oneVillage Foundation

Earth scope: Interactive Geo-stories that Weave together Information about the State of the World
At the Planetwork Conference in June of 2004 a presentation was made to promote a Save the world Game by the Bucky Fuller Institute. While there is nothing on the BFI site about this proposal, a major focus of their work appears to be on developing the Earthscope

If you go into Earthscope testsite you can see some serious attempts are being made to create an interactive mapping system that seeks to more fully capture and integrate complex events into a full immersion visualization experience.

From Earthscope site:
The site features Interactive geo-stories about the state of the Earth, our communities, and possible futures. The EARTHscope (ES) is a new tool for displaying the profound, yet often invisible trends affecting global and local communities. It allows partner organizations to publish their information as engaging geo-stories: downloadable presentations that combine dynamic maps with supporting graphics, imagery, sound, and text.

Key Objectives:
* Provide a digital publishing framework that facilitates learning, research, and public outreach
* Advance a much-needed standard for online "geo-storytelling"
* Allow anyone, anywhere with low-speed, dial-up access to the Internet to browse the
* EARTHscope Library and view the planetary situation using the EARTHscope interface.

ES Player v2.0 Main Features:
* Display maps, keys, text, graphs, slide shows, and video clips
* Turn layers of map data on and off
* Pan maps in all directions, zoom from global to local view
* Animate changes over time

Developing Technology to Augment Human Capacity and Potential
On my trip back to Missouri, I went to the Sustainable Resources Conference in Boulder. One of the highlights of the trip was the Community Building Conference. During lunch we went to the computer science department and took the time to explore the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design. What was fascinating about their work was the attempt to create interactive learning environments. Much of their work has focused on the Clever Project - Intelligence Augmentation (IA) approaches that complement, empower and augment human capabilities. Their belief is that individuals follow very different learning paths so they are seeking to create environments that match individual needs and learning styles. While the Clever Project is focused on developing "computationally enhanced environments designed to assist not only people with a wide range of cognitive disabilities, but also their support community," they hope that a broad range of people in society will benefit from the many potential applications of their technology.

This work dovetails with much of the groundbreaking work that Doug Engelbart has done. He has a long history of innovation, inventing many of the key components that we now take for granted in this increasingly internet driven age we find ourselves in, the most famous of which is the mouse.

Looking through Pip Coburn's blog about the tech sector and the "integration economy" at Always on, I came across this article by Ken Jordan which discusses many of the milestones and achievement of his long career as an inventor.

In October Joy met with Pip Coburn, a Tech analyst with USB Warburg. He came out to the West Coast was to explore innovative ICT development. His job is to identify leading edge companies who are developing the technologies that will evolve from the information economy to the economy of integration. While he was in the area, Joy introduced him to Engelbart who has developed many important innovations and has helped to make computers what they are today. Engelbart's real passion is not investing things for their own sake though but to increase our collective intelligence. He feels that technology has not lived up to its potential because it has not truly brought people together to address world urgent issues.

What is relevant to Engelbart though is that we do not drive technology but are driven by it. This is a key problem that explains why technologies are not solving ecological and social problems but creating them - they are creating more problems than they solve. To address this Engelbart recently brought together a consortium of Silicon Valley visionaries (including Joy Tang and Mark Roest of the OVF) in an attempt to manifest his long time dream of a Networked Improvement Community or NIC. A NIC is a group of people who are empowered by each other and technology to seek out innovative problems to world urgent issues.

Mr. Roger's Sustainable Neighborhood -- The World Wide Web + Interactive Simulation Games for Community Education
The prototype that Professor Gerhard Fischer of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design showed us looked like an ordinary table, it however was anything but ordinary. An image was transmitted from the ceiling to the table to create a matrix on the table that looked like a chessboard. Sensors picked up every move you made on the chessboard with specially labeled paces and the chessboard changed with those actions - this was called the action space. In addition a large TFT screen - the web space - was set up to not only to provide visual documentation of the changes but to link those changes to relevant databases/content.

The focus was on getting users to identify with their environments. With the "chess paces" users could map out land use areas, bus routes, etc. These community based planning exercises that not only encourage people to visualize future scenarios in relation to real environments but by breaking people into teams encourage team building and collaboration through these interactive environments.

While it potentally can be a practical tool designed to improve decision making processes it also can help us to understand how people make decisions in groups. By assisting people in framing problems - cognitive mapping - we can observe the process of idea development and explore various possibilities as to how that process can be augmented with innovative approaches and technologies. The tool is now in the prototyping stages - that is being touted as an interactive environment that combines virtual and real world experiences to help groups reach informed compromises. It could be a model of how interactive graphics rich relational databases can assist in the process of presenting information in a way that transcends petty political debates and personality conflicts that are a common theme in public policy formulation whether at the grassroots or at top-level decision making. The Institute seeks to make this into a visualization tool that can assist in the decision making towards community revitalization in their words a: "Mr Roger's sustainable neighborhood". The Sim City game was brought up. It was mentioned that Sim City was a closed system that does not respond real well to open ended problems while this system is a dynamic one.

Keyhole Technologies Purchased by Google
Google flush with cash from its IPO is now the darling of SV and Wall Street. Many hope this signals SV's upsurge and recovery from the dotcom meltdown of 2000. Goggle now full of cash, is on a buying spree buying up companies like Keyhole Technologies (see MSNBC article for more). Dennis Reinhardt another adviser to OVF works for Keyhole Technologies and is involved in marketing and promotion there. Dennis has extensive experience in environmental design with a PhD in Biology and has spent a large portion of his career developing GIS systems.

Several months ago Dennis gave us a tour of the program that Keyhole has developed. Their product gives the user the ability to zoom down to street level to specific locations. However, unlike traditional map software Keyhole's program enables users to virtually fly through spatial environments moving through cities and around topographical terrain with ease. Keyhole's system is built on a database with trillions of bits of mapping data collected from satellites and airplanes. "With Keyhole, you can fly like a superhero from your computer at home to a street corner somewhere else in the world -- or find a local hospital, map a road trip or measure the distance between two points," Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, said in a statement.

According to the MSNBC article:

"With an Internet connection, a user can enter an address or other location information and Keyhole's software hooks up to a database and takes the user to a digital image of that location. The three-dimensional, interactive software gives users the option to zoom in from space-level to street-level, tilt and rotate the view or search for other information such as hotels, parks, automated-teller bank machines or subways."

The Keyhole technology if it was integrated with the work of organizations like BFI and The Cognitive Virtual Environments Institute could be a powerful tool to develop real time interactive environments. ICT tools like this when properly utilized and harnessed can empower people to rapidly come together to solve world urgent issues. This was the reasoning that led to the submission of the Community Knowledge Delivery System Proposal to the Soros Foundation.

Community Knowledge Delivery System
In Dec of 2003 OVF submitted a proposal (Download PDF version of Community Knowledge Delivery System) to the Soros Foundation. What we envisioned was an research project to effectively test out the kind of technologies mentioned above using state of the hardware and prove those social, ecological as well as financial viability. For example we envisioned high speed satellite connectivity beamed to a central location in a village. This would also be a serve as a multi-purpose community development center (Unity Center) serving as the coordinating and meeting center for the oneVillage Initiative. The satellite system mated to a low cost wireless system would enable "field agents" to communicate with each other, gather information about the community and also communicate with advisors and retrieve information from the Internet.

1. The work of the field agents would involve an environmental scan of existing resources and assets in the community and surrounding areas including existing human capacity and infrastructure.
2. The next step would involve how these systems could be augmented with surrounding resources and the identification of relevant market opportunities to sustain local development.
3. In this process local community feedback would guide the process through a series of charrettes, meetings and workshops.

We believe this concept would offer a way to develop the "Save the World" game BFI put forward (or something similar) at the Planetwork Conference promoting practical and effective ICT approaches. We envision the development of effective ICT social networking and gaming tools that bring people together from all over the world to create augmented networks. These networks will integrate the best aspects/best practices of the virtual world of cyberspace and the real-world to come up with whole systems solutions to world urgent issues like global warming.