edwardvielmetti's blog

The Cooperation Commons has a recent post from "On The Commons", describing and working through a series of concepts of what a "commons" is in a digital age and how various terms ("public goods", "inalienable rights", "common assets") form some part of the understanding of same. … Read more »

Andy Peterson is back from Nicaragua and the telecenter project there as part of MAP. The president of Nicaragua spoke at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for one of the centers. He had some good words about his experiences at the CIC lunch, including the challenges of managing finances at centers that had money dumped on them without corresponding fiscal help.

You can view his photos at

I came across this literature review of community informatics research and studies. It's a 74 pp overview of work to date summarizing both interviews and field work in the area. See http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/584.asp

Imagining What is Possible

"We start with a simple proposition. If we stop thinking of the poor as victims and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up. Four billion poor can be the engine of the next round of global trade and prosperity. It can be a source of innovations."
--- C.K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

June Holley writes this about the economic development work that she and Valdis Krebs have been doing in Ohio. For more background on their methods, see the paper at http://www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf

For the last 20 years, I helped co-create economic networks (see www.acenetworks.org) in Appalachian Ohio, an area with deep and chronic poverty and amazingly little business activity. Since 1982, I was also reading research on transformation in complex systems and trying to apply what I was learning.

What we found was the critical factor leading to transformation--as opposed to viral spreading of ideas--was collaborative projects--or rather a densely woven, ever changing ecosystem of people figuring out what they and their community needed and finding others to join them in doing something about that.