Fingerlakespermaculture mailing list

[Jeff Piestrak <jmp36 AT cornell.edu>]

Can networks help communities become more sustainable, equitable and just? Properly designed, they can support informed decision making and self-organization, a key principle of resilient systems and permaculture design, and critical to sustainability. Some have suggested there are benefits to be gained in “weaving together indigenous culture, permaculture, and digital culture” integrating natural resources, social relationships and culture into a single system. Homegrown tools like these lists, the Green Resource Hub, Swidjit and the Tompkins County Time Bank are beginning to leverage these opportunities locally, providing new and innovative ways for us to collaborate our way to a better future. 

Of course in an increasingly networked world, such opportunities also come with complications, bringing our differences and disagreements more clearly into focus. And now that everyone has a podium to spout their beliefs from, the basis of facts, knowing, believing and acting are becoming increasingly tangled (and in some cases disconnected). Regi and Tony recently wondered aloud on the ST list whether good decision making and democracy itself is possible "given the relentless barrage of baloney and newspeak we face on a daily basis", while calling into question the "religion of science", and sources of perceived authority.

Bestselling author, internet philosopher and Harvard researcher David Weinberger will be at Cornell tomorrow at 1:30pm (Clark Hall 700) to shed some light on these issues, and the immense opportunities networks offer if we embrace our differences and the potential that networked thinking and decision making offer. I've provided a few excerpts below from his new book “Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room”. More info is available here http://events.cornell.edu/event/too_big_to_know.

Hope to see some of you there, and for those who are interested, perhaps continue this conversation in the future...

Cheers, Jeff

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>From the book:

“As knowledge becomes networked, the smartest person in the room isn’t the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn’t the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it. It’s not that the network is becoming a conscious super-brain. Rather, knowledge is becoming inextricable from — literally unthinkable without — the network that enables it. Our task is to learn how to build smart rooms — that is, how to build networks that make us smarter, especially since, when done badly, networks can make us distressingly stupider.”

“The Net lowers the barriers to encountering and interacting with that which is different. The barriers that remain are not technology's but our own. We have lost every excuse not to embrace difference...Perhaps our hyperlinked infrastructure will give us a self-understanding that makes it easier for our curiosity and compassion to overcome our self-centered fears.”

"the Net’s rebooting of science has revealed that the old ways were more broken than we thought...Science had been a type of publishing and now it's becoming a network. . . now that science is becoming a network, knowledge is not something that gets pumped out of the system as its product. The hyperlinking of science not only links knowledge back to its sources. It also links knowledge into the human contexts and processes that produced it and use it, debate it, and make sense of it"

This collaborative event is presented as part of Mann Library’s Connected Minds, Resilient Communities programming, helping people and communities "work across differences to make a difference". Learn more: http://mannlib.cornell.edu/resilient-communities/.

Getting there:

• Cornell interactive map: http://www.cornell.edu/maps/interactive.cfm.
• Campus parking map: http://www.transportation.cornell.edu/tms/cms/parking/commuting/walkers/upload/VisitorParkingMap-11.pdf
  
• Parking meters: http://www.transportation.cornell.edu/tms/cms/parking/campusparking/visitors/metered.cfm
• TCAT Bus Trip Planner (destination Cornell Central Campus): http://tcat.nextinsight.com/