Featured Blog Posts (11)

A new years message to Globalvillagers

 

                "We are the ones who still seem to be figuring out...

                ....how to be the ones we've been waiting for."

                Tom Atlee, http://tom-atlee.posterous.com/are-we-the-ones





A happy new year 2011 to everybody, be it via the mailinglist or other channels !



I have not written to the communit(ies) for quite a long time and want to give an update on many points… Continue

This post goes -identically - to the members of the NING Group 'Global Villages Network' and to the members of the yahoogroup 'globalvillages'.



This is going to be a rather lengthy letter with many messages overdue - and therefore it makes sense to start right away with a table of contents:



thank you for the effort to read this!



Franz



===========================================================



Top News

1. State of Global Villages Network, NING… Continue

Recently our friend Gleb Tyurin organized a high level meeting on innovative ways in rural development in the Region of Vologda (between Moscow and Archangelsk). A group of experts and local and federal policy makers awaited dialogue with external participants via videobridge. To my bad surprise, Gleb seemed to be very nervous in the morning when the conference started. We could only connect shortly… Continue

I have gained some attention in Russia after writing to the governor of Archangelsk about an opportunity to support sound rural development with the help of a Global Villages Network. This network is supposed to be a network of experts and innovators all around the world that cares about the future of Villages.



I need to make some clarification before going on with this matter. It is very interesting that there was a generally receptive attitude to the existence of such a network,… Continue

Thank you for inviting me here Franz. I have many stories to tell and many links to share so this may happen over time. I have been using the concept of "Digital Villages" for a while but it's really a metaphore for something more concrete. You may recall Franz that when you visited Teesside I used the concept of "Rivers" to describe where you were in the world and how my heritage and mindset was focussed by the three main rivers that define my region in the North East of England.



My… Continue

The following will be pubished in Michel Bauwens P2P blog and I also post it here:

"That is the opportunity that the development of Africa presents. Rural Africa missed out on the industrial revolution that raised the living standards of the industrial nations. It is a fresh canvas where we can paint a new picture of development. We can work together, learning from the mistakes of the past, using the sustainable technologies of the present, developing the technolgies of…

Continue

Do you want to live more simply and with socially conscious people? Are you reluctant to leave the city because the nice places seem like social deserts with alien languages? Do you want to spend less time paying your overheads and more time doing whatever you want?



We are a small group of tele-working professionals planning to spend the coming winter working in a warmer, cheaper, and more relaxed setting.



We invite fellow social entrepreneurs to join us and share… Continue

Franz invited me to blog about my dissertation I wrote for achieving the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College, Devon, UK, in 2008. The thesis can be downloaded at



Holistic Science network at ning.com



I have traditionally been a pessimist, and I was more or less just waiting for a catastrophe to happen since I was 17. Environmental destruction, greed, financial and social turmoil… Continue

I like that mantra, reiterated many times after Tony Gwilliam gave it to me in a garden in Ojai somewhen in the early 90ies. Tony is now enjoying a quite healthy circumstance in his Bloo Lagoon Village in Bali. Still for many health issues we have to refuge to cities

So it made me particularly happy that the linkages of the health community to Global Village issues is becoming stronger. I reccomend reading the recently published Interview of Claude… Continue

GlobalVillages is an expression that some people "borrowed" (with expressed consent from Eric and Corinne McLuhan in 1998) from a very popular concept by MarshallMcLuhan.



We changed the notion, though. The McLuhans said this was fine because it was part of Marshalls Intention to show and play with this dialectic from virtual to real.



For us, "Global Villages" are real settlements, physical neighbourhoods,… Continue

The Global Villages Network was founded in 1997 at the third international Global Village Symposium in Viennas city hall. Allready then, we had a long history of making contacts and spreading the idea of an immense interplay between the virtual and the local. For 10 years, we focussed on the experimental work in Austria rather than on international endavours, and we developed compelling solutions for boosting the educational offerings in a rural area. The "Model Kirchbach" developed and we… Continue