About: (Working Intro)

About this project in process:

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19 November 2006: Page is still very much work in progress.

What is this?

The New Mobility Kids Network is being developed as a cooperative open project under the New Mobility Agenda of the The Commons: Open Society Sustainability Initiative, the goal of which to invite anyone who cares about these things to a convenient place in which to share and develop ideas, questions and materials on matters involving children and the ways in which they can and could move around in their communities in their daily lives. And how we can perhaps help them better understand and link their personal mobility choices to the broader challenges of sustainable development.

Of course if we insist on making all of their choices for them and putting them into an entirely passive movement environment (for example "the driven child", the "car potato") that too is a choice. But it may not be the best one... for them, or for our common future.

> > > > Check out draft video introduction here.

Starting Point

In a first instance we propose to get together with a growing netowrk of international colleauges and partners who share these concerns in the following target/activity areas, to create a lively program framework and tool set for our future communciations, sharing and eventual collaboration:

The Walk to School
Play Streets
New Mobility School Program (Content to follow)
Learning games and projects (Content to follow)
Extraordinary Children

The main advantages of choosing these as starting points is that they are at once topical and important, and at the same time are areas in which quite a bit of first rate development work has already been done. Our main role in each of these areas will be to do what we can to make them better known and open them up to new collaborators and eventual sources of support. That at least is our intention.

Content/Approach

The ultimate content of this site is going to be determined by what all the participants chose to bring to it. In this first stage, we have posted some first ideas and links here, to get things moving. But we now await your ideas and inputs.

The first major axis of interest here is the important tool of directly involving the children themselves in the whole act of study, observation, analysis, and commentary -- with this last taking a wide range of forms: oral and written reports, debates, science and social science projects, illustrations, poems, songs, games, and events of a wide variety of sorts which bring together the children not just as sweet little things but as thoughtful observers who find themselves right in the middle of the problems, who have taken the time (with a bit of help) to educate themselves and to whom we should also learn to listen.

The first of our own efforts in this direction under The Commons was what we called the "School Program" back in the late eighties, for which you will find some descriptive materials in the Library here. Subsequently we have collaborated with our Spanish partners, Leber, in a handful of kid-activated programs in the Basque Country, including in-school debates and discussions, art expositions, and public confrontations between panels of children with prepared positions and local political leaders. In two cases these events were covered live by local television. In due course materials from these exhibits will be added to the Media Library here.

One of the main avenues we intend to pursue is that of play as a means of learning, socialization and negotiation. And while we anticipate that it will be primarily oriented to children and play, it would be most disappointing if we were not to be giving at least some attention as well to the concept of play as a learning and socialization/negotiating device for people of all ages and conditions. But then again, perhaps serious people don't play.

In these first stages this site is not very content rich, but to get things going, we have posted a paper on Play Streets by Paul Tranter and John Doyle, whose approach is hemispheres different from mainline practice and policy in most places. It will perhaps be useful as a first introduction of the sort of thing that we intend to be looking at in the months ahead here. The second paper and link, The Walking Bus, introduces a number of concepts that will be of interest to parents, teachers and children. You will also find a draft paper (without illustrations for the time being) on the 1989 School Program in the Library here. But this is only a very incomplete rough first start. More to the point, we suggest that you spend a few minutes in looking over the programs and web sites that you will find in the section Check it Out....

Other items and issues we intend to look at and eventually integrate into this site will be

School programs in many places
Projects and ideas from parents' groups, environmental associations, and even public sector agencies (where they exist)
Information on projects and ideas that have failed (and the reasons why)
Art programs, expositions and children's books on these themes (such as our own Family Mouse series for pre- and early readers)
Probing programs such as Einstein (Combating Exclusion through New Technologies & Approaches to Learning), and other projects and efforts along these lines
Links to leading sites and programs (such as UNESCO'S Learning Without Frontiers (LWF) program, Terc's Global Lab, the entire suite of programs being developed by the Concord group, the three day conference and media activity on Play being carried out by our friends at the Netherlands Institute of Design, among others)
. . .

We are currently considering preparation of a special edition of the Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice, given over entirely to children's observations, work, creations and recommendations about the transport systems that they know, live with and perhaps expect more from. The tentative planned target date for publication is sometime in 2007?. It will be a thoroughly open number with international cooperation from children and programs around the world. For more on that, you are invited to consult the Journal's site here on The Commons. And should you have ideas or suggestions for us, please let us have them. This is going to be one more example of team work and independent citizen effort for a better world.

An Inter-Generational Project

With this in mind, the basic idea here then is to make use of the Web and the growing array of new communications tools that are coming on line for these purposes, in order to allow us all to get together to cast around for ideas, tools and examples that can be made broadly available at low or no cost, and then screened, adapted and put to work in our own communities, schools and families to help improve children's (and indeed our own) sensitivity to these important issues of daily life. The ultimate goal is not to "educate" the child in the usual passive sense of that word, but rather to see if we can somehow get together with them to help them (and ourselves) to understand and develop actual mobility habits in their (and our) daily lives which render them (and us) better prepared for participating actively in a more sustainable world. Indeed, if you think about it, this may be a case in which our own children help us understand better what perhaps we all should be doing in our own choices.

This may in time quite possibly going to grow into the most important component of The Commons. Here is why: It is our impression that the sustainability movement, which until now and in its haste to come up with "solutions", has by and large tended to ignore the importance of preparing future generations of leaders and responsible citizens who will, one can hope, be better prepared to deal with these issues than our own miserable, mediocre (till now at least) generation. There are so many useful things that we can do if we just put our heads together on this. There are a lot of smart and responsible people out there. And some of them are quite small, for the moment, but not without eyes, ears and brains.

So now that we have them, let's use these tools to share our information and experience, and get together to scan, select, improve and adapt the best of these ideas to put them to work in our communities, schools and in our own families. After all, if we don't do it, who will? This entire effort will depend on creative interaction with other people, groups and Web sites. That may mean you! So join in. And stay tuned.

Quick translation

This is no big deal, but it may be useful for some. We are popping in a 'Quick Translate" engine on each page of the site in an attempt to open up the program to a more international audience.

As you will see if you play with it a bit, it offers one-click machine translations into a handful of languages, which are of course pretty primative but which will serve as valauble tools for the genuinely curious and interested, who may not have complete reading fluency in English. The rough translations are best used if you view them side by side with the English originals. But that you will see for yourself.

What you can do to help

Sign in to this informal collaborative undertaking and take an active part in making something useful of it.
Bring to the group's attention information on and links to leading programs and practices around the world.
Send on articles, reports, graphics, media clips, etc. that you think are going to be useful to the others (These can then be posted on the site for easy access.)
Take an active role in the discussions and exchanges, via either the various email links, the chat sessions, or the voice conferencing tools that we have here.
Critique and improve the wording, content and presentation of this site (which sure needs it).
Advise and help us and others with integrating new media and tools into this site
And if you have the technical competence, give us a hand to improve the layout and functionality of the site.
Help the best of these projects in finding funding and other forms of support that are needed if they are gong to move ahead and make their full contribution.

In short there is plenty to keep us all quite busy. But in order to do this efficiently, it will be a good idea for you to take the time to familiarize yourself with the communications capabilities we have here for this group exercise. We understand that to some this may be a bit of a bore, but we have all these tools, and we certainly have some very good reasons to put them to work. So courage. There is so much we can do if we have the energy and good sense to work on this together.