 | This biography of a living person relies too much on references to primary sources .(September 2012) |
Tom Atlee (born 1947) is an American social, peace and environmental activist and author.
| | This biography of a living person relies too much on references to primary sources .(September 2012) |
Tom Atlee (born 1947) is an American social, peace and environmental activist and author.
Born in an intellectual, activist family of Quakers, Atlee experienced social change from an early on. In 1968, he dropped out of Antioch College to organize draft resistance to the Vietnam War. [1] In 1976, daughter Jennifer was born. Participating in the Great Peace March of 1986 – a "watershed experience" [2] to Atlee, he "spent the next 15 years exploring group and organizational phenomena". [3] Atlee lives in an intentional community in Eugene, Oregon.
From 1989–1994 Atlee was editor of Thinkpeace, a national journal of peacemaking strategy and philosophy. In 1991 he went to Belize and to Czechoslovakia as a consultant on ecological social change and community-building. From 1991–1992 Atlee served on the boards of the Ecology Center (Berkeley). In 1996, he founded the Co-Intelligence Institute, a non-profit organization facilitating and researching self-organization, collective intelligence, participatory modes of governance and collaborative democracy. An article in Utne Reader identifies him as a radical centrist thinker. [4]
Co-intelligence according to the FAQ on Atlee's institute website is "shared, integrated form of intelligence that we find in and around us when we're most vibrantly alive. It is also found in cultures that sustain themselves harmoniously with nature and neighbor. ... [it] shows up whenever we pool our personal intelligences to produce results that are more insightful and powerful than the sum of our individual perspectives." [5]
Atlee developed the Wise Democracy Pattern language with the support of Martin Rausch. [6] The first edition was created in 2016. [7] According to their website the Wise Democracy Pattern Language is a pattern language that, "highlights dynamic factors and design principles which can make an activity, organization or community more wisely self-governing." The "prime directive" or fundamental principle of Wise Democracy is "“evoke and engage the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole.” [8] [9]
Saul David Alinsky was an American community activist and political theorist. His work through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation helping poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords, politicians, bankers and business leaders won him national recognition and notoriety. Responding to the impatience of a New Left generation of activists in the 1960s, Alinsky – in his widely cited Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer (1971) – defended the arts both of confrontation and of compromise involved in community organizing as keys to the struggle for social justice.
In These Times is an American politically progressive monthly magazine of news and opinion published in Chicago, Illinois. It was established as a broadsheet-format fortnightly newspaper in 1976 by James Weinstein, a lifelong socialist. It investigates alleged corporate and government wrongdoing, covers international affairs, and has a cultural section. It regularly reports on labor, economic and racial justice movements, environmental issues, feminism, grassroots democracy, minority communities, and the media.
Bioneers, under its parent foundation, Collective Heritage Institute, is a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization based in New Mexico and California. Founded in 1990 their philosophy recognizes and cultivates the value and wisdom of the natural world, emphasizing that responses to problems must be in harmony with the design of natural systems. Official Programs include Moonrise Women's Leadership, Restorative Food Systems, Indigeneity ), Education for Action, and the award-winning Dreaming New Mexico community resilience program.
Radical centrism, also called the radical center, the radical centre, and the radical middle, is a concept that arose in Western nations in the late 20th century. The radical in the term refers to a willingness on the part of most radical centrists to call for fundamental reform of institutions. The centrism refers to a belief that genuine solutions require realism and pragmatism, not just idealism and emotion.
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
Laura Spelman Rockefeller was an American philanthropist. She was the eldest child of Laurance Spelman Rockefeller (1910–2004) and Mary French (1910–1997), and a fourth generation member of the Rockefeller family. She has two younger sisters, Marion, Lucy Aldrich Rockefeller, and a younger brother, Laurance Spelman Rockefeller Jr. Her patrilineal great-grandfather was Standard Oil's co-founder John D. Rockefeller and her matrilineal great-grandfather was Frederick H. Billings, a president of Northern Pacific Railway. Both of her grandmothers, Mary Billings French and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, were important to the early development of YWCA USA. Chasin is known as the founder, former executive director, and former board member of the Public Conversations Project in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Transpartisan, or transpartisanship, represents an emerging paradigm of political thought which accepts the validity of truths across a range of political perspectives and seeks to synthesize them into an inclusive, pragmatic container beyond typical political dualities. It is distinct from bipartisanship, which aims to negotiate between "right" and "left", resulting in a dualistic perspective, and nonpartisanship, which tends to avoid political affiliation altogether.
Self-managed social centres in the United Kingdom can be found in squatted, rented, mortgaged and fully owned buildings. These self-managed social centres differ from community centres in that they are self-organised under anti-authoritarian principles and volunteer-run, without any assistance from the state. The largest number have occurred in London from the 1980s onwards, although projects exist in most cities across the UK, linked in a network. Squatted social centres tend to be quickly evicted and therefore some projects deliberately choose a short-term existence, such as A-Spire in Leeds or the Okasional Café in Manchester. Longer term social centres include the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford, the Cowley Club in Brighton and the Sumac Centre in Nottingham, which are co-operatively owned.
Sascha Altman DuBrul, a.k.a.Sascha DuBrul or Sascha Scatter, is an American activist, writer, farmer and punk rock musician known as the bass player of the 1990s ska-punk band Choking Victim.
Collective wisdom, also called group wisdom and co-intelligence, is shared knowledge arrived at by individuals and groups.
Favianna Rodriguez is an American artist and activist known for her work in political posters and public art.
Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. It may involve consensus, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Collective IQ is a measure of collective intelligence, although it is often used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Collective intelligence has also been attributed to bacteria and animals.
Hundred Flowers was an American underground newspaper published in Minneapolis, Minnesota from April 17, 1970 to April 4, 1972. It was produced by a communal collective, with the main instigator being antiwar activist and former Smith College drama instructor Ed Felien. The 16-page, two-color tabloid was published weekly and cost 25 cents, circulating about 5,000 copies.
Collaborative e-democracy refers to a hybrid democratic model combining elements of direct democracy, representative democracy, and e-democracy. This concept, first introduced at international academic conferences in 2009, offers a pathway for citizens to directly or indirectly engage in policymaking. Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn describe it as an "innovative way to engage citizens in the democratic process," that potentially makes government "more transparent, accountable, and responsive to the needs of the people."
The Lucy Parsons Center, located in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, is a radical, nonprofit independent bookstore and self-managed social center. Formed out of the Red Word bookstore, it is collectively run by volunteers. The center provides reading material, space for individuals to drop in, and a free space for meetings and events.
Jon Eliot Ramer is an American entrepreneur, civic leader, inventor, and musician. He is co-founder of several technology companies including Ramer and Associates, ELF Technologies, Inc.,(whose main solution, Serengeti, was purchased by Thomson Reuters) and Smart Channels. The designer and co-founder of several Deep Social Networks, he is the former executive director of the Interra Project, and a co-founder of Ideal Network, a group-buying social enterprise that donates a percentage of every purchase to a non-profit or school. Ideal Network is a certified B-Corp that was recognized as "Best in the World for Community" in 2012 by B-Labs. He is also the designer and co-founder of Compassionate Action Network International, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Seattle, that led the effort to make the city the first in the world to affirm Karen Armstrong's Charter for Compassion. Most recently, Ramer conceived of and produced the "Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest" in response to a challenge from the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky to other cities to outdo Louisville's compassionate action as measured by hours of community service. Ramer also serves as Director and Chief Technology Officer at Four Worlds International Institute, with a focus on the Campaign To Protect the Sacred. The campaign birthed the International Treaty to Protect the Sacred from Tar Sands Projects, signed by over fifty different tribes throughout North America. Ramer is also the songwriter and lead guitarist in the band Once And For All.
Joseph Francis McCormick Jr. is a former American political candidate, political activist, transpartisan organizer and innovator, author and public speaker.
The concept of conscious evolution refers to the theoretical ability of human beings to become conscious participants in the evolution of their cultures, or even of the entirety of human society, based on a relatively recent combination of factors, including increasing awareness of cultural and social patterns, reaction against perceived problems with existing patterns, injustices, inequities, and other factors. The realization that cultural and social evolution can be guided through conscious decisions has been in increasing evidence since approximately the mid-19th century, when the rate of cultural change globally began to increase dramatically. The Industrial Revolution, reactions against the effects of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of new sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology, the revolution in global communication, the interaction of diverse cultures through transportation and colonization, anti-slavery and suffrage movements, and increasing human lifespan all would contribute to the growing awareness of social and cultural patterns as being potentially subject to conscious evolution.
The New World Alliance was an American political organization that sought to articulate and implement what it called "transformational" political ideas. It was organized in the late 1970s and dissolved in 1983. It has been described as the first U.S. national political organization of its type and as the first entity to articulate a comprehensive transformational political program.
Self-managed social centers, also known as autonomous social centers, are self-organized community centers in which anti-authoritarians put on voluntary activities. These autonomous spaces, often in multi-purpose venues affiliated with anarchism, can include bicycle workshops, infoshops, libraries, free schools, meeting spaces, free stores and concert venues. They often become political actors in their own right.
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