Lev Rickards's blog

Brian Kerr and I recently got back from RecentChangesCamp, a conference for wiki developers and other parties interested in "Building Communities Worth Having." We've written up a small wiki to talk about our experiences, including a few CIC concepts. Check it out below! http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bkerr/asset/rcc-report.html

I pledged on PledgeBank to help Rebecca and Kyle bring a group of students to New Orleans. You can too: http://www.pledgebank.com/ArchivesNOLA The best part was when I thought only 10 people had signed up, and it turns out they have more like 46 out of 50 necessary pledgers. Talk about social capital - what we cannot do alone, what we could never do alone - can be done with a group of people working together. Like sending a team of students to New Orleans.

There are 300,000 of my co-religionists in Iran. They make up the largest religious minority in that country. Education is incumbent upon Bahá’ís. We are expected to build our capacity as human beings, in service to building a better world. Here in the States, us CIC-ers are guaranteed access to education, pending certain institutional, classist, racist structures that (God willing) we can all work to dismantle. I know we all value the right to higher education, because we are all here in graduate school. My brothers and sisters in Iran are systematically denied that right:

Shokufeh has been bringing the insight of a New Orleans girl. Her parallels between Katrina and The Great Chicago Fire are well taken. Cities are impermanent collections of buildings, people and services, and can be constructed in any way we choose. Taking the historical perspective of what shapes a city's landscape seems a necessary step in designing what comes next.