Aproximando cidadãos
Theory and practice
AIDS kills almost 1,000 people per year in São Paulo. Air pollution kills 4,000. AIDS is considered a public health problem, and doctors have a say on defining public policies. Air pollution isn’t – even though it shortens the life of the average person in the city of São Paulo by two years. Taking care of car pollution isn’t a subject for the public health system – it’s for the public transportation agency, for the traffic engineers, and nobody takes into consideration the impact caused in people’s lungs when designing more avenues. It is based on this paradox that the pathologist Paulo Saldiva began TEDxSP talk.
Saldiva’s a rare kind of Brazilian scholar. He’s a researcher, and a great one. Doctor, specialist on pollution, he’s worked in Harvard, publishes regularly in specialized magazines, and is respected in the entire world. But he’s also an activist. He tries to use the data he collects to influence public policies, to change habits, to improve people’s life. He speaks up against the car culture, criticizes the dominant point of view, is always discussing with politicians and business people. Not mentioning that he rides his bike to the hospital he works every day. In short, he connects theory to practice, thought to action. In addition to all this, he’s a fun guy.
It’s good to pay attention to the things he says. A nice opportunity to do it is by watching his talk at TEDxSP. It must go on air today on the TEDxSP site.
November 17th, 2009
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Hangover and Magazine
Hangover.
That’s the word to define the mood of everyone involved in TEDx SP in the last few days. Everybody has that blurry look, that slow reaction, that dull expression, a half smile on the face. Geez. TEDx SP was super intense. 12 hours of excitement, new friends, an evident feeling that everything is possible, and that the world will start to change, the easy or the hard way. Of course, when the flood of ideasin our bloodstream stops, the body feels the abstinence.
To whoever went there, a hug. To whoever didn’t go, a relief: there will always be a next year.
But time to go back to reality.
How is everybody doing?
Let me to introduce myself. I’m Denis Russo Burgierman, journalist, last week I said good-bye to Editora Abril in order to come to work for WebCitizen. From now on, I will visit this blog at least once a week.
My role at WebCitizen isn’t very clear yet. Some say I’m the Content Director. I don’t really like this name too much – I don’t think it is useful to separate content from channel, or content from form. In this new world, these things walk hand in hand. It doesn’t really matter what contains what – what’s important is the message, what matters is the information and what its user can do with it. I’d rather say then that I’m the Information Director. Besides being more elegant, it sounds like a secret agent thing. (The other day I met a guy who has a very cool project called Architecture for Humanity whose job in the company is “Chief Eternal Optimist”, for the acronym to be CEO. He thinks we should create more cool titles for our positions. It’s a first step to enjoy our job better).
Well, whoever attended TEDx São Paulo got a very big yellow magazine. That’s the first issue of Gotas, which was already born as one of the best yellow covered magazines in Brazil. (If you attended the event but didn’t get one, please let us know: some kits were distributed before the magazine came from the printer.) Gotas is Webcitizen’s magazine. To participate in the creation of this independent project was an amazing experience, which left me radiant and frightened, sometimes both simultaneously. Take a look at the cover below.
Transparency is like a trail in the woods on a sunny Sunday after lunch. Everybody is up to it, but nobody wants to start. (continues on page 4)
Pretty, right?
The issue is thematic, and the theme for the first issue is transparency. Number 2 comes in February, 2010. The theme will be “stop talking, it is time to do”. Take a look at the last page:
We’ve got an idea for Gotas issue 2, which will come in February of 2010. The theme we imagined was: “Stop talking, it is time to do”. Then we’d invent a magazine that does things, instead of only discussing them. We thought that, instead of simply filling pages, we could truly intervene in the things of the world out there, registering them and only then put them on the magazine. Did you like the idea? Do you want to participate? Do you have other ideas? Suggestions about where and how could we intervene? Ideas about what could we do it? How can a collaborative creative team, in a short time and with not much money, cause a real impact? Guesses, ideas, insults, suggestions, threats, comments are all welcome by email denis@webcitizen.com.br
The invitation is for this blog’s readers. Send us ideas, please. We want to create a historical issue, a magazine to make us proud, to make things that never have been done before in the world, to become a case study, to inspire people. Finally, we want a magazine to relieve us from the TEDx abstinence syndrome. Let’s get to work, guys?
Ah!
A little bird told me that the first TEDx SP lecture goes online today. And they will start rocking from the start.
A big hug,
Denis
What does Brazil have to offer to the world now?
TEDx São Paulo, Ideas worth spreading. WebCitizen is proud to sponsor the first TEDx São Paulo and to be part of this movement to change Brazil.
On November 14th, the first TED event in Brazil will take place: TEDx São Paulo. At the event, around 600 thinkers from various areas of knowledge and practice will get together to discuss “What does Brazil have to offer the world now?”, a theme that will guide the presentations of 28 speakers, each one of them lasting up to 15 minutes.
The meeting form surpasses criticism or contemplation. The breaks between the presentations will also be extremely important, for the approximation between the attendees. The intent is for the audience to be encouraged to materialize innovative ideas, from many perspectives. Therefore, the same care the organization board took to select the speakers, it is taking in the selection of the attendees, who can apply until October 31st, free of charge, through the community channel.
More than a conference, the date marks the formation of an community of achievers in the country, a link between the dissemination of innovative ideas and their practical execution. Always under the perspective of the collective benefit.
“The first motivation is always individual, but the compensation is collective. We have started to notice that there is a critical mass that seeks its fulfillment through something that reflects positively on society. This behaviour is transformational”, explains Helder Araújo, member of the international TED community, licensee for TEDx São Paulo, and co-founder of WebCitizen.
To be a patron of TEDx São Paulo is to participate actively of a shift based on the exchange of knowledge and the study of new educational formats. It’s our duty as citizens to discuss and practice transformational ideas, and that’s why it is our great pleasure to be a TEDx São Paulo patron.
About TED
TED started in 1984 as a yearly conference in California, and already has had among its speakers, names such as Bill Clinton, Paul Simon, Bill Gates, Bono Vox, Al Gore, Michele Obama and Philippe Starck. Despite the one thousand available seats, the applications are sold out a year in advance. Today, the official TED website streams free of cost more than 500 lectures performed until now, watched by more than 50 million people, from 150 different countries.
Through 4 actions: TED Conference, TED Talks, TED Prize and TEDx, the organization has been changing its motto “Ideas worth spreading” into real accomplishments. Every year TED Prize, for instance, elects a thinker and grants him or her 100 thousand dollars, helping materialize yet another “Wish that Will Change the World”.
TEDx São Paulo
Where: Moóca Theater
When: November 14th, 2009
Application: free of charge here.
Virtual worlds, real cultures
Diplomacy doesn’t belong just to the physical world anymore. The project Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds explores how foreign affairs policies can improve the engagement with Muslim communities all around the world, using complex opportunities provided through the use of immersive virtual spaces like Second Life.
In this video developed during the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. in September 2009, Rita J. King and Joshua S. Fouts, both Senior Fellows of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, talk to WebCitizen about their project and its mission.
King and Fouts chose the virtual world of Second Life as platform for their research due to many reasons, among them the fact that it is the most widespread international virtual world platform. That is their idea: how could people learn about other cultures in a experimental, authentic virtual space, and how this information can add or improve the diplomatic work in the physical and real world?
The project objective was to verify how much they could learn about Islam in a space that has the potential to bring new insights and to crush prejudices and boundaries cemented in the real world.
Rita J. King is Chairwoman and Creative Director of Dancing Ink Productions, and Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
Joshua S. Fouts is Global Strategist of Dancing Ink Productions, and Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is a non-profit and non-governmental and educational American institution that through its programs, publications and website, aims to be the main destination for ethic decisions in international discussions. Since its foundation in 1914, the council has been focusing in the importance of ethic values in international affairs, and aims to be a “voice for ethics” all over the world.
See the video of the project here.
Innovation in service of communication between governments and citizens
After spending more than two decades working for technology companies in the Silicon Valley in California, Lewis Shepherd is today the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Government, besides writing for the well-known blog Sheperds Pi.
In this exclusive interview granted to WebCitizen during the Gov 2.0 Summit, Lewis talks about how new media technologies are today creating new social communication online channels between governments and citizens.
Social networks have the potential to connect everyone in a way that wasn’t possible some time ago. Governments should mirror this social power by creating the opportunity to increase the trust between governments and citizens, in the shapes of the crescent trust existent between social network users. In Lewis opinion, there’s nothing like politics to force a new and creative way to think about the communication with a great number of people.
Microsoft wants to place itself as a pioneer and innovative company in this revolution, concerned about expanding public participation and strengthening citizenship in a collaborative way.
MySociety, building services that people want to use
Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of MySociety, a British open source NGO, which is world reference in websites pro-democracy and pro-citizenship. Among the many websites that the NGO manages, is the parliamentary transparency site TheyWorkForYou, which shows information about every British parliamentarians, and the FixMyStreet, which, as the name suggests, is a simple and clear site that allows British citizens to denounce, monitor and discuss local problems as defective traffic lights, bumpy streets, vandalism in their neighborhoods. Thousands of denounces were sent to the responsible rulers through the site.
This exclusive interview was given to WebCitizen during the event Gov 2.0 Summit, where Tom was one of the speakers. Here, he explained that the MySociety.org mission is to build simple websites that offer to people simple and tangible benefits in their lives, and to use new technologies to improve the quality of life of the citizens.
Spacebook, NASA’s social space
Emma Antunes is in charge of the development and implementation of Spacebook, an intern social network of NASA. Spacebook is kind of a Facebook created to stimulate the inter-disciplinary collaboration between NASA’s employees, with profiles, forums, groups and social bookmarking. Each employee does his or her own homepage where they can update their status, share files, collaborate in a Wiki, add other people and follow their activities, join communities, groups and forums of interest, and even to exchange equipment and information relevant to their jobs and functions.
In this exclusive interview to WebCitizen during Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C., Emma discuss the challenges and benefits of a connectivity and collaboration tool like the Spacebook, and the impact of it in the professional functionality for the NASA’s employees.
Traffic 2.0
BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), the public transport system in the city of San Francisco has been successfully using the Web 2.0 tools to leverage the efficiency, transparency, accountability, participation, collaboration and new models of partnership between the community and the city government.
Melissa Jordan, representative of BART, which responsibility areas include the content for the official site, updates for Twitter and Facebook, posts on the agency’s official Blog, as the whole strategy for social development through the Internet, had gave us an exclusive interview after a tiresome presentation day during the Gov 2.0 Showcase Expo, which came one day before the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C. in September this year.
In this interview Melissa tells how a governmental agency can use technology to become a provider of not only services but also information (not only from the agency itself but also the content produced by its users), building a civic participation connectivity with the public transport users in a light, trustworthy, authentic, well humored and wide w
BART also collaborates in the Web not only with the system users, but also with NGOs promoting interactive activities that benefit the community and the planet, as, for instance, the Bike to Work Day, in a partnership with Bay Area Bike Coalition.
Connection to change the world
Mark Drapeau is a scientist, writer, and consultant in the public and private spheres, focusing on the technology, innovation, government and society areas. Currently he’s deputy professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs of the George Washington University, in the American capital, he has received a lot of national awards and honors for his works.
Drapeau has created the term “goverati” to describe the group of people that understand the governmental mechanisms and how the new social technologies make possible better communication, transparency, participation and collaboration between citizens and governments.
He has recently found the Government 2.0 Club, an international organization that promotes events about the intersection between social technologies and the government. He also was the Co-chair in the schedule committee for the Gov 2.0 Showcase Expo, event that opened the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C. in September, 2009.
During this event that Drapeau gave an exclusive interview to WebCitizen, he talks about how the new media are causing irreversible ruptures in many aspects in the society, such as in traditional education and journalism areas, and how the social media are replacing newspapers and magazines as sources of information.
Mark Drapeau’s blog: http://www.markdrapeau.com/
Mark Drapeau’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/cheeky_geeky
Blog Action Day – Changes that change
The climate changes don’t come alone, by the way they insist to always have company. To help to deal with many changes derived from climate changes, a small list follows:
Good maners: “If you can’t talk about roads or weather, then don’t open your mouth.” That is a recommendation of a mother to her daughter in a novel by Jane Austen (English novelist, 1775-1817). That was a golden rule to live together in society, in England, in order to avoid polemic or personal uncomfortable subjects. Those rules aren’t anymore in fashion, currently would be impossible to use the weather as a theme for light conversations during the traditional five o’clock tea. By the way, roads even less…
Jokes: do you remember that old joke that is about to ask to a distracted interlocutor if the polar bear feeds on penguins? As the person reviews the knowledge on the bear’s food chain, we remind that the polar bear lives in the North Pole, as penguins populate the South Pole. In times of climate change, however, even the old jokes must be treated with caution. I don’t know if we’ll reach the extreme to have bears meeting penguins around, but this bear has been leading unusual meetings – even dates – with other species. Hybrid cubs of polar bears and grey bears, species that don’t usually met, are already wandering around.
Maldives Islands, located on the Indian Ocean, takes the risk to disappear with the increase on the level of oceans caused by the global warming
Tourism: destinations never thought before for family vacation, as the Arctic, will become commonplace. In the other hand, ski stations will need to find other objective for its facilities. Other class that can become a great attraction is the adventure submarine tourism. That is about the visitation of disappeared countries, diving for the most boldness, and with submarines, for the most rich.
Geography: we don’t have only to forget what we knew one day, but we also have to review our ideas about maps, continents, seas and the very geography itself. That is, by the melting of the ice caps due to the climate changes, countries and cities will vanish from the map and inaccessible places will become destinations for vacations. But, everything in a dynamic constant, that is, what you see on the map today, could not be there tomorrow, not only because the increase on the level of the seas, but also because of tsunamis, hurricanes and other extreme climate events.
Refugees: even today, the disasters are the great factor of migration and movement of populations, the increase of frequency and intensity of these events, derived from climate changes, unavoidably intensify such processes. The amount of people involved in movements and migrations caused by climate changes are estimated to leap from the 50 million in 2010 to around of 700 million in 2050. Furthermore, the increase on the level of the seas directly threatens the existence of 40 countries at least, as, for example, Tuvalu and Maldives, small island countries that will develop a new situation: refugees literally with no country.
The climate changes can extremely change the Planet biodiversity and animals such as the polar bear can become legends
Monsters from the past: the role performed by the dinosaurs and mammoths in our lives will be fulfilled, in the future, by animals that exist today. By the current climate changes, the great problem is that, in most of cases, there’s no place for animal populations to move and, in certain cases, this scenario is escalated by the fact that there isn’t in the population enough diversity to develop individuals resistant to the new environmental conditions. Probable result: extinction. So, the most probable isn’t that penguins and polar bears to meet in some place on the planet, but is that both become only legends of a world with biodiversity…
Legendary views: some of us that had the privilege to see views as the caps with actual ice, the great glaciers, small island countries, and marvelous cities by the cost live will be live witnesses that these views had existed in fact and that aren’t another resource from Photoshop…
Starving and poverty: that won’t change, only increase. Besides the refugees, already mentioned, many agriculture systems can collapse and part of the small resources that most of the human population have today to buy their daily food will have to be spent in other necessities, as shelter, health and even water.
Flying saucer: before a symbol of science fiction, can become the only chance to escape from a planet hostile to human life…
Nurit Bensusan is writer, blogger and biologist. Her great occupation is to think without rails
