Three Little Pigs And The News Industry

This is how you save the print industry. Fantastic.

I’ll never look at the story of the Three Little Pigs in the same way again.

Link Loving 02.03.12

• What a poor man’s innovation can teach a rich country. An Phung.
• The psychology of working with children on climate change. Ro Randall.
• Advice to younger self. Henry Rollins.
• The future of Occupy. Tim Gee.
• Intense lobbying by energy companies and government misinformation is creating genuine uncertainty about who has overall control over our energy policy. Catherine Mitchell.
• How to delete your browsing history before Google sells it on.

Still Searching For That

“Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved?

The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Philosopher

h/t Alex Evans

Link Loving 01.03.12

• Stop Stealing Dreams. Seriously cool initiative on education.
• John Romano on Niall Ferguson‘s new book ‘Civilisation’.
• How the domestic workers movement in the US is capitalising on ‘The Help’. ‘Ilyse Hogue.
• Intelligent campaign measuring. Tom Baker is on it.
• How to achieve dignity in debt. What Works.
• Syrians are collaboratively deciding what street names will be re-named post-Assad. Mary Elizabeth King.

Well, This Is Awkward

Remember that post about not using the image of megaphones in campaigns?

This newsletter from Practical Action just landed in my inbox.

The subject line read: 'We need loud people!'

#Awkard

Move Your Money

Today is the first day of the Move Your Money campaign. I’m going to move my money on the 23rd of March because I’m tired of upholding a system that exploits the poorest and invests in weapons and fossil fuels instead of communities and renewables.

The campaign is calling for all of us to move our money from the five big banking groups into local, mutual and ethical alternatives. There is a large network of Credit Unions, Building Societies, Ethical Banks and Community Development Finance Institutions in this country that keep our money safe, so plenty of options to choose from.

“Change and progress are preceded by action, individual and collective, and local banking systems thrive when we support them. Since the financial crisis the alternative sector has grown considerably. Several ethical banks have seen their balance sheets double, and savings in credit unions increased by 300% over the last decade. In the US, 10 million people have moved to local financial institutions since 2010.

Move Your Money isn’t about ‘bringing down’ the big banks (they can do that just fine by themselves, thank you). This is about strengthening the alternatives and creating a more diverse system that works in the interest of wider society”

Danni Paffard, Move Your Money organiser

At Netroots Northwest 2012

I forgot there was a camera next to my face. Won’t be doing that again.

Link Loving 29.02.12

• Who’s really violent? Tips for controlling the movement narrative. George Lakey.
• Learning from the future as it emerges. Morgan Phillips.
• The worst example of greenwash of 2012  from Mazda. Ed Gillespie.
• How to find purpose and do what you love. Maria Popova.
• How much benefit fraud actually takes place? Clifford Singer shows us numbers.
• Why the nation state still matters. Dani Rodrick.

Clicktivism No Longer

SumOfUs is one of a recent batch of online mobilisation organisations – this one focuses on uniting consumers, workers and shareholders to hold corporations to account. Their most recent campaign is against the abysmal standards that workers in Chinese factories have to endure while our shiny iProducts are made.

By now we all recognise a campaign email – reader-focused theory of change + opportunity/crisis + call to action etc. But today SumOfUs sent out a completely different email – read it below. I’m seriously impressed.

—

Casper,

This email is not a normal email. This email is not going to ask you to do anything. It’s long. It talks about big-picture strategy, not just today’s latest corporate tactic.

The conventional wisdom in online activism is that we shouldn’t send emails like this.

But the fight to improve the treatment of workers in Apple’s supply chain is going to be a long, hard one – and it’s going to be fought on the shifting sands of PR spin, against one of the most sophisticated corporate media apparatuses in history.

So we think it’s important for the entire SumOfUs community (all 240,000 of us!) to take a step back from the day-to-day and examine how the fight has unfolded, both behind the scenes and in the PR war being waged in public since we first started campaigning a month ago to get Apple to address the rampant violations of workers’ rights throughout its supply chain.

How this all started

Like many of you, at the beginning of this year we had only a vague idea that there might be something rotten in Apple’s supply chain. We had heard about the suicides at Apple factories, but not much else.

Link Loving 28.02.12

• Will Occupy embrace nonviolence? Todd Gitlin.
• Using emergence to take social innovations to scale. Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze.
• Regeneration – a book edited by my friend and colleague Guy Shrubsole and for which a host of other friends have written.
• The map has been replaced by the compass. Word. Seth Godin.
• Throwing out the free market playbook: an interview with Naomi Klein.
• How phone booths could become mini-libraries. John Locke.
• The long shadow of 1968: preparing for a year of action. Matt Meyer.