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Program Overview + Central Themes
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The Commons offers virtual work space to several clusters of programs and activities, all in the public interest, all based on world-wide networking, and all sharing our central concerns of working in very specific ways toward a sustainable planet, sustainable lives, and social justice.
For the most part the programs are organized into largely self-contained projects complete wiht their own supporting fora, shared libraries, etc., but as you will see if you plow ahead here, there are many underlying relationships and overlaps.
The following "conceptual map" attempts to illustrate this point of underlying linkages, albeit crudely. However, as you get into the programs themselves, you will see better how this works. As you will note, they range from the very general -- for example The Commons itself with its goal to promote strategic thinking and short term remedial actions in the overall area of sustainable development and social justice -- down to the very specific, as an example: World CarShare Consortium ande its focus on how to share a car. But -- and this is our point -- they all link to the same basic underlying themes and concerns.
| Central themes running throughout all projects and programs: |
Here are some of the things we try to keep our eyes on as we move ahead in each of these programs.
- Sustainability, from the bottom up: Not just as a desirable target of high rhetoric that omnipotent and wise governments are somehow going to wisely bundle us into without a peep or any kind of effort on our part, but rather as a personal engagement which reaches right down to the gut of our daily choices and life practices. Which we then find ways to sum into sustainability (think of it as trickle-up change if you will).
- Systemic complexity: Requires appropriate problem solving approaches and more energetic understanding of things such as fuzzy relationships, organic (and not mechanistic) linkages, and the inevitability of unintended consequences (but which can at least be thought through).
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Trend or Pattern Breaks: Strategic things, shifts that we need to discover and do, together, to break the inertia of today's unsustainable and unjust practices -- and get ourselves on new paths of behavior, real well-being, and social justice.
- Inherent conservatism/resistance to change: None of us really likes change, at least not in terms of the way we organize our daily lives. Yet change we must. One important step in this process is to listen carefully to all those who DON"T like what you are trying to do. They have much to say, and reforms will never be possible unless we find ways to bring them around.
- Collaborative Activism: Providing the means to bring together those with vision and understanding and giving them the means to make their collective voice heard in strategic places and at strategic moments in the hesitant march to sustainability.
- Pragmatic Activism: The search for practical, near term tools and ways to better balance our powerful economic motors and incentive systems with badly underserved but potentially even more powerful matters of community, social justice, and personal harmony.
- Entrepreneurship/The Market: Critical motors for what is needed. But how do we put them to work?
- Harnessing Technology: Technology got right can be a powerful tool for sustainable development. In fact, it is indispensable. We are already well into the 21st century and we have a powerful, new and thus far almost entirely unexploited tool kit for sustainable development in ICT (Information and communications technologies). We can with the right kind of work thus use these tools to build both knowledge and powerful new consensuses for change, providing a solid, flexible and wide open base to support teamwork and collaborative problem solving across national borders. That said, we must learn to keep our eyes open as we use these tools, which provide us with means of getting the best and avoiding the worst of the so-called "Information Society", including ways of parrying the dangers of the two-speed society that is currently among the gravest of the threats that we face, both within our own communities and across this troubled world.
- Importance of near-term successes Truth to tell, the concept of sustainability has a distinctly fuzzy, long-term, almost pie in the sky look to it in most places. However, here in The Commons, we stress the need for measures and reforms that can register visible successes in the near term, months or a few years at most. These successes are needed to gain both experience and credibility for more ambitious and far reaching reforms and innovations, which otherwise risk to stay within the pages of all those books and reports
- Independence of Perspective: Anything that requires a major shift in held values, structures and behavior is likely to be less than welcome by those whose vision and acts are determined by the status quo. In all our initiatives we must therefore be entirely independent of these forces and attitudes, while at the same time understanding of their values and fears, and capable of mobilizing them to the new ideas and structures.
- New Democracy: New concepts and new levels of direct citizen involvement, participation, enterprise and leadership. New partnerships not only between the public and private sector, but also among the fast-growing universe of volunteer groups and associations who are increasingly equipped with real knowledge and a no less real ability to create strong constituencies for change.
21st century governance!
And the list goes on ... For further background on these programs and concepts, check .
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Last updated on 9 November 2005
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