Tag: community

Categories
Activism

Transparency for boring but important public meetings

Bookmarked Last Night at School Committee distills hours-long public meetings into half-hour podcast episodes by Kathryn Buchanan (Nieman Lab)

“We have created this podcast as an easy way for any parent, citizen, or interested party to get the highlights, and our take, on what happened last night at School Committee.”

Also the organization Documenters provides training for community journalists (they use the word citizen a lot on their website which makes sense from the “civic” standpoint of participation in representative government, but the word also has connotations about immigration status so I try to avoid using it outside of that definition)

This is a cool idea — but also having worked in government I know how long those meetings are 💤💤💤 More power to these reporters! I have appreciated a local reporter who live tweets local council meetings related to transportation (and am recalling they’re someone who I’m hoping has moved to another platform where I follow people?)

Categories
Reflection Relationships Society

Care is regenerative, cleverness is extractive

Quoted

Care is regenerative. If you care for someone and you put care into a system, it becomes more capable of caring for you. Cleverness, though, is always extractive. Cleverness looks at a situation, goes away, and thinks, “Aha! I’ve made a new idea out of that.” It’s taken something away from a system or situation and all it’s come up with is a clever idea.
— Dil Green

Via Jack Cheng

Categories
Future Building

True 15 minute cities require equity

Liked Dan Wentzel 🏳️‍🌈 (@danwentzel@urbanists.social) (Urbanists.Social)

“My hot take on “15 minute cities” is if you can get to the coffee shop within fifteen minutes, but the barrista who makes your drink can’t afford to live closer than a half-hour away, then you live in a theme park.” – Gareth Klieber #cities #urbanism #housing #transit #cycling

Related: MMM’s recent article on building a car-free city

Several years ago, I stayed a couple nights at the earthship community outside Taos and was disappointed how car-dependent the neighborhood is. For zoning reasons, they needed to develop outside of city limits (iirc), but the highway back to Taos is *not* safe to bike, and too far to walk. They’re so focused on self-reliance, they haven’t actually built a community, with their own services and businesses. The dirt streets connecting the earthships were unadorned, unclaimed — each person was focused on their own domain, not on building community. By necessity, there were piles of trash everywhere (used as building materials for earthships). Instead of a visionary reimagining of community, it’s only a reimagining of a house.

Categories
Culture

Genre is a conversation

Quoted On “Prose-Forward” Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations by Lincoln Michel (Counter Craft)

My preferred metaphor for genres (and I include literary fiction here), is that they are conversations. Great long-running conversations between authors alive and dead, and also between readers and critics… As with any groups, these conversations develop their own jargon. Their own in-jokes, references, and concerns. Some books speak only to one conversation. Other books to multiple ones.

Categories
The Internet Writing

Blog posts don’t have to be long

Replied to Write Less by Matt Gemmell (Matt Gemmell — Thriller, Horror, and Suspense author)

We took away our own permission to write less, unless it was on someone else’s network.

There’s a pervasive and unwritten convention about this now. On social, content of any length at all is fine — and indeed the maximum allowed length is often very short, which reinforces the association. So, perniciously, our eager-to-simplify brains have decided that the converse is true for blogs: you can write only longer, weightier stuff.

Everywhere I read I see McLuhan these days, maybe I should actually read him 😂

But really, I absolutely feel this:

Those who do blog will often sit on pieces for too long, because they’re waiting until they have more to say — or they shelve pieces entirely, wrongly believing they’re too brief and thus somehow trivial.

I’m trying to think of blogging in terms of the scientific community: every commentator adds a new piece, a new angle, and every little bit further understanding boosts the whole community. Together we rise, whether any one person’s blog post causes a large shift in the community’s thinking or not. It’s like the way geology happens: the landscape changes both a little bit at a time, slowly, and cataclysmically. Our thinking and writing can be accretive to others, it needn’t be explosive to be of value.

Another silly thing I’ve shelved posts for: being too slow to respond, feeling as if I’ve missed the cultural moment of discussion around a piece.

Via Nitin Khanna.

Categories
Art and Design Featured Future Building

What do Places give us?

Replied to The Importance of Magical Places by Coby Lefkowitz (Our Built Environment)

In most communities, we have a box that we sleep in, a box we drive to the office or school in, and then, once we’re there, a box to work or study in… These places are often devoid of any ornamentation, idiosyncratic details, or contextual elements that would ground them in a specific community.

Our buildings and places symbolize what we value. They tell the story of who we are.

But what about when we don’t know who we are?

I suspect there’s a connection between the loss of Place-making and the dissolution of community ties.

Continue reading “What do Places give us?”
Categories
Activism Art and Design

Politicized Design: escaping oppressive systems with participatory movements

Watched Politicizing Design from the Grassroots by Bibiana Oliveira SerpaBibiana Oliveira Serpa from Futuress

Drawing from popular activist movements in Latin America, this talk explores the possibilities for the politicization of design.

In her PhD thesis that she recently defended for the Design program of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (ESDI/UERJ) in Brazil, Bibiana delved into her experiences as an active member of different civil society grassroots movements to reveal some of the political, ethical, and practical issues that permeate the transformative action of these collectives.

Through Militant Research Methodology and inspired by her action in the fields of popular education and feminism, she traced paths for a possible politicization of the Design field. In this conversation, Bibiana shares some of the lessons she learned from this journey, articulating four axes she considers crucial for the politicization of Design: ontology, epistemology, practice, and content.

Presented by Bibiana Serpa, a PhD visual designer from Brazil

Design & Opressão (Design and Oppression Network)

Articulação de Mulheres Brasileiras

What is militant research?

  • aims to educate people politically
  • participatory — cannot only research
  • acts in the “context of discovery” not “context of justification” — not seeking to support an existing theory, but to learn
  • always collective

Process of politicization

social movements are self-educating and self-transforming –> politicization

politicization = political learning — “a relational and experiential process”

Continue reading “Politicized Design: escaping oppressive systems with participatory movements”
Categories
Future Building Places Society

Interrogating gentrification

Liked Gentrification is Inevitable (and Other Lies) by Anne Helen Petersen (Culture Study)

“Unfortunately, these kinds of changes are often portrayed as a natural evolution of city space, rather than as the result of deliberate policy making and sets of choices by powerful actors. We conflate the idea that cities change (of course they do!) with the idea that neighborhoods are inevitably taken over by wealthier, whiter residents.”

Gentrification today is often faster, more radically transformative, and directed by powerful state and corporate actors.

Queering asks us to question the normative values that fuel gentrification: ideas about the home and family, the relationship between property and social acceptance, and what is required for liberation and empowerment. Queering also pushes an anti-gentrification politics to interrogate its own normative assumptions. These could include the unquestioned valorization of working-class identities and spaces, the notion of community, and the foundations of the right to the city.

Categories
The Internet Websites

Pass it on

Bookmarked Rewilding Your Attention (CJ Eller)

Tom’s message makes me realize that rewilding attention is an active practice. One must not only pursue those tiny signals but share them as well, whether that means writing about them on your blog or by word of mouth. The only way the tiny signal can keep on resonating throughout the web is if we keep passing it on.

Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network.

— Tom Critchlow, Small b blogging

Categories
Activism Featured Future Building Personal Growth Relationships

Allow room for allies to make mistakes — because we all make them

Replied to we will not cancel us by AdrienneAdrienne (adriennemareebrown.net)

We hurt people.

Of course we did, we are human. We were traumatized/socialized away from interdependence. We learned to hide everything real, everything messy, weak, complex. We learned that fake shit hurts, but it’s acceptable…

Canceling is punishment, and punishment doesn’t stop the cycle of harm, not long term.

We will be accountable, rigorous in our accountability, all of us unlearning, all of us crawling towards dignity. We will learn to set and hold boundaries, communicate without manipulation, give and receive consent, ask for help, love our shadows without letting them rule our relationships…

Shaming and condemning mistakes simply makes others less willing to try or speak up, and less willing to admit their mistakes. This has a chilling effect to keep people in line with what the loudest have decided is right, even when there are valid arguments for other perspectives, and hardly encourages relationship building across identities and ideals. Righteousness is just as unhelpful from the liberal corner as it is from the conservative.

You can hold people accountable without being a dick about it. Not to tone police, but sometimes people on social media talk about others as if they aren’t a person too, and the intensity of condemnation feels greater than the sin. “Nice” is bullshit, but you can be kind and critical.

Continue reading “Allow room for allies to make mistakes — because we all make them”