Archive for the 'selfrule' Category

It’s good to be reminded again of the psychology courses i took back in Magdeburg: In this TED talk Dan Pink talks about motivation for tasks that particularly involve thinking and problem solving. He cites several scientific studies in psychology that show how creative tasks are sometimes even impeded by extrinsic motivators such as rewards and penalties. He makes a good case for running businesses on the basis of intrinsic motivators autonomy, mastery, and purpose:

Autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery, the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose, the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.

Sounds pretty exciting, if not revolutionary! However, Dan’s distinction between creative and mechanical tasks may sound a bit classist. He is focussing on a new operating system for the knowledge workers troubled by facebook and procrastination. The rest of the workforce, it seems, is still well-served with sticks and carrots:

That routine, rule-based, left brain work, certain kinds of accounting, certain kinds of financial analysis, certain kinds of computer programing, has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers around the world can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities.

I am not so sure if this is what really matters. Doesn’t everybody deserve autonomy, mastery and purpose? I wonder if balanced job complexes would be more suitable for this goal by having workers do both creative and mechanical tasks, using both sides of the brain, and having a diverse set of motivators for different types of tasks.

via swissmiss

I was just talking with a newly met friend in Boston about ‘community’ and how it doesn’t translate well to German. It almost seems as if in progressive circles in North America community is the best: think community bikeshops, community gardens, and online communities.

However, the next best German translation, Gemeinschaft, doesn’t seem to carry over the enthusiasm for new forms of collective engagements. Could it be that many German speakers are wary of collective structures due to Germany’s history which certainly has contributed to a dark perspective on collectivity. The racist people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) of the Nazis and the authoritarian collectives in the GDR have made us justifiably suspicious and critical of community reminding us of violence and oppression based on race and ideology.

While the United States have historically put a very strong focus on individuality, there seems to be a surge of community-based activism and civic engagement. Could it be that the individual approach to happiness has also led to isolation and alienation? We need to build open and emancipatory communities that support individuality and collectivity as compliments to each other. Right after the conversation with the aforementioned friend i stumbled upon a fitting quote in the weekly dig (magazine in the Boston area):

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather youselves! Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
- The Elders Oraibi, Arizona Hopi Nation

Die Magdeburger Lebensmittelkooperative Food Coop veranstaltet am kommenden Sonntag ein offenes Themenfrühstück zu selbstorganisierten Gemeinschaftsgärten.

Während es in vielen Ländern eine längere Geschichte städtischer Kleingarten gibt, erleben nordamerikanische Städte gerade eine Renaissance urbaner Gemeinschaftsgärten (Community Gardens). Angesichts sozialer Entfremdung, erhöhter Lebensmittelpreise und globaler Erwärmung können diese Gartenkooperativen als eine interessante Antwort auf verschiedene Herausforderungen angesehen werden.

Neben der gemeinsamen Einnahme allerlei leckerer Dinge (gegen Solibeitrag nach Selbsteinschätzung) möchten wir über die Gemeinschaftsgartenbewegung in Nordamerika reden, diskutieren ob Gartenkooperativen eher Grünzeugkleinkrams oder die bevorstehende Gemüserevolution darstellen, und beleuchten was es für Möglichkeiten für selbstorganisierte Stadtgärten hier und jetzt gibt.

Themenfrühstück: “Selbstorganisierte Gemeinschaftsgärten” (Poster)
Sonntag, 28.6.2009, 10:30 Uhr im ÖZIM (Harsdorfer Str. 49)
Food Coop: http://www.foodcoop-md.de

I am finishing the wonderful book Pedagogy of the Oppressed written by Paulo Freire in 1970 and i must say it is an inspiring read for anybody (still) interested in revolutionary social change. While this book deserves a lengthier discussion particularly about education and activism, i stumbled upon this sentence that begs to be quoted:

“The destroyers call themselves builders,
and accuse the true builders of being destructive.”

I immediately had to think of the discourse around street art. While commercial billboards are accepted and legitimate, street art gets criminalized and denounced. Yes, i also dislike many types of graffiti, tags, etc., but i have encountered so many beautiful and revealing pieces of street art that i just cannot resist seeing city administrations as the true destroyers here. Many of the pieces i have photographed have been destroyed by the true destroyers. For example, a wheatpaste of a homeless person under the bridge in Calgary—which also has the anti-human rocks—had a very short life span…

Listening to BBC Global News (19 Feb 09 AM), i just learned about the US-American organization ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) that trains and supports to-be-evicted homeowners essentially to squat and defend their homes. Their ‘home defender’ campaign somewhat reminds one of the other kind of squatting carried out by dreamers in the global north and by the underprivileged in the south, both refusing and/or unable to play by market rules. Pretty interesting how a subversive method like occupying a property that ‘technically’ doesn’t belong to you (anymore) makes its debut in North American suburbia. As everybody is talking about Main street (in contrast to Wall street) i wonder if there will be alliances between the squatters from the edge of the city and those from the ‘real’ Main street in the inner city. However, i am actually not so sure whether inner-city squatting is still happening in North America or if it has already been declared terrorism.

For a seminar paper i will be looking closer at critical geography, and via the corresponding Wikipedia article i stumbled upon a freely available reader called Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings that spans over 150 years of discourse and 36 texts organized into four themes. Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro have compiled this compilation and made all readings available as PDFs.

This is another reading response for the course Urban Design Theory given by David Monteyne at the University of Calgary.

The readings I have chosen for this week are about the ecological, social, and participatory aspects of urban planning and design. A common theme–which may be utterly obvious–is that urban (design) processes are complex and are therefore to be treated by designers and planners with great care and compassion. While this complexity may call for professionals, I argue that it requires the public as protagonists not mere participants. At the end of this little text I argue for an–also possibly utterly obvious–intervention that integrates those aspects. Read the rest of this entry »

Etwas verspätet bin ich über diese Meldung bei Wikinews gestoszen: “Ein Teilverkauf der Stadtwerke Leipzig an Gaz de France (GdF) ist am Votum der Leipziger Bürger gescheitert. […]” Ein weiteres Beispiel dafür, dass viele Menschen die fortschreitende Privatisierung von städtischen Gütern bzw Dienstleistern ablehnen. Wie zuvor erwähnt, stellen bürgerschaftlich organisierte Betriebe (lies: Genossenschaften) eine interessante Alternative dar.

Somewhat in a similar vein as the last post: danah boyd calls for a boycott of closed (i.e., not open) access journals and venues to make academia a venue for free exchange of ideas and knowledge open to anybody. She seems kind of disgusted by publishers profitting from scientists’ work while locking down their contributions in repositories that are only accessible to those who have the privilege (i.e., money or position) to do so. Instead, scholars should turn to Open Access publishers that do away with those vomitous access restrictions while still providing the peer-reviewed process.

Peter Suber points to some more options for scholars beyond comepletely boycotting closed-access publishers. One of the major one is self-archiving online – which many publishers actually allow. Putting papers on one’s own personal or research group Website is usually accepted. There are also OA repositories that facilitate the self-archiving process. Through services like CiteSeer or Google Scholar it is then possible to make these contributions available in an OA fashion without actually submitting them to an OA venue. Good thinking. Take a look or two into Peter’s short and longer primers on Open Access to learn more around OA principles and practices.

By the way, i have ranted and chanted about Open Access before.

D’Arcy Norman makes an interesting observation how institutions take on exceptional efforts to keep content such as class slides and video recordings shut away from the public because the slides would violate some copyrights and not necessarily to keep ideas for themselves. I support him in pointing out that avoiding copyrighted material would open up so much content. Putting Creative Commons like licensing in place would prevent those cycles of closures.