
the city are now united in an informal network
which freelances together, shares coding tips, job
opportunities and strong friendships. They are
bound by the new culture which is not ‘we are
poor’ and not ‘we are rich’ but ‘we are creative,
we can create what we need’

Example : The World starts with Me
The World Starts with Me is an e-learning program
on HIV/AIDS prevention and general teenager life
skills, developed firstly for Ugandan teenagers and
now running Uganda-wide and happily, adapted
and implemented in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thai-
land. Butterfly Works was asked to develop an
approach for HIV/Aids prevention by the World
Population Foundation. To do this we formed a
diverse group of artists, youths, teachers and topic
experts, who together developed the framework
and depicted the priorities for the digital curricu-
lum of The World Starts with Me, through a series
of brainstorming and co-creation sessions.
Each lesson begins with two virtual peer educators
who discuss themes such as ‘friendship’. Each par-
ticipant then draws a map of their friends, revealing
the closeness, level of support and type of influence
each one has on their lives. This exercise gets
people beyond talking and into reflective space
through doing. (By the way, it’s also fun to do this
exercise as an adult and can be quite revealing.)
The curriculum then takes the individual on a jour-
ney of self discovery, encouraging them all the time
to get the facts and then make their own informed
choices for their lives on topics such as identity,
society, gender roles, human rights, sexuality,
sexual abuse and HIV/aids. A four year study has
shown positive impact on participants and the pro-
gram has been earmarked as best practice at the
World Aids conference in Mexico and by UNESCO.
On a more individual level what we have seen is
young people making sometimes very difficult
choices, such as stepping forward for help with
cases of abuse at home, girls demanding to be
allowed to continue school despite being pregnant
(usually one is expelled), boys re-assessing their
role in sexual relationships, young people setting
up groups to advocate for their rights. It seems
through creating and practicing solutions to the
problems in their lives young people believe in their
right to choose what’s good for them.
we_special_/
Example : Return to Sender
‘Return to Sender’ selects manufacturers in develo-
ping countries, and in co-operation with the HEMA,
a large department store in the Netherlands ensures
a market for their products. The resulting profits
are channeled back to the region of origin through
projects designed to improve the local economy.
‘Return to Sender’ is also a television program pre-
sented by Katja Schuurman, the founder and well
known actress, which gives a window to viewers on
the story behind these special products.
In the start-up two years Butterfly Works was
responsible for selecting the participating countries
and producing partners and managing both profit
expenditure and the follow-up for those involved
locally.
Sourcing these small local makers with potential
was an exhilarating challenge and a risky business,
they had to be small enough to know you were really
helping a small producer to grow and take people
out of poverty yet they also had to be able to rise to
the demand of delivering large quantities of qua-
lity goods to satisfy the needs of a large store chain
( outlets) in Europe. We were also looking for
products that cherished some local culture or tech-
nic without being stereotypically ethnic looking.
The producers in Brazil, for example, didn’t have a
shared working space, they all worked from home
making these beautiful felt and embroidered items.
They have since gone on to form a co-operative,
rent a decent working space and deliver two col-
lections of Christmas tree decorations using their
original craftwork. Everyone of the ladies and their
families in the co-operative has benefited greatly.
Similarly the program imports goods from weavers
in Guatemala, cotton producers in Madagascar,
ceramic makers in Thailand and toy makers in Sri
Lanka. The for-profit HEMA has committed itself to
long-term commercial relations with a number of
the producers groups with a percentage of the pro-
fits continually flowing back to the communities.
As much as the importance this program has had
for individual producers, the fact that it has been
possible to turn a profit with goods produced by
such small groups while honoring each contributor
in the value chain, is, we hope, a source of inspira-
tion that social business models can work.
we_special_/ 

Needless to say, we are not the only organisation In fact I would be willing to bet that there is a whole
that sees and facilitates the creative resources of new tide of social entrepreneurs out there who are
younger and older people. Groups such as PENYA seeing the creative potential in people and adding
who facilitate budding music artists, Hot Sun Films, some resources to the mix contributing to a bubbling
who work with young film makers, Caramundo, movement of ‘creativity out of poverty’ programs.
One Minute Films, KNN Kids news network, Young
designers and Industry, Voices of Africa, Kwani?,
Storymoja, Creative Cambodia, Theater Embassy,
Music Mayday do too and these are just the ones I
can name off the top of my head.

Photo: butterflyworks
p.p.p.s This is rather urgent, there are
And yes, this is all only a drop in the
ocean of what’s needed, a drop how-millions of young people out there,
ever that means a huge amount to full of energy, revved up to go, yet
stuck in poverty. Every individual who
each of the individuals involved plus
there’s a method here that could ‘gives up’ who bows their head or
apply to every human being. When turns to destructive measures given
the lack of possibility to forward
we tap into the creative resources of
themselves in life, is a huge loss to all
people, you never know where it will
lead. of us. WE, the big WE – that is
everyone on the planet and indeed
p.s Warning: it involves hard work the planet itself – all miss out on the
and plenty of moral dilemmas and unique creative contribution they
a continual reconsideration of the could have made.
chosen path.

p.p.s we deeply co-create all the acti- Related Websites

vities with the end users. www.butterflyworks.org
www.theworldstarts.org
www.nairobits.com
www.returntosender.nl
www.isyou.com
 >

>

>

Photo: Bijan Kafi

we_special_/ 

tags > Georgia, corruption, Tbilisi, Russia

Challenging
Invisible
Boundaries in
War and Peace
Social Media in Georgia

Bijan Kafi

Bijan Kafi is a consultant on communication for civil society initiatives and has worked in international development aid in countries
including Egypt, Central Africa, and Georgia. He currently lives in Berlin.
 we_special_/

During August  when the “information war” was raging high in Georgia
people turned to online media to find desperately needed information.
Experience shows that online media may become a way to help bridge the
boundaries between divided peoples.

Zurab Tchiaberashvili may well have expected his
job would not be easy when he became the first
mayor of post-Shevardnadze era Tbilisi. However,
he almost certainly didn’t anticipate what it would
mean to adhere to the principles he had chosen to
pursue in office: to root out corruption in public
administration.
When Tchiaberashvili was presented with a valuable
gift by a municipal executive in , he resorted
to drastic measures. At a publicly-televised event
only one day later he confronted the colleague with
what he considered as an attempt at bribery, thus
intending to inform the public that he would not
tolerate corruption.
By his own standards Tchiaberashvili thought he
had done well. The public, however, thought dif-
ferently. Within days after the event the boards of
Georgia’s most frequented online forum Forum.ge
were flooded with comments, the majority of which
were critical of the mayor’s publicity stunt. Even
though Tchiaberashvili later chose to limit the da-
mage by engaging the public from within the new
medium, in the eyes of the public his image had
taken a beating.
To his surprise the mood of a small but growing
part of his constituency – the tech-savvy and well-
connected – had turned against him. Tchiaberashvili
had unknowingly triggered a crisis and the people
it affected had found a medium, relatively new at
the time, to make their voices heard quickly and
efficiently.
Trackback to Tbilisi
Like Zurab Tchiaberashvili, -year old Sian Davies,
then a charity worker from Wales, did not antici-
pate the crisis she was to witness only months after
her arrival in Tbilisi in the summer of .
When, following clashes with Georgian forces in
Tskhinvali, the Russian army crossed the border of
South Ossetia and into Georgia in early August,
Davies was in Tbilisi. She was working for a local
NGO to avoid precisely the sort of crisis that was
unfolding some two hundred kilometers away.
In what turned out over the following days to be a
full-blown armed conflict, Davies became an invo-
luntary citizen war reporter, mainly thanks to the
new media.
we_special_/
After commenting on a BBC Website and on her
blog that, contrary to CNN reports, Tbilisi had in fact
not been bombed, international media picked up
on the fact that she seemed to be one of the few
reliable sources in an unusual information vacuum.
“The contrast was startling. In a world of mass in-
formation you suddenly find yourself in the middle
of an information void and people scrambling for
the tiniest bits of information regardless of whet-
her they are confirmed or not,” Davies remembers.
The extensive local network of contacts she mana-
ges by mobile phone, SMS, email and blogs enabled
Davies to stay abreast of events as they were unfol-
ding, at a time when commercial broadcasting sta-
tions had left for their August holidays. Not only
were most embassies closed, but many major TV
and radio stations had no reporters on the ground.
Within  hours the media that had picked up her
reports had forwarded the stories to other stations
and news agencies. These in turn were copied by
others. They soon contacted Davies via phone,
email, and even Skype to quench their thirst for
breaking news. In the following days she gave 
interviews for British national and local radio stati-
ons, answered questions by email, and gave inter-
views on Skype to Associated Press. She estimates
that about half a dozen articles have been written
about her, culminating in a radio interview on the
BBC early evening news.
The information Davies and her friends received
from their friends reached the global public via
blog, email and conventional media. Much of it was
further relayed through Twitter, a service then little
known in Georgia. Foreign media gladly picked up
these bits of information, frequently without que-
stioning their reliability. Even though the relevance
of individual reporting diminished as soon as stati-
ons brought in their own staff, much information
continued to be disseminated through the chain of
individual relationships mostly via mobile phones
by progressive individuals monitoring sources and
redistributing information.
In the information age, conflicts are
information crises
During the conflict Georgians turned to the Inter-
net, just as they did when Zurab Tchiaberashvili
chose to publicize incidents of corruption. Infor-
mation was either scarce, as it was during the con-
flict, or over-abundant e.g. after Tchiaberashvili’s

announcement. This was online media’s finest hour.
As Giga Paitchadze, a Georgian lawyer working in
judicial reform and an avid blogger under the pseu-
donym Dvorsky, believes: “It all started with the war”.
Blogs may have played a significant role in chan-
nelling scarce news during the military crisis, but
Georgians still mostly turned to online forums. This
is where they seem to feel most comfortable.
With , users Forum.ge is the most popular
place for Georgians to discuss topics such as cars,
sports, or politics. Some media have gained rele-
vance since the crisis, but places like Forum.ge
are still the preferred means for gathering and
exchanging news because they best meet people’s
information needs and preferred mode of conver-
sation. Forum.ge consistently proves it is an extra-
ordinarily socially powerful institution, as not only
Tbilisi’s former mayor had to learn. Its influence
extends to daily life: search for a Georgian term on
Google Georgia and an entry on Forum.ge is likely
to spring up, directing ordinary traffic to its boards.
During the crises the forums helped to distinguish
the false from the true in the information quickly
and effectively disseminated by all parties. Many
Georgians were familiar with the services, could
easily identify relevant forum boards and were thus
able to find in one place information from any-
where in the country. Forums were efficient tools,
as they require little hardware, are fully web-based
and easy to navigate. Given the suspect relevance
of social networks like Odnoklassniki.ru in the
recent Moldova crisis, the relevance of technically
traditional but socially well-accepted networks
should not be underestimated. During crises they
serve to compensate for the imbalances in infor-
mation generation, distribution, and consumption
typical of such situations. Traditional media are
notoriously incapable of responding adequately:
hourly -minute TV shows leave people craving for
more news of loved ones, offer no interactivity,
and rely on a small number of sources that cannot
be pooled.
The forums enabled people from crisis areas to
report on their situations in ways conventional
media were unable to deliver. They were also able
to bypass at least some of the fallout the propa-
ganda-driven information warfare had unleashed –
no wonder that, with such a subversive potential,
Forum.ge was quickly taken down during the hot
days of that August.

No network to attract them all
More resilient than locally managed servers are in-
ternational services that are becoming increasingly
popular among Georgians. Social networks like
Facebook expand on the concept of the forum.
In Georgia, however, the market for social media
is more diverse with specific services seemingly
appealing to specific social groups.
A  study by ACT, a Georgian marketing research
firm, identified the major players. Odnoklassniki.ru
leads the pack: % of Georgian social network
users have an account. The service is only available
in Russian and is said to appeal mostly to older
Georgians, who experienced the late days of the
Soviet schooling system and so are usually fluent in
Russian, a language less popular among youngs-
ters. Odnoklassniki.ru clearly mimics the Soviet
education system through a strict hierarchical order
of clearly identifiable institutions and grades di-
stinguished by geographical location. To complete
the winning mixture, it is also very easy to use even
for those with little computer experience.
While Hi seems to enjoy a loyal following among
the -and-below age cohort, Facebook certainly is
the second most popular fish in the pond, although
its user numbers of only % pale in comparison
with Odnoklassniki.ru. It is preferred mainly by pro-
Western youth, attracted by its progressive image,
sophisticated interface, and extensively networked
brand.
“Odnoklassniki.ru has successfully tapped into the
local cultural features. It is organized along old
Soviet-era lines that everyone who experienced
those days knows by heart,” says Giga Paitchadze,
founder of the Georgian-Estonian joint venture
Face.ge, which is currently fifth in the ranking. The
relatively new service with its comparatively few
users has chosen a different profile by being only
available in Georgian and thus attractive mostly to
those with little knowledge of a foreign language.
Overall % of all Georgian Internet users are mem-
bers of a social network, says ACT, and it is signifi-
cant that % of these reside in Tbilisi.
Politics are among the issues widely discussed on
Forum.ge, as they are on Odnoklassniki.ru and
other sites frequented by both Russians and Geor-
gians. In the hot days following the August war,
the atmosphere on some service boards became
increasingly tense. Anonymity made it easier for
Russians and Georgians to communicate. Even in
we_special_/
times of crisis, over long distances or where other
limitations would be a hindrance to direct conver-
sation, the forums made it possible to overcome
these obstacles. But it proved to be dangerous,
too, when it lowered the thresholds for hotheads
to clash.
Using networks to change the mood
A group of Georgian students tried to overcome the
limitations by using the services in more productive
ways. On August  Lika Bakuridze and Luiza
Koridze, journalism students at Batumi Shota
Rustaveli State University, opened a moderated
forum using facilities at a USAID-funded public
telecentre. They did so on Odnoklassniki.ru.
In the following weeks others began to use the
forum to express their views, share information
on events taking place around them, and discuss
the expected consequences of the war. The forum
extended the individual’s options for disseminating
images and personal opinion. “I think the aim
of the forum, the spreading of information and
evidence of the war (…) is achieved”, Lika thinks.
The students reserved the right to delete posts
deemed inappropriate. However, the virtual space
showed how the Internet is becoming a medium
that matters for those who take the initiative. -
year-old Zaza Mgaloblishvili from Batumi posted
the link of a video documenting the destruction
of ethnic Georgian homes and an interview with a
representative from Human Rights Watch. Nutsa
Mchedlishvili, , contributed a link to a video
depicting Russian attacks on Georgian military
bases. Fellow Ani Tsitlidze created a board named
“Blood” where participants posted data on the sup-
ply of, and demand for, blood transfusions and their
locations. These data included the profile of a -
year-old with a rare blood type and forwarded her
contact information. Others contributed addresses
where people willing to donate blood would be
welcome. Visitors like students Ilia Dzneladze and
Goga Kalihava also used the forum to post pictures
visually documenting Georgian unity.
In the following weeks the controversial forum
logged over  posts and the creation of 
subforums. It has directly connected members of
Odnoklassniki.ru with  participants and innu-
merable passive readers from more than  diffe-
rent countries.
we_special_/
Georgia’s blogosphere
While debate was raging high on the forums, the
Georgian blogosphere remained relatively silent.
Readers were attracted by some few central blogs
like that of Sian Davies, US-based Anna Dolidze,
the well-known SOS Georgia mentioned below,
or the occasional Russian-language commentator.
Blogs originating from within Georgia sprang up
in greater numbers than ever before and many
remained active after the August events. However,
it is safe to assume that blogs as individualized
channels for information distribution and sharing
of opinion were not of major relevance as a means
of citizens’ self-empowerment before the conflict.
This certainly has its root in technical reasons, as
ACT’s finding that % of social network users are
concentrated in Tbilisi shows. Internet access in the
countryside is still low. An estimated % of the
population have Internet access in Tbilisi, but out-
side Georgia’s largest metropolis the figure drops
to only %.
Other reasons might be economic. Georgian inde-
pendent media have found it difficult to realize
ambitious projects through advertisement-based
business models for professional online publishing.
Markets for online ads remain small and little open-
ness is exhibited by businesses keen on reaching
the masses to use innovative channels. Ad-genera-
ted revenue at Georgia’s largest independent poli-
tical online newspaper, Civil.ge, is still stuck below
% of its budget – and that’s after almost  years
of donor-driven funding.
Cultural issues may play a role, too. Forums allow
for faster, more direct interaction, whereas blogs
require individual authors to write down their
thoughts without knowing their potential reader-
ship and in a place where it might never get noti-
ced. Forums provide not only a thematic frame for
the individual statement, but also a usually well-
known meeting place with potentially great poten-
tial for attractiveness among a given interest group
that is usually still open enough to allow late-co-
mers to the debate. Blogs are essentially more sta-
tic and less conducive to the directness and speed
of interactions that forums encourage. “Georgians
like to discuss”, says Giga Paitchadze who has also
written the chapter on the freedom of Internet ac-
cess in Georgia for Freedom House study “Freedom
on the Net”. “Even when they are unemployed and
have nothing to do, Georgians always gather in the

streets, talk about things they like, smoke, or play
football. Public life in Georgia is a fundamentally
social thing.”
Sowing the seeds of love
That seemed to be confirmed by the  partici-
pants that joined Paitchadze for the first “Barcamp
Caucasus” organised with support from the Open
Society Georgia Foundation, a major funder of
media-related initiatives in the Caucasus and Eura-
sia. Most of the participants in the event in Summer
 were from other countries, with significant
attendance from Armenia and Azerbaijan. Only a
dozen or so bloggers came from Georgia itself,
estimates Paitchadze. “Participation from Georgia
was rather weak, and not so much has come out of
it,” he adds. “We had done some training even for
public agencies before, like the Georgian Institute
for Public Administration (GIPA), on blogging and
Web ., but only to little effect. Somebody once
tried to establish blogging at schools, but that
didn’t succeed, either.”
Nevertheless, the Open Society Georgia Foundation
funded Barcamps in the entire region and has
been a staunch supporter of media training for civic
engagement. Barcamps have also been organized
in Central Asia, for example in Kazakhstan and
Kyrgystan. Additional support by international do-
nors has been small: the European Union as a major
funder only realized its potential in , again
within the framework of an initiative for democra-
tization and human rights.
It is thus difficult to predict if the effects of seminal
initiatives like the Georgian Barcamp will last in
times of peace. Forums and social networks came
to life during the war because of what was essenti-
ally a crisis of information. Partisan propaganda
resulted in fake, slow, or no information at all and
posed real threats to the availability and accuracy
of news immediately affecting the lives of indivi-
duals. Web. tools provided a means to fill the
void and a “pressure valve” for sharing news, whose
sources had become increasingly individual thanks
to technology.
After the war, life for ordinary Georgians has in
many ways become more complicated, especially
in the area of inter-ethnic relations, travel and visa
restrictions, import and export quotas and closed
borders between Russia and Georgia. Georgians
may just find that this situation presents the new

media with an opportunity in peacetime too. The
anonymity that makes it easy for people to enter
flame wars (as hostile interactions on the Internet
are called) also enables them to engage with one
another in the first place – across many kinds of
boundaries. This need has only increased after the
war and, indeed, Forum.ge is once more as vibrant
as it always was.
However, there are signs of lasting momentum.
Since the war blogs, too, have sprung up by the
dozen. Some commentators have been able to keep
up activity, build credibility, and act as anchors for
further development. One of these is Anna Dolidze,
a Georgian lawyer who comments on develop-
ments on her popular Resistance Georgia blog,
already a source of independent comment before
the war. Recent additions include The Tbilisi Blues
and This is Tbilisi Calling. Even Forum.ge has com-
petition from such sites as Forumcaucasus.com,
a private initiative aimed at bringing the countries
adjoining the Georgian-Russian border closer to-
gether, if only virtually.
The Barcamp itself, too, is said to have led to the
development of more regularly updated blogs.
There are allegedly even plans for a Georgian blog-
ging engine. Plus, Barcamp Armenia and Barcamp
Caspian (Azerbaijan) held in Yerevan and Baku in
April and March  quickly followed due to po-
pular demand and in October  the Georgia
New Media Forum still saw strong interest from
bloggers, social media activists, and journalists
alike. Guests included renowned personalities
from the US, Europe, and the Caucasus like Onnik
Krikorian (Armenia) or Emin Huseynzade (Azerbai-
jan). The forum also featured the launch of the
Georgian blog catalog blogroll.ge. Another event,
the Social Innovation Camp Caucasus, will be held
in Tbilisi in April .
The political crisis following the demonstrations of
April  showed how much creativity and expe-
rience in media usage had developed within just 
months. Students of the Georgian School of Public
Affairs set up blogs with the support of US media
trainers. They covered events as they unfolded and
received widespread international acclaim. Twitter
usage exploded too: international commentators,
citizens and media professionals experimented with
mobile technologies and collaborated with greater
ease and more effectively than before. Eventually,
even the Georgian government realized the need
to monitor the Twittersphere in a more proactive
we_special_/
way. It opened its own Twitter account (@govtof-
georgia) and was able to follow several of the most
active commentators from inside and outside the
country.
Voice is no guarantee for independence
The various initiatives by individuals that seem to
begin to form critical mass show that online media
do play a role in encouraging debate among divi-
ded parties and may offer one set of tools to tackle
one of the key challenges of the st century:
divided people and diasporas.
Certainly individual voices “from the field” do
not offer automatic protection against the threat of
propaganda. They are themselves frequently too
uncritical in their reporting or are often accepted
at face value by outside commentators because
official news is either unavailable or unreliable. As
renowned blogger Ethan Zuckerman first noticed,
this was a particular concern with both Russian and
Georgian bloggers reporting from Georgia, Russia,
or even the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Credibility in online environments can also be at
stake in less confrontational settings, impacting
directly on the legitimacy of elected represent-
atives. When Tbilisi’s mayor attempted to address
proactively the criticism voiced by the public on
Forum.ge, many initially questioned his identity.
“People simply didn’t believe him; they thought he
was a fake, that it was not the mayor speaking to
them,” says Givi Ordenidze. “He tried to address
that issue, but what options do you have in a world
that is entirely virtual?”
Some issues, however, may be peculiar to crisis
situations resulting in repressive rule under martial
law and deliberate propaganda or other limitations
to civil liberties. They also pose challenging questi-
ons for further research. During the war the then
famous blogging platform SOSGeorgia.org, initially
founded by two European media professionals
working in the country, got financial support and
was quickly “improved” by a European PR firm also
serving the government. With professional help its
team was able to spend thousands of donated
dollars on offline activities such as the production
of “SOS Georgia” T-Shirts and the organization of
protest marches. However, the growing influence
of the private consultants meant that what began
as a well-intentioned technical upgrade resulted in
the eventual disillusionment of its founders.
we_special_/ 

Future Challenges plight of displaced people and their diasporas

trying to connect and the need for mutual under-
Still, the new social media provide “conversation standing among divided parties. Their virtuality –
space” to vent discord in less destructive ways. They or being “less real” – is a lesser problem. What is
can do so if the channels they provide are picked needed is more research into how they actually
up by people and their grassroots initiatives who “work out” for a given group of people while
perceive a benefit in their information and utility remembering that is is still the people who bring
they are unable to receive elsewhere. about lasting change. When Zurab Tchiaberashvili
Such benefit is naturally dependent on the situation was mayor of Tbilisi, this was precisely what he did.
and the users. Still, funders too often rely on gene- When the technological limits became apparent,
ral assumptions about these benefits when making Tchiaberashvili did what any Georgian would do:
funding decisions. Givi Ordenidze is a former pro- he invited his critics for dinner.
ject manager of Open Society Georgia Foundation’s
Civil Society and Media Support Programme and a
member of the sub-committee on Civil Society and
Media Support. In his opinion it was initially the Most of the time this is how crises are
West European headquarters of the Foundation still effectively solved in Georgia. If
that were more interested in funding than the local that works out for the people invol-
Georgia office as they may have been influenced ved, then nothing can be said against
by the hype surrounding the alleged democratizing it. It says a great deal about both the
effects of Web.. “But you can’t compare Georgia possibilities and the limitations of
with countries where blogging is possibly the only technology. It may just stay like that
source of independent news like, say, Iran”, Orden- for some time to come, even though
idze adds. Western donors might wish other-
Funders and supporters could learn from that. wise.
There is no general benefit of a technology without
a specific context and people making use of it – in
ways that are often unintended by their designers.
It requires a deep understanding of what purpose
certain instruments serve in a given situation and
community of activists. Such analyses have to
include cultural, economic, social, and political
factors. They cannot rely on assumed benefits and
comparison studies only. They also have to pay
attention to potential drawbacks such as resistance
from local workers who might loose their liveli-
hoods due to, for instance, the “benefits” of cloud
computing.
The event-driven principles of modern develop-
ment aid may not help either. External influences
can syphon off funding at any time, like the deve-
lopments in Iran or Afghanistan. Mark Skogen, pro-
ject manager for the USAID-funded IREX agency
implementing the Internet Access and Training
Programme (IATP) in Georgia, suspects as much.
“[It] may in part have something to do with geo-
graphic priorities. […] We had more telecenters in
the past, but are now down to five in the major
cities.”
The social media hold the potential to help to deal
with one of the major challenges of our time: the
 >

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Photo: Franziska Holz

we_special_/ 

tags > urbanization, demographic change, climate change, gentrification,

energy, grassroots politics

The
Urban
Revolution

Niels Boeing

Niels Boeing is a journalist in Hamburg. Travels through Asia and Africa spawned his interest in globalization but also convinced him
that every change for the better has to start locally. He is a member of the group “LOMU – local organized multitude” (www.lomu.net)
that organises social experiments in public space and is also active in Hamburg’s network “Recht auf Stadt” (www.rechtaufstadt.net).
He fully agrees with John Holloway that the new challenge is to “change the world without taking power”.
Photo: Franziska Holz / RAS_parade
The big city has always been both
dream and nightmare. The dream:
if you can make it there, you’ll make
it anywhere. The nightmare: if you
don’t make it there, you’re “down and
out” as George Orwell described so
poignantly in his eponymous novel
from . Yet for millions of urban
dwellers the nightmare looms ever
larger as a cohort of trends make
cities increasingly unsustainable in
every sense – socially, economically
and environmentally. Now, for the
first time in history, more than half of
the world’s population lives in cities.
In  about  percent of them
will spend their lives in urban agglo-
merations, according to a UN forecast.
What kind of lives will they lead if
things go on repeating the pattern of
the past?

We have to do something, we must change our

cities – is a clarion call resonating round many cities
across the world today. This is not just a call to
action because people are already acting and say-
ing “we have a right to the city”. Take, for instance,
Hamburg in Germany.

This might seem an unlikely cradle for the new

unrest. After all, isn’t it one of the richest cities in
Europe? A vibrant and exciting place to be? And
didn’t it kick-start the Beatles’ career when they
played in the red light and clubbing district that
attracts countless tourists each year? The port of
Hamburg, the second largest in Europe, goes from
strength to strength while Hamburg itself bristles
with smart new media and advertising and is now
home to one of Europe’s largest construction sites,
the Hafencity, where a completely new flagship
portside neighborhood is rising from scratch.

But all that’s the view from the outside: checked

from the inside, Hamburg seems rolling down the
same wrong track as many other cities now.
Certainly, the problems of cities in the global South
are much direr than those of their Northern coun-
terparts. But north or south, the dynamics of un-
healthy trends remain the same.
 

The issues: urban sell-out and the energy crisis

Let’s start with housing. In the past  years public

housing in Hamburg has dropped by over %
(from around , units to just over ,).
At the same time rents have rocketed, especially in
former working-class or derelict inner city areas.
And the number of one-person households has
shot up dramatically – one of the key demographic
changes in industrialized countries in the past
decades which puts further pressure on rents as
living space becomes in increasingly short supply.

The effects of such trends are referred to as

“gentrification”, a term coined by the British socio-
logist Ruth Glass in the early s. Gentrification
means a process in which people are forced out
of their neighborhoods by a bullish unregulated
real estate market and replaced by “gentry”, a term
which used to mean the lesser landed English
nobility but which in this context refers to the
young urban professionals who can afford to pay
the prohibitive rents.

Originally endemic to New York and London,

gentrification has long since spread to other cities
around the world. But in the past  years some-
thing fundamental has changed as not only the
enterprise sector but cities too start to feel the heat
from globalization and join the competition for
investors and so-called “high potentials”. How do
you make your mark on the global playing field?
By developing your city and making it irresistible
for investors and the well-to-do. As Hamburg has
done.

Hamburg sold off large swathes of urban real estate

to the highest bidder in a move to built more shiny
office towers and luxury apartment blocks, printing
building licenses for private owners with similar
intentions, particularly in disadvantaged inner city
areas. The results were self-evident as city-center
rents rose to astronomical new levels.

Cities are notorious energy-guzzlers and growing

cities have an even greater need for power. So it’s
not surprising that “boomtown Hamburg” – as one
German magazine put it in  – also turned
to tackle its energy supply problem. Yet the self-
styled “Growing City” opted for fossil fuel energy
at a time when it was already apparent that fossil
 we_special_/

disregarded out of hand, the energy problem

comes full circle and touches on both the housing
issue and the climate change problem.

The idea: a right to the city

For a while these developments went largely un-

challenged. There were signs of patchy disgruntle-
Photo: Arne Bratenstein / RAS_parade_soziale_stadt

ment as various citizens’ groups started to take

action in their neighborhoods against various
major projects. Yet this did not result in a move-
ment in that captured public attention. Last year,
however, things changed.

In April  a memo of secret negotiations

between local politicians and an investor was
leaked that revealed plans to demolish period
houses in a poor neighborhood near the Hamburg
port to make way for yet another apartment block.
This was not just any old neighborhood but one

fuels – with their high CO emissions – were no

Photo: Martin Heger / RAS_parade_komm_in_die_gänge

reasonable future option for a world facing climate
change. Even so, plans for a major new coal-fired
plant were still announced.

For greater efficiency it was planned to use the

excess heat from operations for district heating and
a pipeline through two inner city districts was
commissioned that cut a public park in two. New
housing was also planned for densification of
existing residential areas in a move that did nothing
to mitigate the problem of soaring rents. At this
point, when existing urban green space is further
diminished and renewable energy sources are

with a long history of urban resistance. And its

residents reacted by making the plans public and
mobilizing protest. Soon the area was fluttering
with yellow “NO BNQ” pennants (BNQ is the acro-
nym of the investment project).

In June various initiatives from across the city

organized a joint demonstration that brought ,
people onto the streets. That was only the begin-
ning. One week later they convened in the newly
founded “Centro Sociale”, a social cooperative that
gives space for non-commercial neighborhood
activities (in notably short supply in Hamburg),
under the banner of “Recht auf Stadt” – a right to
Photo: Theo Bruns the city.
we_special_/ 

“A right to the city” is a concept developed by the

French sociologist Henri Lefebvre in the late s
when he formulated his critique of post-war urba-
nism, its ubiquitous consumerism, and the muta-
tion of the public spaces of streets into a “series of
shop windows”. Lefebvre saw urbanization as an in-
exorable, inevitable process which could be turned
into something truly liberating by granting the
“right to the city” to all its denizens. By this Lefebvre
meant the right to appropriation, access, difference
and centrality. Urban elites can exercise such rights
effortlessly as they are associated with a level of
disposable money which remains beyond the reach
of the majority of people. Should such a state of
affairs be tolerated? Photo: Theo Bruns / RAS_parade

city’s press. Significantly enough, no police squads

were sent in to vacate the buildings as had in-
famously happened in the wave of squatting in the
s.

This was because the public were largely sympa-

thetic to the artist-squatters’ stance since the
fundamental question behind the squatting – is this
city on the right track? – made solid sense. People
were indeed asking themselves which was prefera-
ble – a city of car parks and ever more glitz or a city
of affordable urban spaces. Without the economic

Photo: Theo Bruns

crisis, general public reaction might have been
different, but the recession had deeply unsettled
many people. This is now not the best time for
Responses: taking action urban visions of yesterday that provide no satisfying
solutions for the sustainable city of tomorrow.
The idea of a right to the city caught on with the
grassroots initiatives. Two months later it finally
emerged into the public eye. On a fine summer’s
day in late August, some  artists and activists
took the right to access into their own hands by
occupying the last remaining buildings in the
“Gängeviertel”, Hamburg’s th century working
class district close to the city center. This city pro-
perty – vacant for years and in a seriously dilapida-
ted condition – had been sold to a Dutch investor
and was scheduled for demolition to make way for
the standard brand of up-market architecture.

The activists opened a giant art exhibition in the

buildings and demanded that the city council with-
draw from the sell-out. Famous personalities from
Hamburg’s culture and art scene came in support
Photo: Tobias Boeing / Gentropoly
of the protest squat which caused quite a stir in the
Photo: Theo Bruns Since that time much has happened in Hamburg.
 initiatives have set up the “Recht auf Stadt” net-
work that spans not just various city neighborhoods
but a variety of social environments well from
anarchist to working and middle class. This is some-
thing distinctly new which cannot be dismissed as
merely a case of “the usual suspects”. The network
has organized public “district assemblies” and
street parades, and also taken some direct action
all of which is reported in the media in unexpec-
tedly appreciative tones.
Small wonder then that Hamburg’s politics are
buzzing, at least for the moment. The city has reac-
quired the historic “Gängeviertel” from the Dutch
investor and is negotiating a new concept with the
artists in a move that would have been unthinkable
a year ago. The pipeline of the coal power plant has
been stopped by court order after one of the
initiatives and an environmental organization filed
an action against it. Districts are planning at least
partial regulation of rent hikes while – incredu-
lously enough – urban development experts and
critical gentrification researchers are suddenly
being invited to speak before municipal parliament
sessions. The political class too has taken up the
“right to the city” as a discussion topic, albeit in a
rather less serious mode.
New urban unrest: a global theme
On the international level all this might not be too
spectacular as Hamburg is a latecomer there, even
though the city is considered as a forerunner in Ger-
many itself. However, it does repeat a pattern that
can be seen in other cities, like Tel Aviv, for instance,
where the Ir Lekulanu (“A city for all”) movement
brings together people from radically opposite po-
sitions in the political spectrum – from communists
to members of the Likud – who set aside the Israel-
Palestine conflict to focus on pressing urban issues
like truly affordable housing, education, trans-
portation for all and transparent fiscal politics.
Ir Lekulanu also organizes political debates in
neighborhood forums and its first major break-
through was truly spectacular when in late 
it won  percent of the seats in the Tel Aviv parlia-
ment.
In the US the “Right to the City” movement
(Lefebvre once again) is active in seven metro-
politan areas, raising such demands as speculation-
free housing, and the right to community control
of politics and economic and environmental justice.
Across Brazil the “Sem Teto” movement of home-
less workers has addressed similar issues of mis-
guided urban policy-making since the late s.
In an increasing number of cities people are no
longer prepared to accept top-down-politics.
The common themes shared by all these move-
ments are the call for true self-determination,
a deep distrust of the urban political class and the
desire for a quality of life that is not dictated by
fossil-fuelled neo-liberalism. It is the dream of a new
city that aspires to compact difference not homo-
geneity and liberation not control.
If and how the problems of demographics, eco-
nomic crises, climate change and unsustainable
energy systems can be solved, nobody can say for
certain. However, what we can be sure of is that any
solutions must come from the cities and that it’s a
question of democracy. In his book “The Urban
Revolution” Henri Lefebvre wrote: “The passivity of
those involved, their silence, their reticent prudence
are an indication of the absence of urban demo-
cracy, that is, concrete democracy. Urban revolution
and concrete (developed) democracy coincide.”
These words were written in . In  more
than ever we can clearly hear the sound of things
to come.
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>

Photo: Christine Grau

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tags > global voices, citizen media, media, journalism, BBC

When
Media and
Citizen Media
Meet

Solana Larsen

Solana Larsen is the managing editor of Global Voices Online. Before that she was an editor with the global politics Website
openDemocracy.net for nearly five years. She has an MA in international journalism from City University in London, and taught
a postgraduate journalism class about illegal immigration at New York University in . She is Danish-Puerto Rican and lives
in New York.
 we_special_/

Anyone who still doubts whether the mainstream media is in crisis, has never
been to a media industry conference. Participants always flock in droves to
sessions on how new media might help mainstream media regain trust and
audience and develop new revenue streams. I’m the managing editor of a
Website named Global Voices that tracks what bloggers are talking about
worldwide. My colleagues and I are often invited to these conferences to share
our perspectives on what lies beyond the land of ‘old media’.
we_special_/
Perhaps the fact that mainstream media corpora-
tions are looking to a non-profit organization with
no physical address for inspiration should give you
an indication of how deep the crisis is. But it can’t
all be bad news. I’m one of those people who is
optimistic about what might come out of this shake
up of the media industry, and I believe mainstream
media is thinking more and more creatively about
how to use the Web because they have finally been
convinced that it’s useful and rewarding rather than
out of some kind of desperation. At least that is
what it seems like looking at our own experiences
of looking for ways to combine citizen media with
mainstream media.
I don’t need to tell you about how Iranian bloggers
used Twitter during post-election protests, or how
Haitians used the Internet in the aftermath of the
earthquake. You’ve probably heard it before. But
if you think of all the dramatic events taking place
in the world right now, you might wonder why we
don’t hear stories like this more often from other
parts of the world too. Will the balance tip away
from mainstream media when it comes to setting
the agenda? Attracting a mass global audience may
soon become less dependent on gaining main-
stream media coverage first.
Global Voices focuses mainly on developing world
citizen media and one of our goals is to seek ways
to integrate what bloggers are saying in places like
Thailand or Madagascar into international foreign
stories. There is a lot to say about how local citizen
media can impact both national and foreign news
reporting. But the point I’d like to make is that the
success stories in less developed parts of the world
should be indicative of what might work for media
in richer parts of the world too.
Mobilizing online citizen media
At Global Voices, I help manage a virtual newsroom
of bloggers who report on world events by quoting
and translating from blogs and citizen media world-
wide. Global Voices was created five years ago at
Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet
research as a response to the fact that even though
the world wide Web connects almost everyone on
the planet, most people still seem prefer to read
and write about their own local issues. We’re
trying to help foster a global conversation, and
support free speech for all. As our slogan goes,
“The world is talking. Are you listening?”

Over the years, we’ve created a global community
of more than  volunteer bloggers and transla-
tors who all work with out part-time editors. We
report on the activities and the topics that concern
bloggers and citizen journalists worldwide – with
special emphasis on developing countries and
marginalized voices. For instance, what do gay
bloggers in Uganda think about their government’s
stance on homosexuality? Or how are Thai bloggers
preparing for a citywide Bangkok protest of citizens
dressed in red t-shirts?
So this is citizen journalism of a kind that begins on
the personal Websites of a few individuals, and is
adapted into an article that tells a broader story.
Over the five years since Global Voices was founded
we’ve experimented with numerous approaches
to integrating these kind of global citizen perspec-
tives into mainstream media.
In March I spent two weeks working with BBC News
Website editors in London. The goal of our project
was to explore how citizen media could help inform
their foreign news coverage and vice versa. We
added links to Global Voices directly from BBC news
stories when it could help add context and we also
published free standing stories. One example of
when this worked well was during an extremely
heated political debate in the upper house of par-
liament in India about a bill to increase the number
of female lawmakers across the country, spilled
over into online discussion in Indian blogs and on
Twitter. The straight news story left you with almost
a black and white view of the controversy, while
the Indian bloggers shared perspectives that
showed why even feminists might be against the
bill.
Among our weaknesses were imperfections in arti-
cle format, and relative lack of speed compared to
a / news organization like the BBC. The colla-
boration was very useful in pointing out some of
the things Global Voices could do better, including
forward planning. On the other hand it renewed my
feeling that what we do is valuable because it’s dif-
ferent from what they do – especially because we
are more inclusive of stories that world citizens
themselves tell us are important. We don’t believe
that citizen media exists in opposition to main-
stream journalism. The two need to work together.

Challenging old working methods
Among several initiatives to spring out of the
Global Voices community is an outreach project
called Rising Voices that has provided micro-grant
funding for new blogging projects in marginalized
communities to help address the digital divide that
exists even in our own global community. We have
helped launch  projects (of which  are still
active) in places like in Liberia, Yemen, Colombia,
and Ukraine.
One Rising Voices project is in Madgascar: the
FOKO Madagascar Blog Club. This was a group of
socially minded young people from Madagascar
that first got together to train youth in blogging in
. Much of the teaching was done from abroad
over instant messenger with Malagasy diaspora
bloggers in the United States. The young people
started doing cool things. A first breakthrough mo-
ment was when one of the bloggers met a young
woman who’s baby was in desperate need of an
operation and decided to use her blog for fundrai-
sing. They raised the money, and were able to help.
Many months later, political events in Madagascar
led to rioting and killing in the streets. It was never
intended for the bloggers to act as a kind of news
service, but they had the newly learned skills to do
it. In those days of turbulence, many Malagasy out-
side the country relied on blogger reports to know
what was going on. As international interest in the
story grew, the bloggers ended up in newspapers,
television and radio in both the United States,
France, and worldwide. They provided a combina-
tion of first-hand reporting and analysis at a time
when mainstream in Madagascar media was based,
threatened, and scared of threats from both army
and political supporters.
It was a full-blown coup, but once things calmed
down, the bloggers hosted a meeting to discuss
their activities. It was attended by several journa-
lists, former journalists, and even a former minister
of culture. A spirit of collaboration was fostered,
and their influence was cemented. In February of
this year, bloggers from FOKO organized a work-
shop in blogging and Twitter for journalists and
social workers.
I think this example shows how citizens can get
involved in helping to change the media agenda
both locally and internationally. A lot of the time it’s
the bloggers who are ahead of mainstream media
and need to teach the value of engaging with
we_special_/
online communities. We have seen numerous
examples of bloggers taking on this leadership role
in their own countries, and also of media integra-
ting the words or perspectives of bloggers to try
and tap into the energy and new conversations that
live on the Internet.
As an international community Global Voices tends
to focus mostly on instances where bloggers and
online communities are heard in international
media. One of our earliest funders was the news
agency Reuters, and our co-founder was the former
Beijing bureau chief for CNN. However, this is not
the only criteria of success for citizen journalism –
nor is it usually the end goal for the people involved
in the projects. They are local citizens and will usu-
ally have the best interests of their community at
the center of their concerns.
Connecting with communities
In a developing world context where it can be com-
plicated to deal with lack of electricity, slow Inter-
net, and often long travel – people need a very
strong sense of purpose to keep going. I sometimes
feel that evangelists of citizen journalism get car-
ried away and imagine that people just do citizen
journalism for the sake of doing it. Or that if you
have a newspaper or a Website, a whole bunch of
people will submit lots of free content and photos
if you ask them to. Not to mention that it will be
interesting to read.
We need to be completely honest that citizen
media projects sometimes do not produce the most
exciting stories. You can train a dozen people how
to blog and only one or two of them will be really
good. You can even have a clear goal for your citi-
zen media project, but you can’t expect that people
will always write what you think they will. There is
nothing magical about a blog. Most of the people
we work with at Global Voices don't think of them-
selves in terms of journalism. Part of the idea is
for people to find a venue for self-expression and
to give them the tools and flexibility to rise to a
challenge when the occasion calls for it – whether
it’s for the world cup, a cultural event, or a national
crisis. What people may lack in technical skills or
writing finesse, they usually more than readily make
up for with passion and integrity.
One way that online citizen media is really coming
into focus in the developing world is through in-
itiatives that aim to increase citizen engagement in
we_special_/
FOKO Blog Club bloggers in Madagascar celebrating their one year anniversary in . Several were inspired to start blogging to
correct the outside impression that Madagascar is anything like a Disney movie of the same name. Photo: by FOKO Madagascar
their own societies. Rising Voices has created a
new Website and research team that is mapping
these projects called Technology for Transparency.
In Guatemala, representatives from more than 
organizations put the spotlight on the selection
process of nominees for key public offices. In
Ghana, an online information portal is covering
and monitoring elections in ten African countries
and in three languages. In Israel, citizens have con-
verted the Tel Aviv municipal budget from PDF to a
spreadsheet format with visualizations. Is it citizen
journalism? It's certainly powerful public informa-
tion of a kind that previously required journalists
to help tell the story. In this regard citizens and jour-
nalists can do a lot of good by working together.
In seeking solutions to a mainstream media crisis,
it would be silly to think that the same solutions will
work for everyone. One thing worth noting in the
media landscape of the United States is that there
is one sector of the media industry that is less
affected by the economic crisis and media closures.
A survey of ethnic media in the United States com-
missioned by New America Media in  (that
means the Chinese, Spanish, African-American
newspapers, broadcast etc) showed significant

growth since . New America Media attribute
it to the fact that these publications are actively
serving and representing specific communities,
have small budgets; and don’t rely on big corpora-
tions for advertisements. Altogether the ethnic
media reach  million citizens in the United States,
so it’s not an insignificant sector in a population of
 million.
Have U.S. newspapers filled with newswire stories
and syndicated columns strayed too far from the
traditional ‘old media’ pillar of public service? My
point is of course not that all news media should
be divided along ethnic or geographic lines, but
that journalists and editors really need to ask them-
selves who they are serving for what purpose, and
whether they are delivering true value for their
audience or community. One way to identify this is
to engage and reconnect openly with readers in
meaningful ways over the Internet. Chances are
that monitoring how citizens are engaging with
each other about important public interest issues
on the Web will provide inspiration for what a
professional media organization may be able to
help do even better.
 >

>

>

>

Jenin refugee camo / Copyright CJ

we_special_/ 

tags > Ismael Khateeb, Heart of Jenin, Cinema Jenin, Marcus Vetter,
Normalization, Cultural Intifada

It’s all about

People
Cinema Jenin

Marcus Vetter

Marcus Vetter is one of the founder of Cinema Jenin. Born in , director and producer. Marcus studied ‘European Business Studies’
in Worms, Buenos Aires and Madrid. After a work placement at ‘Bavaria Film’ he decided to start another degree in ‘Media Sciences’
at the University of Tübingen. Since  he has worked as a freelance editor, writer and director mostly for the German SWR TV
channel. He has directed numerous primetime documentaries which show regularly at international festivals.
 we-magazine >

Marcus, your last film was for ARTE. It’s called

“Heart of Jenin”. Can you give us a short introduc-
tion to it?

Marcus Vetter >

I was asked by a production company to make this

film – it was not my own idea. And it was not at all
what I expected. The film is about a father – Ismael
Khatib – whose son was killed by the Israeli army in
Jenin, a refugee camp, and who decided to donate
his son’s organs to Israeli children.
Working together with an Israeli director on a
Palestinian issue was a very interesting challenge.
When I first came to Israel to work on the film,
everyone told me that Jenin is a no-go area! All
Israelis are scared to death about this city. Just
mention Jenin on a bus or somewhere and people
will turn their heads – and you can see and actually
feel their fear. People said I would be killed or kid-
napped if I went to Jenin because there were other
journalists kidnapped in Gaza at the time. So we
waited two weeks. But then I decided to go. I shot
in Jenin with my Palestinian team without my
Israelian co-director.
And what I saw there was totally different from
what the news clips were showing or what people
had told me about it.

we-magazine >

Before we go on to talk about Jenin, perhaps you

could tell us why the story of “Heart of Jenin” is so
special?

Marcus Vetter >

The story’s so special because there’s such a lot of

hatred between Israelis and Palestinians. A father
loses his son who’s shot down by the Israeli army,
and he decides through his son’s organs to reach
out to Israeli children. This reach out is something
very special and it really echoed all around the
world. Even in Israel the story made it into the news
program.
Such things can happen in special moments when
human beings forget their hatreds. It was a sign –
a hand reached out to the other side.
Child playing in the refugee camp / Copyright CJ
we-magazine >

What did the Israelian people say?

Marcus Vetter >

First of all people in Israel didn’t expect something

like this to happen. But what they said In Israel was
that this was just one single man and if only
everyone in Palestine could be more like Ismael
Khatid, ready to reach out their hand, then there
would be no problem.
But that’s simply not true! This is what I discovered
when I went to Jenin. They’re very welcoming,
warm-hearted people – first and foremost they’re
people.

we-magazine >

What kind of challenges do you see in this area?

Marcus Vetter >

On the one hand, Israel has made a lot of mistakes.

They are loosing their solidarity in the world. When
I screened the “Heart of Jenin” last year, before the
Gaza war, people liked it a lot. The film was lucky
enough to make its way through all these different
lobbies and appeal directly to the people. There
were some people in the audience who said per-
haps it’s a bit one-sided and takes up the Palesti-
nian cause too much. But nowadays nobody would
dare to say anything negative about the film. This
means that one of the challenges now is the
waning of sympathy for the Israeli people. This puts
Israel in a situation where it’s vulnerable.
And on the other side there are Palestinians who
see that Israel is weak. And this is dangerous be-
cause if they see that Israel is weak, suddenly they
feel that they can solve the situation and so tend
more towards fundamentalism. This is what I have
seen – but not with the majority of people in Pale-
stine. No, the majority of people – and this is my
deep feeling – don’t want a third Intifada. Right
now they’re standing in the middle.
So the big challenge for this region is to handle
this situation – fuelled by the mistakes of the Israe-
lian government itself – and by the same token the
growing potential of fundamentalism on the Pale-
stine side. Israel will never ever except a second
Holocaust. And this makes for a dangerous and
highly explosive situation.

we-magazine >
So why did you go to Jenin even though everybody
recommended you to stay away?
Marcus Vetter >
I went to Jenin because I’m a documentary filmma-
ker and if I’m making a film about someone who
comes from Jenin, then I have to go to Jenin or I
simply don’t do the film. I will not do interviews by
phone like I was recommended to do!
we-magazine >
What happened when you got there?
Marcus Vetter >
I met a great number of extraordinarily welcoming,
warm-hearted people. I was totally astonished at
how “naive” they were – I was astonished that I
could take a taxi without being cheated – unlike in
Tel Aviv or Cairo. It’s a very innocent city because
there isn’t that much tourism.
But later on I also discovered some problematic is-
sues in this society caused by the circumstances
which they are forced to live in. It's hard to gain
trust where there isn't much trust at all. And as I see
it, there’s not much friendship. People are very
quick to use the word “friendship” but true friend-
ship is very rare in my experience. They’re also very
atomised because there is so little money that
everyone wants what the other person has. If you
have a good position, you might be blackmailed
and replaced.
Only the people and their way of being, their warm
hearts, I really liked a lot. And I fell in love with
Jenin and what I want to make clear with our pro-
ject Cinema Jenin is that Jenin is not a place you
should be scared of. Its people are not terrorists!
we-magazine >
But that’s what the place is known for, that’s what
the news delivers!
we_special_/
Marcus Vetter >
Exactly!
we-magazine >
You said at the beginning that “Heart of Jenin” had
totally changed your life. But usually when you
make a film, you go and shoot and produce the
movie, and it’s a success or not, and you follow up
a bit and then move on to the next project. But
you’re now trying to establish something down
there. So what happened to you after you shot the
movie?
Marcus Vetter >
I’d met some people and I could see by looking in
their eyes that they needed a helping hand. I didn’t
want to leave this place without giving them my
hand.
we-magazine >
So how do you reach out?
Marcus Vetter >
The key point for me was, is and will be Ismael’s de-
cision to donate his son’s organs to Israeli children.
When you see the film you will understand that it
wasn’t solely his own decision. Many people were
involved! And that’s key! It was the nurse who
talked to him so well about what it means to do-
nate organs. Then he asked Zakaria Zbeidy of the
Al Akza brigade, if he accepted, and he did even
though he is someone who fights with arms.
Zbeidy said if this is your way you should follow it
and go it with God, I will accept it. This was a very
brave decision on his part since other terrorists or
freedom fighter groups could easily have said
“What are you doing?” Further on he asked the
Mufti of Jenin who interpreted the whole thing in a
favourable light of the Koran.
So the fact that this would never have happened if
everyone involved in this chain hadn’t each taken a
brave decision was also pretty astonishing for me.
This wasn’t a single man’s decision which is the
good thing about it because one single hero is not
enough. We don’t need just one hero. This is a
major problem of our time.
we_special_/ 

Jerusalem, family Levinson / Copyright EIKON

 we_special_/

Jenin City, Store / Copyright CJ

we_special_/
we-magazine >
Tell us, what the project Cinema Jenin is about
and how does it handle the challenges you’ve just
described?
Marcus Vetter >
What we did was to reopen an old cinema closed
down in  and give the kids in the streets a
vision and something to believe in. Cinema means
a lot, means a return to normality which people
need. The kids on the streets, in the refugee camps
need a vision. But it’s not just a cinema for kids,
it’s for their parents and grown-ups as well.
Cinema isn’t just about story-telling; it means
the electricians, workers, craftsmen who build it.
Cinema means translation, filmmaking, producing,
synchronisation – there’s hardly any skill which is
not involved in cinema. And the good thing about
a cinema is that it has an actual place you can see.
It’s not anonymous like a TV station. It’s a place
you can visit. I think there is nothing better than a
cinema for creating the jobs, dreams, visions which
are what the people need.
But what is also just as important is that interna-
tional people – “we” – and Palestinian people –
“they” – want to come together in a joint venture to
build a platform where people can express them-
selves. Why come together? Because this region is
totally divided: the Arab world is totally splintered;
the Israelis who are cousins to the Arabs are totally
splintered. So we need to begin with ourselves and
not just pump money into the region and leave. We
need to create something sustainable, in our case
this platform Cinema Jenin.
we-magazine >
If I got you right Marcus, Cinema Jenin is all about
trust. Give trust, step back and give the other a
chance by stepping back yourself. So your dream
is that is what the whole city has to do. If we can
persuade the whole city ...
Marcus Vetter >
If you can persuade these people with the story that
happened in Jenin with Ismael where the whole city
lent a hand to say “OK, we’ll be smarter now. We’ll
step back this time and do something even though

the occupation army is still in Jenin!” – you can’t
imagine how much the whole world would be in
sympathy with such a move.
Our aim is to come together and stick together:
first Palestinians and internationals in Jenin, then ...
A few days ago we got a phone call from an esta-
blished film school, the established Sam Spiegel
Film School in Jerusalem. Fakhri Hamad and the
director met up at the Cinema for Peace Gala when
we won the Cinema for Peace Award in Berlin. And
somehow they got on with each other, it was
almost like a friendship. And they were here in
Jenin and they spent the night...
we-magazine >
The Israelis?
Marcus Vetter >
Yes, the Israelis. It was the first time, it’s so seldom
that anyone dares to come to Jenin. And now we’ve
had a phone call from the director who asked if
he could come to Jenin on th April and bring 
students with him!
we-magazine >
That’s a huge step!
Marcus Vetter >
That means that now they have trust in us, in
Cinema Jenin, in the city. If the city would accept,
then it’s a huge step because it means that the city
will take care that nothing happens to  Israelis
coming to Jenin.
The whole city would give its consent and not just
one person. This means a lot. Then there’s no hero
anymore, it’s all the people, and that makes a big
difference. I hope it will happen some day ...
http://www.cinemajenin.org
 >

>

>

Photo: www.wired.com
we_special_/ 

tags > better place, end of oil, environment, no batteries,

new business model

On a
Mission to
End Oil

Shai Agassi

Shai Agassi is the founder and CEO of Better Place. He is focused on one of this century’s biggest challenges, moving the world from
oil-based to sustainable transportation. Agassi works with government leaders, auto manufacturers, energy companies and others to
make his vision – zero-emission vehicles powered by electricity from renewable sources – a reality in countries around the globe.

I heard Shai Agassi’s story for the first time in
January . It was at DLD Conference in Munich.
Since then I’ve wondered about all the people he
has already hooked up with: mayors, CEOs, investors,
statesmen, car dealers ... incredible carbon foot-
prints ... At one point, everybody marveled about
Shai’s ability to convince you that the answers to
the most challenging problems are easy and ob-
vious. He tells you the story, and it sounds so simple.
Why don’t we have it today? Why isn’t it here
already?
Three years later, in the beginning of , Agassi’s
vision can show its first results.
But let’s start with Shai Agassi, formerly known as
the next SAP CEO. The topic: green transportation.
Agassi is the founder and CEO of Better Palce PLC,
a new infrastructure creator and operator for the
management of country-wide electric vehicle fleets.
Better Place PLC works with governments, car ma-
kers, and financial institutes creating a large scale
framework for rapid transformation of transport
systems away from fossil based energy to non-pol-
luting oil free solutions. Green transportation for a
Better Place called earth! Better Place is not in fact
another VIP going green. No, it is the astonishing
business model behind the idea and the simple fact
that batteries are not included!
Batteries are not included!
Electric cars have long been a fetish object for
environmentalists: electricity can be produced from
wind, solar or nuclear sources with little or no CO.
Yet all these alternatives suffer from a common pro-
blem: refueling. The most advanced electric car cur-
rently for sale, the Tesla Roadster, runs for no more
than  miles on a charge, and others can do only
 miles or so before they need two or more hours
of plug-in time to recharge. The problem of refu-
eling looms so large that fans of electric cars have
a phrase for it: range anxiety, the nagging fear that
you’ll run out of juice and be stranded at the side of
the road before you can find a charge spot. It is the
main reason why most people, even while they
cheer on the development of low- or no-emissions
vehicles, are leery of actually buying one. And if
people won’t buy them, carmakers won’t make
them.
Agassi's solution is a dual system. Better Place aims
to construct a worldwide network of millions of
small-scale “charging spots,” parking-meter-like
we_special_/
posts scattered around downtown areas and along
highways. But crucially, Better Place is also building
roadside robotized battery-swap stations that
provide fresh, fully charged batteries without
having to wait hours for a charge. You drive by and
a robot will change your battery quickly. Agassi
says: “If we can’t do this in less time than it takes to
fill your gasoline tank, we don’t have a company.”
The robot is designed to reach under the chassis of
an electric car, pluck its battery out and replace it
with a new one, in much the same way as you’d put
new batteries in a child’s toy. At a presentation in
front of a group of investors and employees the
robot – a squat platform that moves on four dinner-
plate-size white wheels – scuttled back and forth
along a -foot long set of metal rails. At one end
of the rails, a huge blue battery, the size of a large
suitcase, sat suspended in a frame. As we watched,
the robot zipped up to the battery, made a nearly
in-audible click, and pulled the battery downward.
It ferried the battery over to the other end of the
rails, dropped it off, picked up a new battery, hissed
back over to the frame and, in one deft movement,
snapped the new battery in the place of the old
one. The total time:  seconds.
The Business Model
“If I can give you miles in a more convenient, chea-
per way than gasoline, you will take them,” Agassi
says. “If your neighbor is driving an electric car and
paying me only $ a week for the electricity, you’re
going to buy an electric car, too. If I do it without
killing your kids and the planet, then it won’t even
matter if it’s cheaper or not; you will just do it.”
Better Place came up with an astonishing business
model, a model which is actually borrowed from
the mobile phone industry. In the same way that
wireless operators deploy a network of cell towers
to provide an area of mobile phone coverage,
Better Place will establish a network of charging
spots and battery exchange stations to provide
ubiquitous access to electricity to power electric
vehicles. The company will partner with car makers
and source batteries so that consumers who sub-
scribe to the network can get subsidized vehicles
which are cheaper to buy and operate than today’s
fuel-based cars. Consumers will still own their cars
and will have multiple car models to choose from.
What does this mean in numbers? Can a company
become profitable based on this model? No doubt
Photo: www.thefutureisawesome.com we_special_/
about that. Powering a car by electricity — even
relatively expensive “clean” energy like wind or
solar — costs far less than powering it by gasoline.
And with the United States market for automobile
gas at roughly $ billion, Agassi figured that a
company controlling a world network of charging
stations would become so profitable so quickly that
it could subsidize its customers’ electric cars, much
the way mobile companies give out free phones to
people who sign two-year contracts ... e.g.  USD
for  miles,  USD for  miles ... car model
A:  USD, car model B  USD, model C  USD.
Dream on or translate into action?
You can call it extraordinarily bold, requiring car-
makers to fundamentally rethink the way they build
cars. But the time might be just right! They are
collapsing anyway ... so Agassi’s solution might be
a huge opportunity in crises for them.
In barely two years, Agassi has persuaded investors
to contribute $ million, and several cities,
countries and states – including Israel, Denmark,
Australia, Tokyo. The French automaker Renault is
spending $ million over three years to develop
a car with swappable batteries, to be released in
. In Israel, where Better Place has already in-

stalled hundreds of its signature blue car-charging
stations, Agassi is credited with convincing the
nation’s jaded political class that they have an
opportunity to actually wean their country off oil.
And now Agassi is targeting China – the largest
car country in the world – for a very good reason,
he says: “If China goes electric, the world will go
electric! It is as simple as this. The Chinese govern-
ment is great in executing such ideas, they are very
fast in deploying mass infrastructure. And they have
the money to do so. They put a  USD-incentive
on every electric car in particular focussed on
government vehicles and taxis, they are creating
a new city for electric cars between Beijing and
Tiangjing – the new Detroit if you want, they’ve
put down the budgets for all of the  major cities
to put the right infrastructure in place, they ban
gasoline cars from the cities. They are definitely
taking these ideas seriously. All of that is driven top-
down. But they are also creating a car industry bot-
tom-up. And when the Chinese have a consumer
product ... nobody can beat them in price! So once
the Chinese Market goes electric, the US has to go
electric, Europe has to go electric ... The Chinese
today have the ability to be the risk takers and
leaders and then the rest of the world will follow
them!”
 >

>

>

Photo: Jochi Ito

we_special_/ 

tags > sharism, China, censorship, environment, climate change,

social media tools

We Share.
We Do Not
Censor!

Isaac Mao

Isaac Mao is a blogger from the People’s Republic of China. He is co-founder of CNBlog.org and a co-organizer of the Chinese Blogger
Conference. In , he started the movement for adopting Chinese bloggers on overseas servers. He divides his time between
research, social works, business and technology. He was a Berkman Fellow /.

China is in many ways a huge future challenge – for
itself, its people and the world. Take a worldview of
China and the first thing that strikes you is the sheer
magnitude of the new economic super power.
There is no doubt that China is ready to act as a glo-
bal trendsetter and leader (see p.  of this issue
where Shai Agassi makes the same point with refe-
rence to China’s role in the electric car industry).
The Chinese government well knows how to exe-
cute sweeping ideas and rapidly mobilise mass
infrastructure. All the signs in China are set for rapid
relentless growth. But what is the price to be paid
for this? And who will pick up the tab?
Isaac Mao argues that every Chinese citizen –
regardless of whether they are members of the
Communist Party or not – will pay the price and that
everyone will be called on to make huge sacrifices.
But the question Isaac asks is whether such sacrifi-
ces are really necessary – whether there aren’t any
better ways to succeed. And his answer is yes there
are – with Sharism!
Isaac took an early leadership role in the Chinese
online community. His simple but far-reaching mis-
sion is to make China a better place to live in by sha-
ring worldwide knowledge! For him knowledge is
the key to a sustainable future of all the people of
China. In pursuit of this goal, he advocates provi-
ding people with uncensored access to the Internet
and he also wants to make them aware that the
government is censoring the net. His idea of
Sharism is thus a critical tool for abolishing the
Great Firewall of China.
Isaac Mao first introduced the term four years ago
to describe a way of sharing your work (everything)
within your social network (or public domain) while
still retaining all the rights you wish to retain. Sha-
rism can be practiced easily and at any time when
communicating with others – writing blogs, po-
sting photos or organizing offline meet-ups for
group discussions, etc. And if you don’t want to
practice it, you simply don’t share because Sharism
is based on a person’s own individual decision. Sha-
rism is actually a very simple idea and part of our
human nature. It should be practised on a daily
basis. Sharism is not an assault on other people’s
rights. It’s a very personalized mindset and practical
spirit. When you practise Sharism you can gradually
feel the change operating as you become more
we_special_/
open-minded, more knowledgeable, and as your
social capital increases. Because the more you share
the more you receive.
To translate the theory of Sharism into action, free
access to the Internet is of the essence. Sharism
itself is critical for overcoming censorship in China.
As Isaac Mao says, “There is a ridiculous race going
on about censorship in China. Those in power try
to get their hands on the very best technology
available. But those fighting censorship are actually
the ones with this technology and they are the very
ones who make it available to undermine the Great
Firewall of China. The very ones who share!”
That Sharism is indeed an effective force can be
seen from the following example: even though
Twitter is officially banned in China each Sunday
afternoon without fail the hash tag #GFW (= Great
Firewall of China) reaches the No. slot in the
Chinese Twitter charts – charts that are based on
Chinese IP-addresses. The Chinese “twittersphere”
is a vivid demonstration of how “easy” it is to by-
pass the system by sharing. A group of people wor-
king on technology tools shares them and their
ideas to give people uncensored access to the net.
Yet bypassing or helping to do so the Great Firewall
of China is actually a very dangerous enterprise
that can easily land people in prison or seriously
restrict the lives they lead. The government is
tightening the screws on this target group. So what
still leads them to combat censorship? Isaac Mao’s
view is that “For China as a whole it is very impor-
tant that all people have access to knowledge.
Knowledge is the key to a better life. If people know
and understand, they can start to act! And I am NOT
talking about a revolution; I am NOT talking about
overthrowing the government. I am talking about
access to basic knowledge for the average Chinese
citizen. People should know about the environ-
mental damage the incredible rate of economic
growth is bringing with it. They should know how
to deal with breast cancer. They should know about
the death of natural resources and the damage
done to nature. Chinese people need to become
aware of these problems. They need to know that
they exist. They need to know that censorship
exists. They need to gain awareness. Because if they
know they will understand. And if they understand
– they will act! And the more people act, the
greater is the probability that change for the better
we_special_/ 

Tagcloud by Isaac Mao: Chinese Censorship System and Society

will happen. If they don’t know, nothing will
happen.” So how can change really be achieved?
“Look,” Mao points out, “today only % of all
Chinese people have access to the Internet. And
they’re mainly on the east coast, the further you go
inland the rarer Internet access becomes. Even so,
China still is the world’s premier Internet country –
in terms of the absolute numbers of people with
access. Chinese is the most written language on the
net. Yet all this is just with a mere % of the
people. So imagine what would happen if the idea
of Sharism reaches just % of our online commu-
nity – it will make them a force to be reckoned with
practically overnight!”
meaning you gain points by sharing. And then
people can change their credit points into real cur-
rency. PayPal and adverts, to give but two examples,
can be embedded in hardware – and this is what
makes a business application based on an indivi-
dual decision to share or not to share. Imagine that
individuals can share via Facebook, Twitter and all
the other social media tools. This gives a huge
potential for increasing the capital of Sharism. And
this is the sort of pipeline we are now planning ...”

The idea of Sharism spreads by the mouth-to mouth

communication – online and offline. And it has now
caught the interest of entrepreneurs and business
angels as young successful Chinese business men
operating mainly out of Taiwan and Hong Kong are
planning to implement Sharism in their software,
hardware and business applications. Sharism soft-
ware is pretty easy to image – it means things
like Wikipedia or social translation platforms like
yeeyan.com. But what about the hardware? Isaac
Mao smiles and explains, “We want to design a
credit system in hardware so that people can easily
generate credits based on their sharing activities –
tags > Milagro, Argentina, Tupac Amaru, leadership, trust
Milagro
Nicolás Tereschuk
Nicolás Tereschuk is an Argentinean political scientist
and journalist. He is editor of a personal blog of politi-
cal discussion (http://vidabinaria.blogspot.com) and
co-editor of the collective blog http://artepolitica.com.
Sebastián Miquel
Sebastián Miquel is an Argentinean photographer and
political scientist. Works as a free-lance photographer.
Has developed the series “Abya Yala, Sons of The Land,
Documental Photography about Tupac Amaru”, expo-
sed at the Palais de Glace, in Buenos Aires.
All photographs copyrigt by Sebastián Miquel.
>

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
“Milagro” is Spanish for “miracle” which is what
many think Milagro Sala has accomplished. Like
other jobless groups in Argentina her organization,
Tumac Amaru (named after a revolutionary th
century Inca), received money from the government.
But unlike most of them, the organization of this
diminutive Indian woman has gained the love and
respect of her people.
After the Argentine economy recovered, the govern-
ment channeled money for food and housing to
social groups in poor regions of the country. Tupac
Amaru took a decision which proved to be the right
one: to empower all its members and make wise in-
vestment. They built two factories for bricks and
steel to reduce the cost of building new housing.
And their move paid dividends. In the northern
Jujuy province the government spends over $,
to build a family house whereas it costs Tupac Amaru
just $, and their houses are built at four times
the speeds of state-contracted construction com-
panies. Their logic of autonomy and intelligent
spending also ensures sustainability for the projects.
Another key aspect of the Tupac Amaru “philosophy”
is the way it seeks to give people true human rights,
to make them feel they can do as well in life as richer
people. For instance, they decided to build an aqua-
tic park in a neighborhood where people never
even dreamed of having a swimming pool. Or a park
for kids, with big dinosaurs and cartoon characters
figures that seems like Disney World to the boys
and girls of neighborhoods that were shanty towns
only a few years back. As they say, “The poor have
a right to fun”.
Many lives in one
Who is Milagro Sala? And why does she go against
the grain of traditional politics in North Argentina?
A native American Kolla, Milagro grew up in a
“white” family until she was . From that time on
she remembers being segregated from the highly
stratified and traditional Jujuy society where the
color of her skin was enough to keep her out of the
public pool where rich white kids played in the hot
northern summers. Her life was played out on the
streets where she quickly developed a familiarity
with drugs, poverty, violence and police harass-
ment. It was also the time when she realized that
we_special_/
she would never meet her biological mother, one
of her abiding dreams.
Since her first active involvement in politics, Sala
knew the truth of Juan Peron dictum that “organiza-
tion beats time”. She organized a protest for better
food and was arrested during a scuffle with local
police. Later on she became a public service official
and became involved in the trade union where she
fought against neoliberal reforms in Jujuy.
The Argentinean crash of  – a fall of over 
points on GNP – left the poor regions of the coun-
try clamoring for food and shelter and strengthened
solidarity between people in poor neighborhoods.
In the shanty towns around Buenos Aires and
the even poorer areas in the north, mothers were
desperate to feed their children and looked to
mutual self-help, government hand-outs and other
new ways, making it easier for leaders like Milagro
to bring people together. She was “trained” in the
s when various sections protested against the
neoliberal reforms – privatization, the open eco-
nomy and the dominance of the financial sector –
which caused a tripling of unemployment and in a
mere ten years a widening of the gap between the
richest and poorest sections of society from a factor
of  to a factor of . The then president Carlos
Menem was the “best disciple” of IMF policies and
privatization boosted the fortunes of foreign capital
companies while thousands of small businesses
went broke. Unemployment, inequality and the
corruption of public services (education, health,
justice) for the poor peaked in . With the eco-
nomy in deep recession, that year’s mid-term
elections were a defeat not only for the party of the
former president Fernando de la Rúa but for the
whole of the political class as large swathes of
voters protested against traditional political parties
by voting for Homer Simpson or other cartoon cha-
racters over actual candidates. When the govern-
ment fell in the middle of a major financial, political
and social crisis, the streets resounded with the cry
“All of them, go home!!”. The middle classes saw
their savings gobbled by bankers who were bailed
out by the state. Workers suffered as their salaries
were weakened by devaluation and inflation. And
the unemployed could not even make a living by
working in the informal “grey” economy.

Tupac Amaru
Tupac Amaru took off when Milagro Sala started to
organize her neighbors to feed the children of
starving families. “When we went on the streets to
demonstrate, we had good TV coverage but we still
had nothing to eat”, she remembers, *_speaking at
a local TV show._*
When the political turmoil of  passed, after an
economic recovery based on devaluation of the
peso and a boom in exports, the poorest people
started to receive government help which came in
a variety of channels but mainly from the ruling
Justicialista party. This was the time when the idea
of letting people build their own houses was first
floated. “We went to Buenos Aires to ask for money.
The government refused because we weren’t able
to show them any experience in this field – which
was actually true, we had none! We fought hard for
the funding though. We told them we had coope-
we_special_/
rative groups already formed, the skills needed and
the land”. Once the money was secured, a whole
organization was set up through the indefatigable
leadership of this Kolla native woman with  buil-
der groups defined and ready to receive materials
to start their job. Things went much better than
they would have done under a private contractor.
Milagro Sala led her people to a better use of public
funding and also tackled alcohol and drugs – two
issues which were endemic problems for the people
of the Arid Puna region. One of the obligations for
people joining Tupac Amaru is to avoid addiction
to alcohol and drugs and the best way of doing this,
as Sala says, is to give them stable employment.
Delinquency, unemployment and a lack of personal
projects were also major issues in the poor neigh-
borhoods of San Salvador de Jujuy yet through its
activities Tupac Amaru has actually lowered crime
figures in the region. To tackle the high school
drop-out rate, Tupac Amaru members must not
we_special_/
only go to school and learn to read and write but
are also encouraged to strive for the higher levels of
the educative system. “We need professionals to
serve in their own neighborhoods”, Milagro says
_*in a local documentary about her life*._ And in
terms of domestic violence, Tupac Amaru empo-
wers women in their neighborhoods to seek help
and denounce violence against them. In a traditio-
nal society like Jujuy, violence against women goes
largely unpunished. Even though national laws
do protect children and women, local officials are
frequently unwilling to apply them. Today Tupac
Amara is about much more than food and housing.
It has also set up health and education services and
through its agencies poor Native American boys
and girls can now play sports like hockey or water
polo which were once the exclusive preserve of the
rich.
Tupac Amaru is different from other social organi-
zations in Argentina because its main focus is on
concrete achievements like employment, housing,
and food. “Some political sectors in Jujuy are very
upset with us because they also receive money for
housing, but their money always goes missing”,
Milagro Sala has repeatedly told the national press.
Big media groups in Buenos Aires accuse Sala of
using “violent” methods, but she says that what
they really fear is the collective power of the ,
people who make up Tupac Amaru.
Traditional politics
How do traditional politicians react to an organiza-
tion like Tupac? Mainly with fear and distrust. Local
political parties don’t like an organization which
spends less time talking and more doing hard work.
Milagro Sala does not have to spend money, time
and effort in political campaigning, even though
she may be the most powerful woman in the north
of Argentina. The kind of power she has is based
on providing the people with those housing, health
and food solutions which the state, in a highly un-
equal society, has proved incapable of delivering.
These solutions are made possible through the use
of public investment which is neither administered
by the state nor by the private sector but by the
third party of an organization with its own set of
rules to define its own objectives and efficiency
standards.
Milagro is accused of being violent. Is she? Imagine
, people ready to go on a demonstration if

their leader, the person who has shown them how
to cooperate and build a better future for their
children, asks them to. They may be described as
“violent” but are they? As Milagro Sala says, “We
can show results in terms of houses, and factories.
The political leaders who accuse us of being “vio-
lent” simply can’t”. The leader of the old radical
party in Jujuy, Gerardo Morales, called Tupac Amaru
a “mob”. And the same message is sent out by the
big media groups. A “mob” is certainly an organi-
zation which develops activities independently
from the state. But, does that make Tupac Amaru
members a mob of gangsters?
Milestones
Milagro Sala has founded two schools for ,
students and Tupac Amaru pays the salaries of 
teachers. There’s not much in common here with
the gangster activities of a “Cosa Nostra” mob!
Rights and opportunities for all could well be the
slogan for Tupac Amaru. If they build a neighbor-
hood, it won’t look like a “second best” for a shanty
town but will come complete with parks for chil-
dren, access to schools and a good service infra-
structure. If they build a school, it will look like the
ones in Buenos Aires: with libraries, and science
and computer rooms. In a country where a child
from a poor background is more likely to do badly
in school exams, projects of this kind are a valuable
contribution towards equality of opportunity.
Imagine a region with a high child mortality rate
like Jujuy. Tupac Amaru has administered govern-
ment money and its own resources to build two
small hospitals staffed by over  doctors and
nurses. Medication, X-rays and blood tests are free
for the members of the organization. These poor
people – some of the poorest of Argentina’s poor –
have grouped together and bought a computer
tomography and mamography system for the pre-
vention and cure of a range of lethal diseases. And
they are now planning to build a rehabilitation cen-
ter for the disabled. Medical services in the Alto
Comedero neighborhood, once the poorest in San
Salvador de Jujuy, are so good that Tupac Amaru
hospitals now offer their help to state hospitals in
an effort to shorten their notoriously long waiting
lists.
Dental care is the most recent medical service offe-
red by the organization. In , Tupac Amaru
started to educate its members about the impor-
tance of dental care, and develop preventive cam-
paigns. A mere two years later and they opened
a dental healthcare center.
Participation, empowerment and sustainability
Milagro Sala is not the “one and only” leader: she
asks all members of the organization to participate
and empowers them to make decisions. In ex-
change, they receive concrete benefits and have the
right to debate and decide in assemblies on how to
use resources and which plan to follow. A weekly
“congress” of  delegates makes the final decisi-
ons. Working within this structure, they have prio-
ritized the building of six factories financed with
public resources.
Sustainability is another characteristic of Tupac
Amaru projects. Factories supply materials to build
houses. A textile factory produces aprons for kids
and doctors. Recently, they have diversified pro-
duction and are now selling the Ministry of Social
Development T-shirts and shorts kit for national-
level sports. This forward-looking proactive thinking
is what makes Tupac Amaru different from the
“passive” model of organizations for poor or un-
employed people.
The neo-liberal Argentina of the s saw the
emergence of / piqueteros / – groups of organized
unemployed who demonstrated to gain the go-
vernment’s attention. The first major social plan
to help the unemployed was put together in .
It provided most poor families with  dollars a
month. By  large-scale protests and unrest had
abated by  but there were still many/piquete-
ros/groups asking the government for money. Even
though some of these groups could show specific
advances for their people, most depended on a life-
line of public support for their survival and some
found their power ebbing away as members started
to find jobs. Nothing of this kind has happened to
Tupac Amaru with its close cultural affiliation to
northern Kollas.
Native Americans
Until the last major economic crisis in , Argen-
tina had considered itself as the most “European”
country in Latin America in a self-understanding
that originated in the th century when hundreds
of thousands of Europeans arrived in the country in
search of a better life. The rich owners of the “estan-
cias”, the “powerful” of the time, encouraged im-
migration as they believed it meant people from
northern Europe. But things did not happen accor-
ding to plan and instead a wave of mostly illiterate
Spanish and Italian families arrived in Buenos Aires.
The “European” image of Argentina asserted its
dominance reinforced by an extensive education
program guaranteeing access to public and free
schools for most of the population. The education
system neglected diversity and inculcated an un-
derstanding of Argentina not as a multi-cultural,
multi-ethnic country but rather as a nation whose
origins were to be found in a “crucible of races”.
This constructed image, in which racial conflicts
were absent from the public eye, tended to hide the
reality of discrimination, private violence and ex-
ploitation that the Native Americans of Argentina
were subject to.
The political vision nurtured by Tupac Amaru tends
to break this image. Diversity has finally been
recognized, and as Max Quispe, a member of the
national board of Tupac Amaru puts it, “Every poor
person has a bad time, but the color of your skin is
an extra mark against you”. Quispe says that “Tupac
has a native American vision by rising the Whipala
(the flag of the Aymara Quishwa people). You learn
that Tupac Amaru exists. You learn more about con-
flicts you were only vaguely aware of. You realize
you are a son of the land. We have a great chal-
lenge now which is to come together with, meet
and grow stronger with Mapuches, Quom, Kollas,
Guaraníes, and every race of people. We must re-
cover our identity, our land, our languages. Native
American have now woken up! Our time has
come!”
The spread of such ideas has been encouraged
by the Bolivian president Evo Morales who became
the continent’s first Native American head of state.
In a recent meeting with different ethnic groups,
Milagro Sala expressed a feeling that is growing
across the Andean region, “They wanted to divide
us, but we are showing them that we are closer
than ever. They could not conquer us. Comrade Evo
Morales shows us the strength that lies in us. We
follow his example”.
Avoiding isolation
The Tupac Amaru position is not based in a strategy
of political or social isolation. Milagro Sala is part
of one of the two trade unions federations of Ar-

gentina, the left-leaning Central de los Trabajadores
Argentinos (CTA). She has an extremely fluent rela-
tionship with the most prominent political and
social leaders in the country. Recently she appeared
at the National Congress in support of the hetero-
dox economist Mercedes Marcó del Pont as presi-
dent of the Central Bank of Argentina.
This woman, who was abandoned as a baby in a
cardboard box by her parents, has become a true
leader by empowering her own people. For her
power isn’t a matter of command and control but of
serving people’s needs and of going the extra mile.
For example, a few weeks ago she had a meeting
with Science and Technology Minister, Lino Barañao,
to talk about funding a Center of Innovative Tech-
nologies in new form of government – Tupac
partnership.
Yet all the work of Milagro Sala and the Tupac
Amaru, as spectacular and impressive as it might
be, unfolds against the backdrop of a series of deep
endemic fissures in Argentinean society. First and
foremost there is the pattern of growing inequality
which reached record levels after more than 
years of democratic governance. In the wake of the
state terrorism of the last dictatorship and follo-
wing the break-up of the pseudo welfare state
model which had prevailed since the s, politi-
cians did extremely badly in some fields, especially
when it came to income distribution policies. Criti-
cized for adherence to IMF policies, Radical and
Peronist governments were not able to strengthen
sovereign policies for the majority of the people.
Only after the  crash and the boom in commo-
we_special_/
dity exports did governments start to think about
acting in an autonomous way and introduce speci-
fic policies to combat poverty, like the  dollar per
child monthly benefit for all unemployed families.
Tupac Amaru acts against a further deficiency in
Argentina which is particularly notable in its nort-
hern region – the lack of state investment in infra-
structure and basic services. “If we exist as a social
organization is because the politicians got it
wrong”, says Milagro Sala. Although the organiza-
tion flaunts “revolutionary” icons – Tupac Amaru II,
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Eva Perón – at all its
public demonstrations, causing fear and distrust
among conservative political leaders, its slogans are
far from subversive. “Who are we?” shouts Milagro
Sala. “Tupac Amaru”, members of the organization
roar in answer. “What do we want?” “Work, Edu-
cation and Health!”. They chant. In Argentina these
are constitutional rights for every citizen. Even so,
many poor families have not been able to live
decent lives for generations now.
The future
What could the right path into the future be for an
organization like Tupac Amaru? Should it replace
state policy-making in certain regions? Will it be
possible to maintain coordinated activities (state
funding and control and Tupac work)? Should
Milagro Sala step into politics and open up her pro-
posals for the whole of Jujuy society? Is it a right
move when “social” organizations become “politi-
cal”?
This kind of strategy has been successfully pursued
in Bolivia by Evo Morales. As has Brazilian president
Lula Da Silva, once a local trade union leader but
now the most important politician of one of the
biggest countries in the world. The dilemma is
clear: how can an organization like Tupac Amaru
strengthen its capacities and extend its activities
beyond the northern provinces of Argentina
without becoming “just one of the others”, just
another political party competing among the rest?
As Milagro Sala explains, Tupac “does not compete
with the state, it pitches in where the state has
failed”. But what will happen if its own members
start to act politically, and canvas for votes and sup-
port far beyond Tupac’s present neighborhoods?
These are issues that have already affected president
Evo Morales in Bolivia. The situation is complicated
because these are not simple “non government
organizations”; their strength is based upon the
participation of people who have been neglected
by governments for generations, on the participa-
tion of poor people, Native Americans who only
recently – after the crisis of neo-liberal policies in
the s and with the help of highly talented and
original leaders – have started to feel that their
rights are real. It was with their support that Evo
Morales could take a crucial step and become a
political leader for the majority of Bolivia, leaving
representation of coca-growing farmers behind
him.
Milagro Sala remains a Native American from
Argentina’s northern region, only now she is a well-
known figure in Buenos Aires. While only traditio-
nal and right-wing political leaders feared her, she
could work patiently to counter the “violent” image
in which the big media groups portrayed her.
But can she get her message across to the broad
majority? The next few years may give us an ans-
wer. Until then, Milagro Sala will continue telling
everyone who asks her that she is just “the expres-
sion of the many who dreamt they could live a
better life by organizing themselves”.
 >

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Photo: Alexander Rausch

we_special_/
tags > Benin, development aid, self-organization, West-Africa, Aledjo
Helping People
to Help
Themselves
Interview by Astrid Ramge
Astrid Ramge
Astrid Ramge was in charge of Corporate
Communications at MetaDesign in Berlin,
Germanys leading Corporate Identiy and
Branding agency, during the last ten years.
Now she is getting involved in various
projects concerning Web . and political,
cultural and business changes.
Alexander Rausch
Alexander Rausch works as a consultant
and system coach. His motto is to help
people to help themselves no matter if the
problems are private or business related.
He serves a wide range of people within
our society – unemployed poor families as
well as succesfull business people.

Ulrike Reinhard
Ulrike Reinhard, founder of we-magazine.
Trained as an economist. Since she left
university, she has been self-employed in
various fields.  she had her first
e-mail account at The Well. The past ten
years she has travelled the world extensi-
vely, always looking for better ways to
think and act. She is deeply committed to
the network she inhabits.
 we_special_/

“We support Benin” (WeBenin) seeks to provide unbureaucratic effective

assistance to people and initiatives in Benin, helping them to empowerment
or self-responsibility and self-determination. WE spoke with the initiators
of WeBenin, Ulrike Reinhard, freesoul and founder of we-magazine, and
Alexander Rausch, creative coach and trainer, always on the look-out for new
forms of moderation and group work, about their experiences and the lessons
learned from this project which they started in . The two of them hit on
Benin because it’s one of the poorest countries in Africa but also because of
the personal bonds tying them to the land: the late father of Ulrike’s son came
from Benin. WeBenin is not an association or foundation but has consciously
chosen a “formless” kind of outreach that relies on voluntary helpers, trust,
donations, and campaigns and harnesses the power of networks.

In  when you started your Initiative you spent two weeks in Benin and
you returned there again in . What are conditions of life like there and
what challenges do you meet in Benin?

Alexander >

Benin is one of the poorest countries on earth. The
cities are teeming with people who’ve escaped
from the countryside in search of a better future. In
the rural areas you find those typical African round
huts with straw roofs and village wells. There’s no
kind of infrastructure. Then you have the smaller
towns most of which have an Internet Café and a
power supply. The bigger villages like Aledjo have
at least a rudimentary infrastructure with a few
public telephones but electricity only for a number
of houses or huts and then only at certain times of
day. Water comes in a bucket from a well. And
Internet access – when it’s there – is comparable to
the time of the first modems in Europe.
Schools in rural areas are few and far between so
the only children who go to school are those whose
parents can afford to pay bus fares. Or children who
can walk around  km a day to school and back.
This means that education is a luxury beyond the
reach of most people. The level of education
throughout the country is very low and the majo-
rity of people can neither read nor write.
Language is another big problem. A legacy of the
long period of French colonialization is that French
is the official language of the country. Yet the rural
areas and villages have a great number of very dif-
ferent dialects which often creates major language
barriers.
we_special_/
When you started your WeBenin project in ,
your networks here in Europe began collecting
computers, cell phones and money to pass them
on to people and initiatives in Benin. All this was
under the slogan “Help people to help themselves”.
How has your projected shaped up to present and
what kind of experiences have you made?
Alexander >
Our vision is to network the people in the country
so they can give one another mutual support and
assistance and develop their OWN problem-solving
skills and abilities, and their OWN ideas and pro-
jects which they can then share and pass on yet
further. So that the country can awaken to new life
from the inside and under its own steam, and so
that the people themselves can live autonomous
lives of the kind they want, of the kinds that match
their own reality.
Even so, the lack of infrastructure I’ve just talked
about meant that an Internet-based project of the
type we’d originally thought about was realizable
only on a very small scale. Another factor we had
to take into account was the very high illiteracy rate
in the country which meant that any Internet work
would have to be limited to videos or podcasts.
But videos and podcasts need fairly high data trans-
mission rates – and they’re simply not around!!
All this wasn’t what we’d imagined and it certainly
wasn’t what we’d been hoping for. It would have
been great, for instance, to set up some form
of partnership between schools in Germany and
classes in Benin. But it was immediately obvious

that this kind of option was a complete no-go. And
it’s for similar sorts of reasons that we’ve had to put
other international projects which we’d have loved
to realize with the Internet on ice for the time being
– like exchanges with people in other poor parts
of the world.
But cell phones are common in Benin as they
are throughout the whole of Africa. And with the
various different networks operating in the regions,
people in Benin very often have several phones. We
had no difficulty in distributing our cell phones
even though our phone campaign was only a drop
in the ocean! But it’s still true that the cell phone in
Africa does indeed offer a viable – and very often
the only – alternative for implementing e.g. educa-
tional projects.
Photos: Alexander Rausch
And we did have our first small successes. In Aledjo
we were able to set up a computer room where
children, young people and adults too could make
their first steps towards computer proficiency. And
we could also establish the Internet to a certain
extent through “mobile sticks”. We’re optimist that
the Internet problem can be solved – development
continues apace and the sticks are only the begin-
ning.
Another milestone was the support we were able
to offer through our donations to the women’s
organization ADRIA in Aledjo in setting up a regio-
nal project. We bought a quantity of sacks of ferti-
lizer which ADRIA then distributed in the regions
using a system of micro-loans. Another idea we had
was to transfer ADRIA’s micro-financing model to
the neighboring locality of Massi. So watch this
space!
Photo: Alexander Rausch
In line with our guiding principle “Help people to
help themselves” it’s paramount for us to get
people in Benin to provide mutual support and
assistance for one another. No matter whether it’s
the women of ADRIA who pass on their knowledge
to other women, or individual computer experts
like the “village admin” who develop their own
skills and abilities and train others, the important
thing is to have a multiplication effect in the out-
reach.
Generally speaking, our greatest challenge was and
still is education and building up networks and the
Internet in a country where the conditions on the
ground aren’t particularly auspicious. Yet Benin
does have the great advantage of being a politically
stable country with a government which is very
receptive to receiving outside help. In this sense we
see great opportunities for driving our project for-
wards through continuous development of the
technology and partnerships with other projects
which have dealt with similar sets of circumstances.
Ulrike >
From the word go we didn’t want to adopt any “top
down” approach and appear as the clever know-it-
alls. What we wanted to do was to listen, to identify
the actual pressing problems and then motivate
people to use their own steam and their own sense
of personal responsibility to help themselves.
In summer  our initiative was able to place two
volunteers from Germany in Aledjo, two young
women who after graduating from high school took
a year off for voluntary social work. I brought the
two of them to Aledjo last summer and helped them
get their bearings. They are now supporting Mme
Abibai on the micro-credits program and working
as German and French teachers at local the school.
Unfortunately it quickly became apparent here that
it’s not at all easy to familiarize volunteers and
Europeans with just what “Help people to help
themselves” actually involves. Even volunteers have
a very highly ingrained sense of security and a hier-
archical way of thinking. So, on their own initiative,
these two young women sought out the local
branch of the German Development Service (DED)
in an effort, as it were, to get the official blessing
and authorization on their current positions. This
was a move that we certainly hadn’t planned for
and which will probably lead to the projects we’ve
started in Aledjo being staffed in future by DED
volunteers – which will force us either to become
entangled in bureaucracy and take us association
status or to strike out in new directions. This is a
rather unfortunate situation for us but it does serve
to show once more how thinking on both sides –
both people in poor regions and aid volunteers –
still remains deeply colored by the dualism of
“You’re rich and have go to help us” versus “We
know what’s best for you”. We need to do a great
deal more work to persuade people out of these
ruts.
Personal relations, personal initiatives and
personal relationships are very much at the
forefront of your project. Can’t that sometimes
also be an impediment when you’re trying to
support people and trying to act in an equitable
and impartial manner?
Alexander >
WE wanted to do something in Africa and we chose
Benin because that was where the father of Ulrike’
son Tim came from. So right from the beginning we
had a personal connection with the country. And
we also involved the family in Benin – Tim’s uncle
accompanied us for the most part of our travels.
Then as now, what we wanted to do embody and
live out our principle “help people to help them-
selves” through our own personal relations so that
the people on the ground would understand this
spirit and carry it forward.
Obviously justice is a very difficult thing to guaran-
tee but it’s got nothing to do with personal relation-
ships. The big NGOs can’t guarantee justice either.
But our project had the vision that personal bonds
and network building would somehow result in
more justice. Because when a network widens,
more and more people have the chance to take
part in it so that ultimately everybody can benefit.
Powered by self-responsibility and people’s own
actions, it will have an impact over and beyond
local boundaries and inspire people to take their
own futures in their hands. Established NGOs often
export their own view of things with what they
believe are the proper courses of action to be taken.
WE on the other hand want to get to know the per-
sonal connections, the individual worlds in which
people live, and work from inside to motivate them
to autonomous action.
What have you learnt about the needs of people
in Benin? In the light of your present experience,
what is the best way to support them?

Ulrike >

Given the staggering poverty there, it’s quite certain

that % of the population are involved in a bare
struggle just to survive from day to day. For women
every day at sunrise this means trudging the long
way to the fields with a child on their back, anot-
her in their hand and a heavy weight of “baggage”
balanced on their head. Day in day out without the
slightest hope of change or improvement.
It wasn’t the poverty that shocked me in our travels
through the country. No, the people might be chro-
nically poor but they have a tremendous zest for
life – something that is lacking in us here. What
depressed me and what depresses me still is that
there are countless numbers of people there who
simply don’t see any chance of a better future.
They’ve almost resigned and accepted their lives as
they are without the slightest hope for the future.
We’ve been into schools and gazed into faces that
I shall never forget for as long as I live: emptiness,
emptiness, sheer emptiness. Not a trace of pride or
dignity. Possibly just the hope that when whites ap-
pear they might be given a handout. But that is pre-
cisely not the way to do it! These people don’t need
handouts and they don’t need someone to show
them or tell them how they can best survive in their
own country. They know that already!
We have to reawaken to new life everything that
has been destroyed by long decades of develop-
ment work and the behavior of the former colonial
masters. We have to restore these people to their
dignity and recognize them and view them as our
equals in the ecosystem of the earth. We can help
them sustainably and for the long term – if we only
let them be themselves.
My dream is to hear more people in Benin saying
“Yes, we can!” and to see more people like Mme.
Abiba take control of things with her own two
hands and get them done. You can help them to
find their own way but then you have to let them
go it alone. And that will only happen on a broad
basis if WE say to them “Yes you can do it!” If we
give them back their dignity and treat them with
respect and are willing to learn from them the
whole host of things that they can do and we can’t!

And it is important – even if it’s very hard when you
look into the empty faces of the poorest of the poor
as an affluent European – it’s important to say to
them “We haven’t got any handouts for you. You
have to do it by yourselves – and you can do it!”
That’s the only way we’re going to make a perma-
nent change for the better!
From the very beginning you’ve relied heavily
on the mechanisms of the network, both for
those giving and those receiving. Calls for
donations on the Web, in blogs and so on. How
is your network now shaping up on both sides?
Ulrike >
For us the Internet is the key instrument, on the one
hand for enabling education and on the other for
promoting and building up the networks internal
to Benin across the world. That is a vital basic
requirement that’s needed if the people in all the
countries of this world are to gradually build a form
of life that makes life livable for all. This is a deve-
lopment that the governments of the world are
going to have to come to terms with over the next
few years. The Internet has turned the world into a
global village.
In Benin we’ve created the first node. How this will
develop in future depends solely on the people
there and how relevant network content is to their
daily lives. The network is tremendously useful for
our work in terms of donations and information,
and it also brings us into contact with similar kinds
of projects. As we’ve learnt, it functions extremely
well!
And what does the future look like for WeBenin?
What’s the next step you’re planning?
Ulrike >
I intend to return to Benin in early August. With two
main things on the agenda: firstly, we want to find
out how we can use the Free Radio Network there
to build a network infrastructure, and secondly we
want to start preparations for building our library
in Aledjo at long last. If everything goes according
to plan, the architects Johannes Hucke and Barbara
Quentin will be coming with me and we’re going
to talk with the people on the ground on how to
take further measures to promote reading and wri-
we_special_/
ting in the region. The idea is to start with a group
of about  women in Aledjo and to work out a way
with them how they can best teach the other inha-
bitants of their villages to read and write.
Do you have any connections now to similar
projects in other countries?
Ulrike >
No, this sort of connection doesn’t exist in any phy-
sical sense even though it’s something we’re very
much thinking about. We do think that projects that
have been successful in other countries – including
countries outside of Africa – could be transferred
to Benin. We don’t mean classical development pro-
jects but rather those initiatives mainly sponsored
by private individuals which start out on a modest
small scale and which like we do subscribe to the
“help people to help themselves” principle. Projects
which make people strong in their dignity and
which put them into a position where they’re able
to build something themselves – projects that I call
“enablers”.
In particular, I’m thinking about the Cinema Jenin
project which is also discussed in this edition of we-
magazine. So why not build a cinema with a media
square in Porto Nuovo or Naittingou? This would
have the advantage that the partners in Jenin cer-
tainly have all the know-how needed to set up a
project of this kind in Benin and we can simply learn
the lessons of what they’ve done in Jenin. Film in
Africa is a huge topic.
We’ve also been following a project in Winneba,
Ghana with very keen interest. Winneba is a town
about  km west of Accra on the coast where
what is known as a NIC or Network-Improved
Communities was set up with help from the Free
Radio Network from Berlin and an initiative from
Taiwan. The technical infrastructure comes from
Berlin while on the local level people are schooled
in using PCs and networks by Taiwanese students.
The people who’ve had their training then go on to
train others so there’s a snowball effect.
The Free Radio Network enables many small units
to share the low network costs which means they
can be connected to the Net. Such a structure could
be applied to Aledjo and enable communication
between various localities without any of them
being linked to the Internet backbone. When you
think how hard it is for most people just to cover
we_special_/ 

the  km to the next village, it’s easy to see what
kind of benefits such a system would bring with it.
Both Winneba and Nigeria too – in places where
these NICs are now part of everyday life – have seen
a considerable rise in the living standards of the
stakeholders in terms of educational level and
income.
People everywhere are now seizing initiatives
off the beaten track and fighting for a better and
more livable world. There’s an uprising among
the culturally creative. Would you label your-
selves as such?
And do you see any signs of an emerging new
trend or movement comparable with the environ-
mental movement?
Ulrike >
I don’t like being put in boxes! But I do indeed think
that you can speak of the formation of a movement
that bypasses the traditional channels of develop-
ment aid. In my view it’s exactly the same pheno-
menon we can see in politics, education or in enter-
prises: if something can’t make a breakthrough in
its proper system or just takes an incredibly amount
of time about it, it goes ahead and builds its own
system. And that’s much easier to do nowadays
than it was  years ago, thanks in great part to the
advent of the Internet. On the one hand having
access to the Internet means that people can now
clearly see and hear those previously unknown and
“oh-so-remote places”, while on the other new
media also enable the rapid and effective networ-
king of all those who want to get active.
didn’t just ask for donations, they also spread the
news about us and this attracted more and more
new “helpers” to swell our ranks. Ulrike too has had
a lot of instantaneous support and feedback per
Twitter from Los Angeles and other parts of the
world. To keep it short, this is the first time that I’ve
really understood the network principle on such a
huge scale and I’ve really “caught the bug”. Network
communication is ultimately the very best means of
helping people and of hopefully creating a better
world.
I always used to be aware that I myself bore sole
responsibility for the kind of life I wanted to lead.
Webenin has now shown me that we can reach the
whole world with the Internet and that by working
together in networks we can slowly but surely take
more control over what our lives should look like.
The opportunities it offers are breathtaking! Many
many people are now using them and their num-
bers are continually growing. Since Benin, all my
thinking is along the “open tracks” of self-organi-
zation, networks, the global village. So WeBenin
has changed my life as a whole by changing my way
of thinking. It’s a wonderful feeling even though it
does give you a very stark view of the degree of
(personal) responsibility you bear for the whole!

To what extent has the WeBenin project changed

your outlook or your reality? Do you view the
world differently now to the way you viewed it
two years ago?

Alexander >

For me personally my view of things has changed

because I now know what it means to have lived
out Marshall McLuhan’s dictum “the world is a glo-
bal village” in my own person. The Internet and the
network have shown us that there are a great num-
ber of people out there ready and willing to give
immediate and “easy” help and support. The blogs
Photo: Alexander Rausch