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Open Sustainability Network Conference 2008

The Open Sustainability Network Conference 2008 now has a facility booked! The dates are Oct 18-19, 2008 in San Francisco. (If you have any questions, please ask on the talk page).

Open Sustainability Network Members

See the living list of OSN members

Open Sustainability Network Commitments

These commitments are currently under development. See the memorandum of understanding

Background

The goal of the Open Sustainability Network is to build a unified collection of relevant online tools and practices to help students and teachers build effective programs in appropriate technology and social entrepreneurship. Specifically, the OSN is focused on impacting the training of future innovators and managers who will need to effectively tackle a set of profound global challenges through the creation, commercialization and institutionalization of sustainable enterprise and clean technologies.

The need for an OSN became apparent following three meetings in early 2007: the Business, Engineering & Sustainability Workshop, the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, and the NCIIA Annual Meeting. During each of these meetings separate discussions addressed the need for an online portal of appropriate technology and social entrepreneurship; with each discussion approaching a problem with a unique approach and audience. Portals referenced during these meetings include:

After an initial review of online resources, there is a great deal of overlap between initiatives and much to be learned and shared across initiatives. As discussions continue, we seek to better understand each of these individual initiatives and build collaboration to create specific unique resources for appropriate technology and social entrepreneurship. With this in mind, the OSN aims to understand how portals can better inform one another to meet three crucial needs:

Collaborative Opportunities

Open Education: Implement collaborative education and training modules and coursework for entrepreneurs and engineers to learn technology creation, implementation, and commercialization practices.

Collaborative Taxonomies: Develop a framework for shared information across disciplinary and geographic boundaries including technology, project, course and organizational information.

Online Publication: Determine best practices for online publishing and knowledge sharing to effectively disseminate new knowledge and application.

Paper on OSN: Leveraging Information Technology, Social Entrepreneurship and Global Collaboration for Just Sustainable Development

Currently, those working for a sustainable development in a vast array of contexts all over the world are often duplicating efforts. In an era where a rapid transition towards sustainability is needed, such wasted effort is no longer tolerable. This paper will discuss current work to overcome this challenge by creating an Open Sustainability Network (OSN) that links relevant individuals, programs, courses, projects, and organizations aimed at just sustainable development. The paper will build an understanding of, and collaboration between, relevant online tools. The paper concludes that the OSN can: 1) develop partnerships with sites with online tools to alleviate some of the technological overhead; 2) help inform entrepreneurs and expanding businesses about the challenges and opportunities presented in social entrepreneurship; and 3) benefit service learning implementation by acting as a repository for appropriate technologies, systems, and policies, while also acting as a clearinghouse for international and local collaborations. For the full paper: [1]

Further Possibilities

Eventually the Open Sustainability Network can allow data and user sharing between member sites. With no loss of identity organization can work together on data, artifacts and projects, while still effecting the world in their specific way. Members can also take advantage of the specialization of other members, e.g. a site without a social network can use the APIs or Google OpenSocial to embed the social network from a OSN site into their site. Or an API on one site will allow a user to view and edit content from a "content provider" OSN site, without leaving the original site. The technology for making this happen is not too far away. OpenID, OpenSocial and RSS are just three of the tools that can be leveraged.

Open Sustainability Network workshops

An OSN workshop was be held at the 2008 NCIIA National Conference, March 20-22, 2008, and others are planned for later in the year.

Pre-Meeting

Hi everybody,

As you might know I am working besides my studies to promote collaboration between wiki that works for sustainability and green causes.

I start with Ekopedia, got in contact with Green Wikia, Appropedia and many others... A short list here show some of them... Site_list_for_Sustainability_Wiki_Search

They don't always know each others... They are sometimes afraid to loose their identity in any kind of co-creation... However they are all motivated and passionated wishing to improve the world.

Through my studies I learn facilitation and a basis of my formation is learning by doing so what I propose to you is to try a Skype meeting to generate/co-create a better/some collaboration... Why a Skype meeting? Because where are all around the world and I don't have the resource to invite all of you at my apartment for a meeting. Skype seems a good way to collaborate and skip space issue. It will be a challenge (for me at least) to facilitate this Skype conference but I believe that it can be fruitful.

Here is a tools to find a date... I propose to do that end of August, before I will be farming in Belgium with my best friend. So just follow the link and let me know your availabilities.

http://doodle.ch/8pvtwr2pp82m794y

I would like also some feed(-back) forward... What do you think about this initiative? What would be your expectations from it? What are your position toward "your" wiki (time-role-...). See you soon

-- Olivier Chaput KaosPilot Team 1 Rotterdam


External links

http://www.opensustainabilitynetwork.org

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