| Response to Global Democracy article by Eric Schneider | 0 comments |
 20 Jul 2006 @ 15:01, by Roger EatonGlobal Democracy & Sustainability literacy learning: Why they must go hand-in-hand by Eric Schneider Eric, this is a wonderful article, chock full of enthusiasm and sensible ideas. I applaud your ideas and sentiments, and am impressed by the !Positive News and Youth Views! Ezine at http://www.pnyv.org where you are a member of the Founding and Creative Board. I must add your latest at http://pnyv.org/literacies and how to trigger a new conference culture! Yes! I see you are using php. Alas, the GroupDialog InterMix software I am developing is in C# and dot-net, which is Micro$oft dominated and therefore in what is almost an opposing camp to php. It could be ported to php, though, and I am looking into that more carefully after seeing pnyv. If the dotnet background of InterMix does not put you off, please consider using InterMix as a way of creating a global voice of youth. I think it would be very exciting for your far flung teams and would add a whole new positive dimension to the ezine. There would be no charge, and you could run your own instance of InterMix on your own machine if that is what you want. The simple idea behind InterMix GroupDialog software is to enable groups to elect messages round by round. Winning messages are normally highly approved and so can be taken as a consensus position of the group. A powerful dynamic can be created by alternating “Unity” and “Diversity” rounds, where many participating networked groups each elect their own message in “Diversity” rounds, and in the Unity rounds they elect one message to represent their common humanity. In the case of !Positive News and Youth Views!, the many groups would be founded on the PNYV teams, each team having its own voice, with the members of the teams inviting their friends to join in. A key decision would be the initial topic. Probably “Enhancing PNYV” would be a good starter. The Unity-and-Diversity World Council at udcworld.org is starting up such a dialog in August or September of this year, and is recruiting networks to join in. At this point we have our own network of 700 plus email addresses. We want at least three networks to begin the dialog. The topic will be “Building a Unity-and-Diversity Global Assembly. You and all readers are invited. Send me your email and I will add you to the list of 700, or better yet, if you have a network, bring the whole network in. Best luck to you! --Roger Eaton rogereaton@earthlink.net |