Uses - Putting The Commons to Work- The Commons (http://www.ecoplan.org/)

Putting The Commons to Work

Each program and site under The Commons offers a fully independent, non-official, non-bureaucratic, non-aligned source of views and critical opinion in its interest areas. We propose The Commons as a useful group work tool for those who are concerned with advancing the state of thinking, policy and practice in the important areas of technology and society to which it is devoted. Here is a quick listing of ways in which we think you can put it to use without delay:

The Commons offers you and your colleagues around the world an interactive forum which has set out to incite and support the very widest range of views and approaches - in the knowledge that there are no easy answers to the problems associated with sustainable development, and that the best responses are going to be those that are hammered together as a result of exchanges and conflict resolution among those most directly involved.

The Commons has two principal functions: the first being to serve as an efficient gateway to the dozen or so focused programs/web sites that make it up. The second is to supply an independent, free forum for world news about and the open, critical discussion of the issues of sustainable development and social justice, and of the ongoing efforts to do something about it. As one critique recently put it of our topic: "We are a generation of great talkers". Good, but far from enough.

You can consult this and any of our sites as an activist international source of innovative ideas, information and contacts in its chosen areas of work.

If you yourself are creatively active in these areas, The Commons and its associated tools is available as a multi-function communications center and tool kit to support and internationalize your activities, inputs and impacts.

You have here a handy place to announce, test and get critical feedback on your ideas and plans -- whether set out in the form of informal working notes, brainstorming pieces, essays, reports, or multimedia materials.

The @Forums provide a means for quickly accessing information and materials on these matters that may be taking place in language groups to which you do not have easy access (via the machine translation capabilities that exist both in simplified public version in the site itself, as well as back in The Commons in a much more sophisticated and powerful variant. Thus if, for instance, you have a newsletter or other occasional publication which presently exists only in French, Spanish, Italian, German or Portuguese, we can possibly run a machine translation for you and present the results in handy two column form so that they run as a reading aid for those who do not master that language.)

Consider making use of these capabilities as a conference or event support system with which you may want to consider working if you are planning something along these lines and are interested in making use of the tools and approach that are set out here.

The Commons can also serve as a means for getting support for a project or an idea, including international partners to help in the organization of events, demonstrations, pilot projects or proposals (such as for the various specialized programs of the European Commission which are open to international teams. See for example the work done with the Mayor and City of Bogota in the first half of 2000, that eventually led to our being jointly awarded the Stockholm Prize).

You may have further ideas about this yourself, and we hope that you will share them with the group. There may be others who can profit from your creative thinking, insights and timely information.

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