everydayrobots

This weekend a good friend asked me this: “If collective action is working for #sopa, why is it not working for #ows?” 

I found that a very interesting question that resonated strongly with me. In the following I want to share my answers to it.

1. #sopa is not lower income vs. higher income, bottom vs top of the societal pyramid but top vs. top, industries vs. industries. Strong lobbies vs strong lobbies, while the one lobby knows how to mobilize by using the web. Google, Amazon, Yahoo, O´Reilly, the whole Valley more or less, Wikipedia, TED, MIT aso.

2. The protests against #sopa had a cristal clear goal of being against sth new. That was easy understood by the masses and it´s easier to convince them to preserve the status quo always. #Ows is “blurry” for the masses because it´s about building sth new which is way harder to do. (Same with Egypt: it was one thing to get rid of Mubarak, it´s a totally different thing to build a functioning society/ economy/ government without the old elites now.)

3. #ows is fundamental systemic critic. If people scratch the surface of almost every topic they want to engage with (be it banks, income distribution, poverty, justice, war, hunger, environment, education …) they´ll find, that all their topics are just symptoms of the same outdated, ill system of running our world. So they get frustrated and are simply overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the challenge. It´s easier to believe the lobbyists/ media/ politics (the people we were brainwashed for decades to believe they know what´s best for us) saying that everything will become better for everybody if we burn enough oil and the economy keeps growing. #Sopa did not challenge our whole way of living. #Ows does.

4. #ows is open ended while #sopa had a clear deadline that put pressure on everybody interested in the topic. 

Open for discussion, I´m looking forward to your comments!
(Photo Credits: Flickr User “Kill Pop”: Thanks!)

Just 2 days after I´ve mentioned them in my last blog post I found out that Open Source Ecology is coming to Germany this year!

After a chat with Nikolay I´m really excited to join the initial group and do my very best to help to plant the seed of an Open Source Economy also in Germany. As written before I´m convinced that in order to survive the ecological crisis we pile up right in front of our eyes a deep rapid cultural change will be the only option. A reorientation on trusted communities that connect to a global sharing economy. Sharing best practices, fostering adaptation and learning around the world.

Read their full announcement in English and German and the 1st rough Roadmap for Germany.

This short clip summarizes the overall plans for 2012 and underlying logic of an Open Source Ecology:

Nikolay will come to Berlin by the end of the month and we´ll have an OSE meetup. So if you are interested to get involved please let us know!

In the calm last days of 2011 I took some time to recap the last year. Although the topics of ecology, climate change and the destruction of our planet´s ecosystem were at the back of my mind for a long time they finally became my focus in 2011. They´re no longer just topics to me, but became the driving forces behind everything I do and will do in 2012. As I wrote already here in my opinion this ecological crisis we have caused by an economical logic based on greed, growth and consumption is the major challenge to my generation, the one big problem we have to tackle.

Although we had already formulated our first thoughts around a permanent space to “rethink”, for experimenting and co-creating sustainable ways of living in 2010 I was triggered to think further in this direction on several occasions last year:

• Vanessa Miemis started a conversation around what she called “Superhero School” (now it goes by the name “Collaboratory”) in a group on Facebook and wrote about it at her blog Emergent by Design. I really love the idea and the lively discussion that emerged and brought up lots of valuable insights and ideas.
• Then I stumbled upon the U.S. architect Michael Reynolds and his stunning work he calls “Earthships”: An Earthship is a radically sustainable building made with recycled materials. They can be built in any part of the world, in any climate and still provide their inhabitants with what they need to survive, with ‘modern’ amenities, if desired.

For more information watch their older full movie “Garbage Warrior” or this short documentation of their disaster relief efforts after the earthquake in Haiti.

• The next project that really caught my eye and since then stays in my mind through all the noise in the web is “Open Source Ecology” some of you might know from their TEDtalk. They build open source machines to build a village!

• And now my brother Simon gave me the utopian novel “Walden Two” by the psychologist B.F. Skinner from 1948 for Christmas. What a book.

I´m convinced that our civilization and its current political, societal and economical systems are broken on a deep inherent cultural level. Therefore I can´t believe in incremental repair from within the systems anymore but think we need spaces of freedom for designing and building alternatives. Customized sustainable alternatives that might become mainstream, the “normality” of living in the 21st century. To me one of these spaces of freedom I helped to create was the 7 week camp Palomar5 in 2009/2010. The energetic, adventurous spirit I´m looking for came to life there from time to time. 

With this experience and precious memories in mind I´m currently planning with friends a 3 day conference plus 6 week camp that will be entirely dedicated to the co-creation of radical alternatives. We aim to transform the camp to a permanent space subsequently.
More on this soon here for sure.

Another project that will accompany me through 2012 is WE_the_movie. It´s (obviously) a movie project I´m doing with a small team including my friend Ulrike I also do the we-mag with. The movie will be about the cultural change we need from a “ME” to more of a “WE society”. A whole series of best practices from around the world and interviews with thinkers like Sir Ken Robinson but also less known activists in the field will hopefully transport the message into mainstream media. For this we are in talks with some major TV stations at the moment. I wrote more on my personal motivation to do WE_the_movie here. If you want to learn more about WE_the_movie you can find the full treatment online and in case you have some christmas money left we would be more than thankful if you would help us right here. Thank you!

Besides this I´m about to launch the Ideabrigade. The Ideabrigade is pictured as a global network of skilled creatives, with experience of working together, and tested processes to address problems fast and ad-hoc in what we call “idea sprints”. While we´ll start in Berlin there will be brigades in Melbourne, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Paris launching within 2012. More to come on this too.

Last but not least in fall 2011 we formed the group “Minimal Footprint Hedonists”. In the last two month we experimented with and built prototypes of “energy bikes”. It´s very hands-on and a hell lot of fun so far. Thanks guys btw! ;-)

For 2012 we want to design and build a “Social Cloud Generator”: a mobile docking station that will trigger social interaction by producing energy together in a fun way.

As always if you are interested to learn more about or help us with some of the stuff above just drop me a line at dominik[at]everydayrobots[dot]de or let me know in the comments.

I have the gut feeling that 2012 and the next years to come will be years historians will have a lot to write about. Let´s give them stories we can be proud of when our grandchildren read them one day…

I wish you all the best for 2012!

This post was first published at we-magazine.net. It´s my story – why I am doing WE_The_Movie, a film project I started with friends some weeks ago. Make sure to check it out, donate or maybe even join us in this endeavor!

When I was in Samoa in the Southern Pacific back in 1999 I was quite sure that I found paradise. The lush, opulent vegetation, white sandy beaches, vulcanos, rainforests and cristal clear water in the lagoon, corals, starfishes and immense shoals of fish. But already back then the natives I was living with were highly alert: The village elder told me something was wrong with the sea and the winds, that something was changing. They said “Mother Earth” was screaming in pain and was about to die because of our “Western” consumption.

Today I know we have gone way too far. It´s a horrifying scientific fact that our planet´s ecosystem will collapse within my lifetime. “With just 10 more years of “business as usual” emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, it becomes impractical to avoid “disastrous effects” [on climate and environment]. That´s what NASA and the Columbia University Earth Institute already said in 2007.

Our current way of living is based on the fundamentally flawed ideas of individualism, success and endless growth withour any restrictions. It´s all about ME being in this world, while the ME is very often reduced to be nothing else but a “consumer”.

The urgent change needed can’t be tackled by individuals alone. It needs a very strong WE in which every individual (=ME) takes responsibility: WE need to connect, to listen to and to understand each other. WE need to inspire, to learn from and to change with each other. WE have to bring in our creativity, intelligence and action to save the basis of our living.

WE can’t wait for institutions and our political leaders any longer. They failed so far or were simple too slow. WE have to start right away. I feel obliged to spread this message. And I hope WE_the_movie will accelerate the change we need. To save us. To save “Mother Earth”. It´s time.

Last week I was invited to speak at the 1st InfluencerCon in Berlin. The panel´s topic was “changing to green” so I did some research about the actual numbers to back my arguments. What I found was nothing but shocking. After studying the numbers and looking into statistics I´m concerned. Very concerned. It´s no longer about if there is something like man-made global warming, it´s about surviving this century or not. Just to clarify upfront: I´m not talking about numbers from “left wing radical environmentalists” but the NASA, Cornell, Washington and Yale University.

Some numbers to get the dimensions we´re talking about

• Up to 270 species are driven extinct every day (73.000 per year & 2.336.000 in my lifetime). This extinction rate is between 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural background rate. (Harvard biologist, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize,  Dr. E. O. Wilson in his book ”The future of life”)
• Almost no multi-year ice remains around the North Pole and the average ice thickness is down to 90cm. (www.thearcticinstitute.org)
• There´s 6x more plastic than phytoplankton in some part of the oceans. 600,000 tonnes only in the North Sea! (www.greenpeace.org)
• More than 12 million hectares of productive land are lost due to desertification every year. ~Size of South Africa every decade. (UNCCD – United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification)
• 6 million hectares of primary forest are lost every year due to deforestation and modification through selective logging and other human interventions. –> At this speed by 2030 only 10% of all tropical forests will remain globally. (UNEP – United Nations Environment Program)

• Carbon dioxide:
  • Preindustrial concentration of CO2 was ~280ppm (parts per million). In 2010 392ppm.
  • It must be kept beneath 350ppm to avoid “irreversible catastrophic effects”. To reach 350ppm would need a phase-out of existing coal emissions by 2030.
  • Estimation for 2100: 541 – 970ppm! (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many others)

Some say that they don´t see any of these happening. Well it does, not only in Africa or Asia, although it hits those first and more heavy:

• ~40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution. That´s 63.000 per day. (Prof. David Pimentel, Cornell University)

Until today we (= “western”, industrialized countries) are mainly the reason for all of this but keep “celebrating” the horrible numbers of economical “success” …

• Sales of Mercedes-Benz cars in China increased by 112% in 1. quarter of 2010, to 23,600 vehicles. (Trendwatching –> New York Times, 29 April 2010)
• SUV sales in China are expected to double, from 847,000 units per year to 1.54 million in 2015. (TruckTrend, March 2010)

… while the world population is growing especially in the BRICS countries (Brasil, Russia, India, China, South Africa):

• 2000: about 6 billion
• Today: about 7 billion
• 2025: about 8 billion (all estimated by the United States Census Bureau)
• But already TODAY upgrading the infrastructure in the “developing world” to the status of the “developed world” would require essentially all of the copper and zinc (and possibly all the platinum) on earth as well as near-perfect metal recycling. (“Metal Stocks and Sustainability” Prof. Robert Gordon, Yale University)

The “real” thread: Cascading Effects

This little selection of numbers above by itself is frightening enough but what really puts up the pressure are possible so called “cascading effects”. Scientist can describe them as points in time from when on it does no longer matter what humankind is doing. Global warming becomes self- sustaining: What already kicked in probably:

• Most of the remaining tropical forests are in the Amazon. Deforestation there stops transpiration and leads to more desertification –> kills more trees –> less transpiration. Self-sustaining forest dieback with potentially catastrophic effects on global climate.

What could happen if we just keep on going:

• Tundra melting: frozen organic matter will release loads of greenhouse gases
• Arctic Ocean heat up: massive release of methane (16x more efficient greenhouse gas then carbon dioxide) from the ocean floor.

What does all this tell us?

There´s no better way to sum this up then Ronen Kadushin, who developed the open design concept, did at the panel: “We´re pretty much fucked.” Dave Pollardwrote: “We have unleashed the sixth great extinction of life on Earth […]. We have created a political and economic industrial growth civilization monoculture that is unsustainable, out of control and unstoppable.“ I´m a hopeless optimist so of course I can´t take “unstoppable” although reading through my research I´d agree on “probably unstoppable”.
The only quite utopian option I can think of is that a majority of us understands:
Industrialism and consumerism are the reason for, not the solution of, the problem. The technocratic promise of “inventing our way out of the problem” is proven wrong by the sheer numbers and statistics. It brought us here. We CAN´Thave more cars, more traveling, cheaper clothes AND our planet. It´s time to act, the window of time left to act is closing.

With just 10 more years of “business as usual” emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, “it becomes impractical” to avoid “disastrous effects.” (NASA & Columbia University Earth Institute in 2007) We have to understand: we are gambling. Humankind is playing the biggest game by chance ever played and we put ourselves at stake for profits.

I´m writing on a next blog post focussing on potential approaches to adress this central challenge of our generation.
Photo credits: flickr user kvitlauk

As most of you probably know I´ve been to Israel last month. With my sisters in crime from we-magazine, Ulrike and Bea, we were warmly welcomed at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva. Our goal was to produce a short filmclip about the “Open Apartments Program”, something that I believe is not existing somewhere else and goes like this:

The university offers students apartments for free in poor neighborhoods around the campus in Beer Sheva. In exchange the students provide 8+ hours of their time per week offering courses to the poor families, their neighbors. The students can choose what they want to do as long as it serves the neighborhood and helps the people around in a meaningful way. What we have seen there was really amazing: mainly self-organized the students gave reading/ writing lessons to elder people, created a community garden with the neighbors and offered various sports courses like soccer and gymnastics for women. And none of them only spend the mandatory 8 hours, they were deeply involved in the neighborhoods, the family and were in contact with the people around them every single day. They became family and friends to each other, completely independent of age, religion, nationality or education.
Step by step they break down the barriers between university and the poor neighborhoods, between religion, origin and heritage, between humans.

As strong believers in co-creation and team creativity of course we did not just go there to shoot our story. Instead we deep dived into the “Open Apartments Program” by facilitating a design-thinking workshop: Together with 7 amazing students who are all part of the program, we analyzed, brainstormed and prototyped the film´s storyboard, its texts, musics, pictures.

For more details regarding the workshop and the phases of this 2.5 days of creative process check out our documentation:

During the workshop the students came up with a strong & beautiful core message for the film: “Community involvement teaches you what they don´t teach in classrooms! The university of life is out there!” In my opinion this sentence covers pretty much the core of most problems we´re facing in our educational systems of today: we do not focus on developing full personalities, responsible, mature humans. Instead we focus on pressure fueling young people with facts and information. This might work with robots but not human beings.

At the 3rd day the students shot all scenes of the co-created storyboard by themselves. None of them had ever been involved in any kind of film-making before. After another half a day of editing this is what they produced to bring across their really special approach of studying and developing their personality. I just love it.

Thank you Adi, Nilu, Sara Tal, Maayan, Lior, Keren and Matanya for your trust and energy. It was great fun working with you!



I was asked to answer some questions concerning Civil Participation in Policy-Making and although I´m obviously quite an amateur in policy-making I tried to transfer my experiences from collaborative design and creativity processes to this topic. Because there was a limit of ~500 characters per answer I will add some more background linking here so this is what came out of it:

1. WHY IS CIVIL PARTICIPATION IN POLICY-MAKING NEEDED?
The term “democracy” has its roots in “dēmokratía” (Greek) what means “rule of the people”. Through technological progress, first and foremost the internet, institutions can now easily and directly enable this “rule of the people”. In today’s complex world involving the brainpower and creativity of as many people as possible in civil participatory processes will hopefully lead to better solutions than intransparent, longish processes inside exclusive “expert circles”. If we are serious about “dēmokratía“ it’s about time to adapt this beautiful concept. What this “more” of democracy could mean is beautifully presented by this list of specific demands of the 15-M movement in Spain: http://roarmag.org/2011/05/list-demands-spanish-protesters-15-m-madrid/

2. WHAT CAN YOU DO TO IMPROVE CIVIL PARTICIPATION IN POLICY-MAKING?
I experiment with civil participation myself. My role model is the activist-network Avaaz that mobilizes millions of people worldwide to sign petitions for current causes. I want to raise the level of participation above the signing of petitions to the collaborative development of solution proposals to current causes. To do so I develop an event framework where people meet spontaneously for 2-7 days for focused face-to-face collaboration. These teams will be connected to a global community online and rely on its feedback, votes and helping hands to share the results. For digging a little deeper concerning these “impact camps” you might want to check out “In Search for Impact” where I wrote about my background thinking or the post “Ad-Hoc Impact Camps” going into first planning details of such a format.

3. WHAT IS A GOOD AND CONVINCING EXAMPLE OF CIVIL PARTICIPATION IN POLICY-MAKING?
One of the most impressive examples of civil participation is the crowdsourcing of a new constitution in Iceland. After the crash of the Icelandic banking system the government decided to directly involve the Icelandic people to co-create their new constitution. Since April 2011 every Icelander can add ideas to an online platform. Using these ideas the council posts new draft clauses every week that then get commented publicly by citizens. That way the new Icelandic constitution is drafted in a participatory, iterative process. For more details concerning the process of this impressive example you may want to check out this informative piece at bulletsbombsbanks. Also check this “Iceland says it was “bullied” over bank debt” from yesterdays huffingtonpost.

When I had political discussions with my grandpa most of our talks ended up like this: “Boy you´re right but never forget, you grumble on a very high level.” And I knew he was right. While I grew up in safety, freedom, peace and democracy he did in war, poverty and the Nazi regime, not knowing what to eat tomorrow, not knowing who to trust. He almost got killed 3 times before he turned 16.

What we see right now are beginning revolutions in many countries and while my grandpa could argue that the revolutions in the Arabic world are not connected to Germany because the situation there was and is way worse, probably he would not understand, why the #SpanishRevolution started.

In this post I´ll share my thoughts about why I think the revolutionary movement was and had to be kicked off also and especially in “western” countries and why I think we´ll see similar situations like in Spain probably in almost every European country within the next years. Let me give you a collection of facts and quotes that I can see to be combined in one huge picture. No doubt it´s still quite blurry and not really coherent but I think it gives an idea what we are heading for.

So let´s drop the bomb: In my opinion we are experiencing the beginning of the end of the capitalist world order as we know it. Please don´t get me wrong, I´m neither communist nor a believer in any other ideology. But even Schumpeter, the “intellectual father” of capitalism, already stated in 1947 that capitalism will not only tear down barriers that hinder its progress but also buttresses that prevent its collapse.

Some more concrete ideas what this could mean practically are given in “The Limits to Growth“, a study published by The Club of Rome exploring the future of world economy that was sold more than 30 million times in 30 languages since 1972. It was updated in 2004 and points out that:

• within the last 3 decades the gap between rich and poor increased from 35/65 to 20/80
• going on with the “business as usual” of the last 30 years will lead to collapse starting around 2030
• from 13 possible scenarios only 3 will lead to stability and balance while all the other scenarios lead to overshoot and collapse

Here some numbers, symptoms of the financial system eating itself:

• A brand new study released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with McKinsey (!) finds that while global credit stock doubled from $57 trillion to $109 trillion in just 10 years (from 2000 to 2010), it will need to double again to an incredible $210 trillion by 2020 in order to provide the necessary credit-driven growth.
• Right now the US make 4.300.000.000$ debts per day. The overall indebtedness now equals the gross domestic product of the US (~14 trillion $).
• EU – Greece: What the EU is doing right now especially to Greece is basically this: Imagine you´re unemployed and the few bugs you get from public welfare don´t cover all your costs. Because you can´t lower your running expenses you ask your bank for a loan. The bank gives you some extra money that helps you to survive this month. In the following months you have to repeat your bank visit and the bank gives you loans again and again. That way you get into depths more and more and month by month you need more money ´cause you still have to pay your costs but increasingly also the debit interest. This is a downward spiral that inevitably has to end in an insolvency.
• Even the Economist´s “diagnosis” points out that “Greece’s moribund economy is hopelessly uncompetitive.” What this means? Europe permanently has a leak in the boat.
• “A Real Crisis”: If this happens to Greece that would mean that a lot of international banks will not get their money back what might kick off some kind of domino effect through out most western countries and their private and state banks. And this would end in the “real financial crisis” and no country in the world will be able to stop it with the money of its tax payers. Just to give you an idea of about how much money we are talking here also the numbers are that huge that it´s actually unimaginable: The IMF (International Monetary Fund) puts the total costs of the “1st” financial crisis at 11.9 trillion $. This money, that was mostly spent to bail out banks is now of course missing in other areas, especially in the social sector.

“Climate Change”:

• Just yesterday The Guardian published an article that quotes Fatih Birol, chief economist of the Internatonal Energy Agency (IEA), who calls the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius nothing but “a nice Utopia”.
• A study sponsored by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) found “that ocean health has declined further, faster and to a far greater extent than dire forecasts only a few years ago. These symptoms, moreover, could be the harbinger of wider environmental disruptions, scientists said. All five mass extinctions of life on Earth - reaching back more than 500 million years - were preceded by many of the same conditions now afflicting the ocean environment. The rate at which carbon is being absorbed by the ocean is already far greater than at the time of the last globally significant extinctions, which wiped out up to 50 per cent of some deep-sea animals, the report said. Overfishing has also reduced some commercial fish stocks by more than 90 per cent, it said.” (Al Jazeera)

“Social Injustice”:

• One in five children in America lives in poverty. The US child poverty rate is 21%. When you have one in seven Americans living in poverty, one in five children living in poverty—including one in three African-American children and Latino children.
• All 5 seconds a child is starving and 37.000 human beings are starving per day in a world full of money.
• Spanish Telefónica laid off 6.000 workers while the management got paid 450 million € and additional 6.9 billion € of bonus just some weeks ago.
• Here is an absolutely frightening infographic I found at an interesting blog post called “It´s the Inequality, Stupid“. No more explanation needed.

In more and more countries all of the above and a lot more leads to a growing dissatisfaction of the population and in Spain, a country with more than 40% of youth unemployment, these people start to form a so far very positive, pro democratic, non violent resistance outside of the parliament and all established political parties. How scared the political elites are right now you can see in this video where spanish policemen attack sitting peaceful protesters:

To sum it up: the end of the world as we know it is near and we don´t know what will be next, but I think WE will like it.

WE urgently have to collectively bring in our creativity and humanity to help to develop a next, better system and we have to learn from Tunesia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and now also Spain. A good starting point to do so is this first draft of the 8 demands people of the spanish movement 15-M who occupy the Puerta del Sol in Madrid have formulated. It´s about time.