Cruising speed: World Carshare, World Car Free Days , and the Agenda itself . . . are all on a roll. (As is The Commons.) Steadily improving and extending coverage, brining in new members, offering new tools, and doing their bit for sustainability. If you are following any of these, you will know about all that. But if not (yet), let us invite you in to have a look. Who knows, you may stay around for a while.
xTransit: Yes, again one of our strange words. But it appears to be needed to pull together all the many bits and pieces so as to provide a coherent platform for discussions and exchange on what has to be the hottest transportation topic on the Agenda: The "third way" of getting around. Getting people around in cities in road vehicles, smaller than full sized buses, driven by real human beings, dynamically shared with others, and aided by state of the art communications technologies as the only way to offer "car like" mobility in most of our 21st century cities without killing the cities. Check it out via http://www.newmobility.org
Kyoto World Cities 20/20 Challenge: This perhaps most important of our collaborative projects has sat on the sidelines over these last months while we hammered away with our limited resources at other parts of The Commons, with the thought that this work on the concomitant parts of the New Mobility Agenda were going to be important raw materials for making this policy project zing. What’s missing? The link between our very real collective hands-on competence in terms of how people can get about in cities, sustainably, and all those higher visibility programs that are out there are targeting climate issues, mayors’ Kyoto initiatives (but where is the hard core of their transportation proposals), et al -- but few with the kind of transportation competence that is needed to make real progress out there on the city streets. Can you help us make those links with these other groups and the cities themselves? So far, we have not been able to do this job.
United Nations Car Free Days: This one got stuck somewhere in some office in that big building in New York. Have a look at what we propose on the site and let us know if you have any ideas for this great cause. It is too important, too good to end its life there in some drawer. Pop in and have a look at our proposal for next steps.
Our Wikipedia New Mobility Projects: Promise! There is more to this than you may at first blush think. Our goal here is to stimulate our informal international expert consortium to "put our brains together", and in the process to tap our collective intelligence to build a free, high-quality, comprehensive on-line encyclopedia and get out the word that solutions are in sight. For the benefit of all in a world in which old ideas and old and bad practices die hard. (We want to help them out the door.)
Self-Organizing Collaborative Networks: (Own window) Sound kind of familiar. Well that in fact is almost exactly what we are here. And since that is the case, we have set out to examine this concept more closely and in public. For more on this, you are invited to turn to the new entry in Wikipedia on this, and to join in with your ideas and additions. (It reads quite nicely with the in-process entries on Knowledge Building and Self Organization which I also invite you to have a go at. They are all part of what we are dong here, and since we have between us some years of hands-on experience together in this, who better than we can help define the meaning of these terms in the field of policy and practice)
Finance: Oops. Big problem. Big challenge. Normally I do the heavy lifting here, paying for all of this out of my consultancy earnings. But I have been spending too much time with these programs, and we need to find new ways to pay for it. Now, we are going to keep all this going one way or anther but it ain’t easy. We are not looking for your money (that would corrupt the whole concept of being ‘off the economy’ which is so central to all we do. But it would be good to have your ideas about possible foundations or other sources of support. Or your thoughts on how to integrate some parts of all this into some form of 21st century cash machine (a la Skype, Google, who knows, but no ads).
Failing any ideas on that, what you can do is to write me a brief letter with some kind of “attestation” that all this work is serving some useful purposes, at least as far as you are concerned. Than if you can properly sign it so that you are properly and impressively identified, I can then place that into our eventual applications as we start to shop around for support.
There we have it as this New Year opens up before us, with its challenges and its opportunities. As you may have noticed we remain entirely optimistic that we have the means to deal with these problems, and that the only thing we need to find is a bit of imagination and solidarity to put all our big brains and even bigger hearts to work.
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Last updated on 3 January 2006