• n.b.: needs much better name

Table of Contents:

Concept

If you can harness a locality of people (neighbourhood, town, etc.) you can accomplish a lot of things. Any group of people contains sufficient talent, capital, and time to undertake projects that will make them more self-sufficient.

What stops us from banding together and doing things that benefit us all is our feeling of powerlessness, inculcated to us by corporations, the media, and our educational system. I keep reading about people who have thrown off the yoke of corporate servitude to start their own businesses, and even though they're working harder, they feel amazing. Just the fact that they are the ones in control, setting the pace, makes them feel alive and powerful and satisfied.

To convince people that they have the power to do things, we must inspire them by showing them what is possible. Other communities, that were once just like them, with the same doubts and feeling of powerlessness, banded together to undertake a project for everybody and are now benefiting from it!

Therefore, the concept is to create a website that contains all the information necessary to undertake projects that can improve your community or make it self-sustainable in some capacity.

Project Ideas

• Self-sufficient hydro-generation through wind/solar power

  • a neighbourhood can quite easily become independant from the power company

• Neighbourhood wireless mesh network

  • all members of the community can pay a small monthly fee ($2 or something) and get free internet anywhere in the neighbourhood! (adjacent neighbourhoods can join together to create larger meshes.)

• Projects for 3rd world countries

  • I don't know much about the needs of third world countries, but I'd imagine that there is a lot of information that could benefit people who live in impoverished villages.

• MORE IDEAS PLEASE!!!

Things the site will contain

Part of this project will be a really slick website with video tutorials, maps, highlights of community experiences, and a wealth of information and tools to get the projects done.

In specific, it should have:

• a collection of pre-planned, researched, and tested projects that communities can easily undertake
• educational videos to undo the damage wrought by government schools, to help people realize their potential as autonomous entities
• helpful lectures by successful professionals about how to manage people
• a world map of all the communities around the world which have done these projects with a mini-site on each. they'd contain the project's status and stories of their experiences on a particular project (problems, results, etc). basically, proof that these projects work and can save money (or whatever the goal is).
• an editorial staff to collect the raw information from communities undertaking the projects (results, suggestions, problems), and update and enhance the plans and sites. some communities probably won't be interested in keeping their pages updated, so the staff will be there to call up and interview the people and keep the information propagating.
• ways to get funding for projects that need it.

Potential

The basic idea behind this project is to be a facilitator for allowing people to satisfy their basic infrastructure needs by giving them information, funds, training, etc. Essentially, it's doing what the government SHOULD be doing.

It would be very interesting to see if it would be possible to bootstrap a new kind of government (organizational system) off of a site like this.