c.Figallo

Posts Tagged ‘community’

LifeHack is about getting stuff done most efficiently and effectively across all aspects of your life. In this article, the focus is on living the green life – again, as efficiently and effectively as possible. It’s a stripped-down, realistic approach that doesn’t provide you with the wiggle room to continue consuming as usual just because the consumables are labelled “green” or “environmental” or “organic.”

The hacks are broken down into 6 Principles of Green Living:

• Simplicity
• Fairness
• Community
• Sustainability
• Planning
• Transparency

Here, for example, is how LifeHack describes the green approach to community:

Too much of our world market is out of sight, and therefore out of mind. Since we don’t see the lives of the Bolivian granny who makes our chic shopping bags, or the Indonesian teenager who makes our shoes, or the Chinese mother who assembles our iPods,we don’t think about it. And we don’t think about the tremendous amount of resources it takes to get raw materials from Africa, North America, Asia, and somewhere in the Pacific to some factory in China to put together an mp3 player which will then be shipped (using resources again from all over the world) to some store in Oregon (that is again assembled using materials from all over the world) and into our pocket (of pants made in the next town over from the iPod factory, using cotton grown in Africa and rivets made of steel from Japan on machines made in Europe from materials mined in…).

On the other hand, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of attending a local farmer’s market, you’ve experienced something few of us do these days: an encounter with a part of your community, an actual living and breathing person, who made something for you to eat. There were some global resources used (even organic farmers use tractors, and they needed a truck to bring their stuff to market) but most of the labor and material involved came out of your local area — the soil you’re standing on, the person in front of you. You have a relationship with this person, and with their land. Your land.

Your local farmer selling to a local market — that’s sustainable. The relationship you have with that person — that’s sustainable, too.

This is Post #1 in what will be a continuing commentary on people using technology to make important changes in the world. Not necessarily the bleeding edge or the app du jour or where the big investments are going. More like who’s making the most difference using social apps or mashups of different apps.

I’m big on blogs. To me, they’ve become the “anchor app” for everything else – social net platforms, wiki, twitter, IM/SMS. They anchor around a point of view, a personality or a topic while most other applications serve as peripheral communications channels.

At this time, I’m finding the smartest, most concise information in blogs. They allow good and intelligent individuals and small teams to get the exposure they deserve. At the same time, they are also the soapboxes for the most inane and insane voices on the Web. You make your choices…