Patterns

Title Pattern Text
Community Animators
Justin Smith

Development professionals often find it difficult to adequately assess the broad spectrum of problems a community faces — or the various assets the community has to work with. This often means that development schemes are mismatched with the community's needs, abilities and liabilities. Community Animators can act as critical links and local citizens can often better activate a community to realize change than an outsider.

Online Anti-Poverty Community
Penny Goldsmith

Because anti-poverty advocates and activists often don't have the education and training resources or communications they need, their opportunities for building communities are limited. At the same time, poor and marginalized people don't have the information they need to exercise control over their lives or get the resources they need. The most effective online anti-poverty communities are defined and created by advocates and poor people to address needs as they arise.

Sense of Struggle
Douglas Schuler

Many of the strongest forces in the world must be challenged. A Sense of Struggle can unite a group striving for positive social change. A Sense of Struggle lies between optimism and despair. We need to cultivate a Sense of Struggle and, at the same time, make it easier for those who are involved in the struggle. According to Frederick Douglass, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."

Self-Help Groups
Justin Smith

Individual capacity among poor peoples in the developing world (particularly women) to establish credit and develop self-sufficient businesses is often unrealized. Organizing groups to secure collective and individual credit, and skills training, can help in accessing the capital needed to build businesses and livelihoods. Self-Help Groups offer one approach to create associations for economically marginalized groups.

Self-Designed Development
Justin Smith

Development initiatives are often designed and implemented by outside professionals, politicians and wealthy elites. Neither community empowerment nor fundamental sustainability plays a central role in many of these interventionist projects. Communities must take the opportunity to proactively assert their own paradigm and to exert their own sense of identity and influence in the face of outside forces attempting to define their collective futures.

Engaged Tourism
Christine Ciancetta

At its worst, tourism devastates ecosystems, displaces communities, causes pollution, promotes drug and sex-trafficking, restricts access to clean water, and degrades culture. A westerner's perception of travel often is oblivious to foreign cultures or different lifestyles. Engaged Tourism shifts from fun abroad to meaningful experiences. In fact, engaged tourists can help re-establish values, culture, and status of people adversely affected by commercial tourism.

Appropriating Technology
Ron Eglash

"Ordinary people" can produce science and technology. Latino "street mechanics" created the Low Rider car and Black teenagers created the "scratch" sound of rap. Appropriating technology can help the disenfranchised gain social power. We can encourage marginalized groups to explore positive "hybridity," create community technology centers, and train engineers and designers to think about appropriation by users as a positive goal.

Control of Self Representation
Douglas Schuler

Whether through speech, story, or image how people are represented influences how they're perceived and treated. Non-whites, incarcerated, sick or starving people, disaster victims, uneducated, aged, and rural people as well as many others marginalized by gender or ethnicity are misrepresented. One cannot fully control self-representation but it can be addressed. The first step is increasing awareness of the problem; the second is analysis; the third is action.

Homemade Media
Douglas Schuler

Capturing an image or conversation encourages reflection and introspection yet people outside the major spheres of power have little access to the technologies and tools of self-expression. Although this can be harmful to those people, others are deprived of enriching stories and perspectives. Homemade Media helps build confidence and self-esteem as well as employment skills. Anybody with a story to tell can benefit from Homemade Media.

Arts of Resistance
Douglas Schuler

Repression and other forms of injustice and other social ills are often overlooked, or seen as inevitable. Art can be used to deliver a message of inspiration and information for the disempowered. Art can convey beauty, love and joy. It can also convey justice, fairness, dignity and resistance. The future itself is a plastic medium, a canvas that we all help paint. Arts of Resistance can be seeds that helps people understand their situation and how they might work to improve it.

Labor Visions
Nancy Brigham

As companies move jobs away from unionized workplaces, fewer workers have health insurance and pay has stagnated. New technology has helped businesses create huge multinationals that move jobs to where labor costs are the lowest. Labor Visions, based on humane values, solidarity and local community, can motivate a union movement that transcends borders and involves all workers and their allies.

Universal Voice Mail
Jenn Brandon

Even in this very wired age, the lack of a telephone number can be a real problem. Universal Voice Mail is a low-cost solution for those unable to afford their own telephone. Potential users include the homeless, the working poor, people fleeing domestic violence, or those otherwise in need of confidentiality. Universal Voice Mail should be available as an alternative to telephone service so that all people have a reliable point of contact and a link to their community.

The Power of Story
Rebecca Chamberlain

The ancient art of storytelling needs to be rediscovered and updated. Stories help humankind to understand and reframe the meanings that undergird their existence. We can use new technologies to weave words and images, scientific information and poetic inspiration, and incorporate multiple voices to tell multi-faceted stories of our earth communities. As Thomas King tells us, The truth about stories is that’s all we are.

Public Domain Characters
John Thomas

Humankind has created a magnificent pantheon of fictional and not-so-fictional characters. Sadly, this legacy may be lost as corporations increasingly own the rights. The natural processes of creating, sharing, and building on stories has been degraded into a process of claiming stories as private property. The development and sharing of Public Domain Characters can help reclaim these timeless functions.

Everyday Heroism
Douglas Schuler

In the media, heroes are usually richer, stronger, and better looking than ordinary people. And the situations in which the heroes find themselves are not ordinary. This makes people feel that their own lives are unimportant. No matter what the movies tell us, however, most real heroes are ordinary. We need media that involves ordinary people and everyday lives. Celebrate the heroes among us and strive to be one. Remember: Speak the truth even if your voice shakes.

Telecenters
Michel J. Menou

Across the globe new information and communication technologies (ICT) are increasingly perceived as essential to citizenship. In the same way that public libraries increased participation for the socially excluded through universal access to knowledge, so too can Telecenters that provide free or inexpensive ICT facilities. Remember that numerous preconditions must be met before Telecenters can effectively meet their objectives.

Thinking Communities
Aldo de Moor

Creative thinking is essential for self-realization and for finding sustainable solutions to the problems of our complex global society. A worldwide network of Thinking Communities needs to be created that links affordable locations where people can concentrate and work on individual — as well as collective — creative projects. These would allow members to concentrate deeply, while allowing them to meet peers who are working on other projects.

Great Good Place
Douglas Schuler

Around the world people have forgotten how to "hang out" with friends, a lost art that refreshes the spirit and sometimes leads to social action as well. People need places other than their home or workplace where they feel comfortable without spending much money. They can be cafes, plazas, community centers or simply places with chairs or benches. They can be privately owned but they must support community needs for them to serve as Great Good Places.

Soap Operas with Civic Messages
Douglas Schuler

People all over the world face important life decisions with inadequate information and social pressure to behave in certain ways. Policy makers, media producers and community activists must present that information in forms that are accessible and acceptable. Soap Operas with Civic Messages weaves health and other socially responsible information into soap operas without compromising the compelling everyday drama that the genre exemplifies.

Emergency Communication Systems
Douglas Schuler

Disasters require the attention of every level of society, including individuals, families, and neighborhoods as well as city, state, national, and international agencies and organizations. The content of Emergency Communication Systems and the dynamic and flexible flow of information through them are critical at every stage, including policy development, preparation, search and rescue, recovery, and reconstruction of vital infrastructures.