What does the word community mean in the sustainable development field?

The term community can be correlated to several fields of interest, from biology to sociology. This post will only focus on a general sociologic definition and on a particular aspect of it, the virtual community. Those approaches best apply on the sustainable development field.

On one hand, the definition of The Free Dictionary gives a general view of what the word community means and includes: a community could be “a group of people living in the same locality and under the same government”, “having common interests” to form “a community of interests” with a sense of “community spirit”. On the other hand, the virtual community coined by Rheingold, refers to a “self-defined electronic network of interactive communication organized around a shared interest or purpose” (Castells, 1996) but also to “a group of people, who may or may not meet one another face to face, who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer Bulletin Board System (BBSs) and other digital networks” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). How could the characteristics of both definitions could apply to the sustainable development field?

A conference has been hold at Bond University on wednesday the 24^th of march 2010 about developing a sustainable campus community. It was explained that a community on a campus has to rely on several particularities: having an institutional culture that is fostered by the governance of the campus, planning operations and strategies, and involving education. Given the exemple of Bond University, a few engagements are taken, for exemple the “Talloires Declaration” (create a framework to enlarge, support, and reward good practice in civic engagement and social responsibility) has been signed up in 2008 and a Sustainable Management Development Plan for 2010-2015 has been proposed. Moreover, in this conference, it has been suggested for exemple to improve environmental lessons in classroom and social interactions in order to provide messages about how do sustainable things, when and why do it. The sense of community here has a meaning of how to change behaviour through the use of different communication tools, and engagements.

The professor Tim Jackson from the University of Surrey, proposed a Community Engagement Framework in which people are enabled and encouraged, community are engaged, and examples are used (have a look on the diagram below for more information).

From those physical engagements, it is possible to enlarge them to virtual engagements and actions. Given the example of the fight to increase the health quality of Indigenous people in Australia, the “Close the Gap” day exemplify the interdependency of virtual and physical engagements. A website has been made to gather people and make them propose actions to raise funds, write to the government, or sign a pledge. The last one offers you the choice to have your name written in their website to tell the world that you have taken action.

We could now give a new definition of a green community in the 21^st century: it refers to a group of people having common interest that could form interactive online network, and who may or may not share green ideas in face to face meetings, and who take actions in the virtual or physical world.

Community has protean meanings in the sustainable development field and all of them are interdependent. For the next decade, the best that could happen is the development of local green communities (local producers and activist) in putting them in a major position of the green decision-making process of local governance system, and in their involvement in other online and offline communities. Another interesting change could be to create a major green browser. It could reference all the websites and blogs about sustainability to offers common people an easy access to green information, and spread it widely throughout the world. Green and sustainability is all about community as it is made by people.

References:

virtual community. (2010). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved March 26, 2010, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9470936

Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the network Society. UK: Blackwell Publishers Inc.

Tufts University. (2005, September 17). Talloires Declaration. Retrieved from The Talloires Network: http://www.tufts.edu/talloiresnetwork/?pid=17

Oxfam International. (2010, March). Close The Gap. Retrieved from Oxfam Australia: http://www.oxfam.org.au/explore/indigenous-australia/close-the-gap

Jackson, T. (2005, May 19). Motivating Sustainable Consumption A Review of Evidence on Consumer. Retrieved from Docstoc: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/7874847/Motivating-Sustainable-Consumption-A-Review-of-Evidence-on-Consumer

Short news: Information overflow

Art is always a good way to have another view on society....

Richard J. Evans: "What I tried to do was visually represent the way information is so easily leaked into today’s society, through the Internet and television. Pretty much anything you can imagine, you can get your hands on. With such an abundance of information, I feel as though it over-flows into our lives and the typography is purposefully hard to read to reflect this."

Link: http://richardjevans.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00:00:00Z&updated-max=2010-01-01T00:00:00Z&max-results=9

How is information a 'public good' in the sustainable development field?

In the field of communication about sustainable development, the information stream plays an major role to convey green ideas through the use of different media.

The word information refers to something intangible that is non-depletable, as a contrary to natural ressources (The Scholarly Kitchen, 2009). It also has the property to be non-rival in the way that if I am using a source of information, it doesn't prevent anybody else to use exactly the same source. Thus there is no background of something private which has the intrinsic characteristic of ownership. If I am reading an article on the Internet environmentalist website www.novethic.com, it will not entrave anybody else to read exactly the same news. So what are the characteristics of information as a public good in the sustainable development field?

From the definition of the Linux Information project (2006), economists use the therm public good to refer to a good or service which can be consumed indefinitely without reducing the quantity available for other persons. About information, we went from private good with material media (newspapers, magazines) that are owned by editors, to digital media that gives information the trait of a public good: “The development of distributed digital information through network browsers has radically changed many of the traditional institutions of... communication” (Hess et al's, 2001). Thus, the point about digital information is that it can be spread easily and as a result could be copying. This act illustrates the non-rivalry of information that makes it a public good. The idea of copying is developed in the Scholarly Kitchen website, saying that an overuse of information doesn't make it scare, but do exactly the opposite. In doing so, information become infinitely expansible: each user of the Internet can duplicate, create and distribute information. From an article writing in the New-York Times, an Internet user can react on its blog to modify and add content from the original article, to create new reactions in other blogs and new articles in other news websites, and so on.

As a result, traditional communication has changed to make information rhyme with participation. Information is here all about participatory media content. All kind of media are gathered and contents are created by both citizens and professional. Information is created through participatory media, like blogs, podcasts, and widely broadcasted to share green ideas all over the world. Participation in web 2.0 is best illustrated with the rise of the open source encyclopedia: wikipedia. “Open source production essentially involves producing a commodity as a public good” (Anthony, 2009). A parallel can be made with the “creative commons” movement which “enable authors,... and other creators of original content to establish more flexible... principles through which their work can be used and repurposed to serve non-commercial, public-good principles” (Flew, 2008). A movie available on the internet reflect this principle: “Home”, directed by a famous french photographer. You can freely see the whole movie on YouTube, without being charged or risking to be pursued for hacking.

--> link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU

Another interesting example is on the Google search page, if you click on the link marked “advanced search,” and then on “usage rights” you can select “free to use or share” (Boyle, 2008).

Information should be shared and provided, the problem is that sometimes information is withhold, as the example of the movie “The Cove” which revealed a catastrophic information about how dolphin are butchered in the Japan town Taiji.

In the sustainable development field, information needs to be widely provided to citizen to increase their awareness about climate change and to keep them in touch with the reality. So what could be more a public good than information about sustainable development?

References

Flew, T. (2007). New Media: An Introduction. South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.

The Linux Information Project (2006, February 16). Public Goods: A Brief Introduction. Retrieved from The Linux Information Project http://www.linfo.org/public_good.html

Society for scholarly publishing (2009, April 9). Information as Property. Retrieved from The Scholarly Kitchen, what's hot and cooking in scholarly publishing: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/04/09/information-as-property/

Hess, Charlotte & Ostrom Elinor (2001). Artifacts, Facilities, And Content: Information as a Common-pool Resource. Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University: http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/ostromhes.pdf

Anthony, D. (2009). Reputation and Reliability in Collective Goods. Rationality and Society, 21(3), 283-306. Retrieved from E-Journals database.

Boyle, James (2008). The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Retrieved from: http://www.thepublicdomain.org/