What's New

What's New in

The following programs have seen the most activity of late in The Commons, with those with most latest developments on top. A quick one-click visit to the respective home page will provide you with an in-depth update in each case. As you review them, bear in mind that a fair portion of the activity and inputs take place within the respective @World Forum, including in the Message Centers, Libraries, and Files & Media sections. We also recommend that you have a quick look at the closing section on New Format & Working Tools .

Go to ASSIST

The Information Society Technologies Programme (IST) of the European Commission has charged an ad hoc international cooperative project team, which has taken the name ASSIST (Achieving Sustainability through Substitutive Information Society Technology), to report on ways of developing and expanding the potential for achieving sustainability by encouraging the development of Information Society Technology based alternatives to material consumption, and so reducing consumption of all kinds as a step toward a more sustainable world. Through its contribution the ASSIST team is hoping to provide an impetus to the move to creating a Sustainable Information Society that will better serve the environment, quality of life, and social justice alike.

Go to Earth CarFree Day 2001

The first-ever Earth Car Free Day took place this year on Thursday, April 19th. Led by The Commons and supported by Earth Day Network, the goal was to spark and support a first series of thoughtful events and striking demonstrations around the world: all based on the common theme of personal responsibility, citizen-based activism, and vital new public/private/community partnerships. The balance of

accomplishment: a wide range of self-organized events, large and small, in hundreds of cities involving millions of people all over the world. Plus the permanent infrastructure of freely available information, tools and materials that you now find here. As one participant put it so well: "With Earth Car Free Day 2001 behind us, the nose of the camel is now under the tent". .

Go to Today!

Today! Sustainable citizenry in action

This free wide-open paperless journal invites friends and collaborators around the world to contribute and share background information, views, challenges and thinkpieces which can help open up new perspectives on the pattern break approach to laying the base for more sustainable lives. Pattern breaks may not be a substitute for Kyoto, but without concerted citizen action and unrelenting pressure on government, sustainable development will remain a vain dream. Check it out!

Go to Vote Bogota 2000

Probably one of the most important events on the international transportation scene in many decades. On Sunday, the 29th of October the City of Bogota called a revolutionary and far reaching public consultation to gain support for an entirely new transport policy and delivery system for their city - a city with huge reductions in private car use and an alternative mobility system which is at once functional, sustainable, and socially just. For the results: check out Vote Bogota 2000

The crux is to create a permanent legal framework in support of a phased policy of massive car reductions in the city, building on a path-breaking restructuring program already well underway and getting visible results.
In addition to full information on the events leading up to the referendum, Vote Bogota 2000 also offers opportunities for international discussions and exchanges on the implications of this pathbreaking initiative.

Go to The Commons (home page)

The last month has seen a major reorganization of The Commons in an attempt to make it more interesting, clearer, more quickly informative, and more topical. And a vastly improved introduction and way into the several dozen programs here that are advancing in quite a range of areas. (The layout and presentation format that you see here is intended to serve as the new standard which in due course and as time and resources permit extended to all of our active programs. See New Format & Working Tools ) Note also:

The new and greatly extended Search Functionality now covers more than 4000 pages on ours and closely related sites, and is regularly updated for new information. Before using, however, we strongly recommend that you review the Search Tips section.
The addition of a handy Go-To program link on each home page of the site. This is part of the attempt to begin to integrate the various programs, which have many potential overlaps, into a coherent whole.
In addition to the Message Center which is the low-volume announcement and update link to our members under this part of the site, there is now an Open Discussion Forum which has been opened for less structured exchanges, commentaries and dialogues. This new Forum is also linked to the Politics of Sustainability site.
A major new program and dialogue on International Prizes for socio-technical system innovation has just gotten underway here. Comments and contributions are welcome.
As they are for the new discussion of Sustainability Role Models, which we also hope you will visit and participate in.
And don't forget to check out this month's Thinkpiece, "The Quality of Growth", which shows how the economists at the World Bank are trying to work their way through the growth and social justice tangle.

Go to Children on the Move!

This site and the program behind it have undergone a major restructuring and retargeting over the last weeks. This has been done in preparation for the first international cooperative program which has just gotten underway -- the preparation in cooperation with a number of leading international groups of a Special Issue of the Journal of World Transport on the topic of The Walk to School.

Check out the Work Pad link on the top menu bar to see some of the latest thinking on this group effort, and the path on which we are now set out in this highly original, cooperative sustainability effort.
Excellent materials and feedback from the International Walk to School Day on October 4th are now available via the site.
Additional collaborators and contributions are welcome.

Go to @World CarFree Days

A major site overhaul following the new format has been carried out here, in good part to respond to increased consultations due to the large number of CFD projects that were scheduled for September.

The results of the many CFD projects that took place over the past month are steadily being added to the site.
Have a look at the new Media Gallery there, and if you have anything to share please let us know.
You may have seen in the press that The Commons was awarded, jointly with the City of Bogotá, the Stockholm Challenge Award for successful international collaboration in support of the first Car Free Day project ever to be organized on a Third World mega-city. (You can if you wish view the prize-giving ceremony by clicking here.)
It is hoped that we will get some help over the next month in an attempt to meld the considerable body of background and materials that have been developed here, in order to produce a well written and useful Guide to Car Free Day Organization" (much as we have done in the carshare area with the two volumes that are now available on that site).

Go to @Work on the Web

A major overhaul of the Rethinking Work: New Ways to Work site is presently in progress, in parallel with a push for new cooperation and joint projects. It is our intention to give major stress to this program, beginning in the months ahead and with a ten year program in view (the second under this series since its initiation in 1991).

Go to @World CarShare Consortium

While @World CarShare continues under the old web format (update to follow), there has been consistent consultation and many quite useful exchanges on technical and planning matters in the group's Message Center.

The Consortium passed the 200 member mark for the first time in early July, continues to add several new members each week, and new projects are steadily being added to the Inventory.
There are now more than 200 carshare operations in cities around the world that are directly accessible from this site (see the Inventory).

Go to The Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice

A major and massive site overhaul has been carried out here, as the WTPP team is moving to increase international visibility, subscriber support, and to begin to stake out a number of new Special Editions in cooperation with other groups and events working on the sustainable transport agenda. More than 500 international leaders in the field are being kept regular informed by the periodic newsletter and updates.

Go to the Louise Darracott Reading Foundation

The Louise Darracott Reading Foundation is being set up in the closing months of 2000 to provide an entirely independent, non-governmental, cooperative program working with others to increase literacy, learning skills and love of reading and books for children in underprivileged groups in and sections of the State of Mississippi.

The early focus will be on finding ways to support programs and efforts aimed at achieving 100% literacy for children in the rural black community, starting with the strategic support of existing and new programs in Mississippi.
While the program is not indifferent to technology-based teaching and learning techniques (e.g., machine based learning, computers, Internet, etc.), it will give its attention primarily to programs which emphasize the interaction of caring adults with small groups of children in a loving atmosphere.
The program is entirely based on partnerships and working creatively with others, as opposed to trying to start up independent initiatives.

Go to @ccess on the Web

A partial overhaul of the site (using a shortly-to-be-abandoned software menuing system), which clarifies its content. However, it needs to be more closely linked to the other transport related programs of The Commons to clarify how all these sites can work together as part of a broader, consistent policy thrust.(Stay tuned.)

Go to A New Role for the @ccess Discussion Forum

The decision has been made to use the @ccess Message Center to host all more general discussions of transport-related matters and concerns of all programs under The Commons. Thus, while more focused exchanges on specific matters that relate to specific specialized sites and programs (such as carsharing, car free days, @ccess mobility solutions, etc.) will continue to take place on their own dedicated fora, we thought it important that there be one place where all more general exchanges on these matters can take place and subsequently be accessed. In this way the @ccess Forum becomes a unified catchment area for all these discussions, thereby bringing together a growing body of information, materials and observations that can be of interest and use to the more than one thousand people who regularly consult the site on transport matters. (This Forum is also fully searchable, which indeed is one of its main reasons for being.)

Go to The Stockholm Challenge Network

Just getting started. Has yet to develop it's raison d'etre and content.

Go to @Bilbao 2001 Congress on ITS for Transport Problem-Solving in Mid-Sized Cities

This site has been linked from the top to the Ertico Web page for the June 2001 Congress. For further information, contact the @Bilbao Technical Secretariat.

New Format and Working Tools

A major study and revamping program began to get underway over the summer of 2000, with several objectives in view. The first was to ensure that the contents of each of these programs, many of which are fast developing in terms of their size, content and complexity, is fully transparent and easily accessible to both first time visitors and the members and partners. The second was to see if we could somehow make the various relationships and linkages between many of these programs clearer, so that the potential for creative synergies could be better spotted and developed. Bearing in mind that the site already consisted of many thousands of pages on an expanding array of topic areas, this is something of a challenge.

You can see the new format at work in its pretty developed configuration in the following programs: The Commons, Children on the Move!, CarFree Days , Rethinking Work , World Carsharing and the Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice.

Among the innovations already achieved or in progress, we would mention:

Expanding/collapsing menus to left permit a much cleaner and more comprehensive access to the steadily expanding context of each site.
The Quick menu bar up top is intended both to provide better access to each site, and to give you a broader picture of what is going on in The Commons as a whole.
Greatly expanded Search function
The addition of the handy Go-To Program link on each program home page, which takes you directly to any other programs under The Commons.
Similarly the What's New pages have been unified under this common format, so that you can now keep your eye on progress in other parts of the site as well. Who knows. You may find some things of use.
The full functionality of the site is best accessed via the latest versions of Internet Explorer (or Opera, quite nice!). For those who insist on using Netscape (AOL? Time Warner?), it still works but we must warn that it suffers from being slower and considerably less clean in format. IE is of course free and directly available from our site. (We wish we could do better for you on this, but we just can't. On the other hand if you're a genius and want to help us work this out on our 30+ Web sites, welcome to Paris!)

* * * The above should not be taken to imply that there is no activity on the other programs; rather it intends to point up where the bulk of our efforts have been focused in the last weeks.

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