Participating in/Supporting The Commons

Participating in/Supporting The Commons

Paths into The Commons

Sponsorship and Support

Project & Program Leaders

Volunteers: Help Wanted

Joining/Guest Book

Paths into The Commons

There are various ways in which you may wish to enter, make use of, and eventually participate in The Commons. Since this is intended above all to be a collaborative enterprise - but also something that will be useful for those who are interested in the issues but for one reason or another not able or interested in contributing - it may be useful if we take a moment to clarify. There are the usual handful of options, including:

Lurking
Commenting
Joining the Discussions
Signing In
Contributors
Expert Panels
Volunteer help: informal, ad hoc or more structured
Sponsorship and Support

We would hope that you will chose to kick off your use of this site and eventual collaboration by signing in to the Guest Book. That in our view is the most creative and eventually useful option all around, however lurkers too are welcome. It may just be a first stage, or it may be a choice of life style. But in both cases you are welcome, and we hope that you will find some interest and use in the work that is reported on and the tools that are presented here.

Sponsorship and Support

Thus far external financial support received has been adequate to cover about a fifth of total program costs. Volunteer inputs from outside have contributed a like amount. But this is hardly a stable platform for the future and further support is now needed.

We are hopeful that some groups or institutions, foundations, or possibly even individuals, may be sufficiently impressed by what we are trying to do that they will decide to come in and help us reach out beyond what we have thus far managed to achieve in order to make this better and more powerful cooperative program in support of our shared sustainability objectives. There are several main paths of such support:

Global funding support for The Commons (because it's the right thing to do)
Underwriting all or a portion of the costs for a specific program or project
- The World Carshare Consortium as an example of a mature site
- Children on the Move, example of a site where all remains to be done.
- Zero Emissions Virtual Conference was the first completely virtual conference by us in 1997.
- OECD Towards Sustainable Transportation Conference was the first such example back in 1995/96.
Technical support, webmastering, graphics, designh, and housing of web site(s).
Funding a specific task or project element (such as printing costs of a special report, contributions to cover conference participation, equipment or software purchases, technical assistance services, etc.)
Support for training fellowships and visitor programs.
Aggressive institutional support and willingness to serve as a "champion" for a specific project or supporting action in some city or place. Or for a Collective Action initiaitve.
Open-end financial support for a proposed program of grants and assistance from The Commons to fund the further work of worthy projects and individuals who have already given proof of their ability to make a contribution to the important tasks at hand.

Project & Program Leaders

Have an idea for a new project or program under The Commons?

If what you wish to do coincides with the values and interests set out here, you are invited to get in touch. That is the way that most of these projects that you will find here got underway in the first place. Our main role here is to work with and support good people with good ideas. So, if you have a project underway for turning a conference into a trampoline for concrete initiatives, keeping cars out of East European cities and preserving their amenity and historical patrimony, building an international network to support some budding social activist movement, new approaches to job creation in a depressed region, creating a multi-media center, library, social space in some small place.... and other such responsible initiatives where an international partner might be helpful, this is one place you may consider coming to thrash out your ideas.

Volunteers: Help Wanted

Organizing and maintaining a public interest program and Web site as ambitious as this requires considerable resources and effort. Until now just about all of this has been on a volunteer basis, with incoming funds covering about a fifth of our costs. So help is needed if we are to be able to continue, and of course we want to do more than just hang on. So perhaps you will want to give us a hand in some specific way. Technical help that can permit us to make the various multimedia extensions needed are high on the list, but help is needed too in site maintenance, correspondence processing, editing and translations. We also realize that we can do a lot better in terms of site design, but once again we are pretty much stuck with what we have until further help comes along.

This is the place to get in touch to discuss any eventual contribution on your part. Technical help and financial support is wanted for the following tasks, which are possible, certainly useful for the conference, but beyond our present budgetary possibilities:

Listservers to support and enhance specific projects and programs
Organization of Poster Sessions using latest connect technologies
WebMasters to help improve and expand this site (including the task of deployment of code to help us move systemically to collapsing Toolbar elements)
WebCasting of one or more associated physical presentations or meetings
Integration of several video presentations
Multi-point videoconferences cum Poster Sessions
Figuring out some clever feedback loops so that the best inputs received in our various Call-In lines can be shared.
And, not surprisingly if you know the Web, the list goes on.

There is a great deal that we can accomplish if we get together. Your ideas, suggestions and help here will be most appreciated. After all... community, sharing, team work!

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