A common thread in all our work and investigations is the potential for using technology positively to break the sustainability impasse that is currently the state of play in most places. The emphasis throughout is in laying the groundwork for action in terms of concrete polices and practices that can advance the sustainability and social justice agenda in your company, city, country, region . .  . or in your own life and that of your family. Which after all is where sustainability must start.

A little history

Unconstrained by bureaucracy, economic interests or schedules, The Commons offers a wide open, world-wide, non-government, non-aligned, fully independent public forum concerned with making a modest contribution to improving our understanding and control of technology as it impacts on people in their daily lives. Created in 1973 as an "invisible college" bringing together a gradually growing group of thinkers, researchers, activists, and policy makers and advisors, in the early days the medium of preference was mail, phone and the occasional physical get together. We first staked out The Commons in a very simple alpha version on the internet in 1988 as a collaborative working space to deal with our selected range of sustainability themes, ready to make creative use of an ever-expanding array of communications technologies and sharing arrangements for international group work and knowledge building purposes . Think of it as distributed problem solving, with a strong thrust to open tools and new approaches, all in the good and great cause of sustainability and social justice. We think of The Commons as a public library of our time (taking our model from Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues in setting up the first Public Subscription Library in Philadelphia in 1730) -- an open door and a set of shelves in which the thoughtful citizens of a place (in this case our planet) agree to put their "books" together for common use, and also where they come together regularly to consider issues and hammer out a consensus position on the common challenges confronting their community. And like any good library, a place created with children and future generations in mind -- and a time frame and the quiet of mind to match. Back to top How we go about our work The Commons has two principal functions: the first being to serve as an efficient gateway to the dozen or so focused programs/web sites that make it up. The second: to supply an independent, free forum for world news about and the open, critical discussion of the issues of sustainable development and social justice, and of the ongoing efforts to do something about it. As one critique recently put it of our topic: "We are a generation of great talkers". Good, but far from enough. The Commons, as we put it with only half a grin, has been created to go beyond talk and is dedicated to: "Increasing the uncomfort zone for hesitant administrators, industrialists, and politicians; pioneering new concepts for activists, community groups, entrepreneurs and business; and through our joint efforts, energy and personal choices, placing them and ourselves firmly on the path to a more sustainable and more just society." Working together with the hundreds of informed and highly diversified people and groups around the world who check in regularly to use the sites and contribute to the discussions, we are in a distinctly privileged position at a time of tightly held agendas and interests: Our only constituency, our only objective is to open up the discussions and let in the enormous diversity of opinion and views that need to be brought together and understood in order to hammer out a sustainability agenda worthy of the name. One aspect of our approach that leaves some people a bit uncomfortable with what comes out of all this is our consistent encouragement of diversity of views and hearty "creative dissonance" - which in our view is what is needed to make sure that we are indeed looking at the full range of issues and interests in this ever more diversified, heteroclite, vocal and inevitably contentious society in which we all increasingly live. Or as the expression goes: "if you can't stand the heat, what are you doing in the kitchen". Back to top Connect Technologies Technology is not going to solve all our problems and dilemmas of sustainable development. But one thing that we have learned over the last decade of awfully slow 'progress' in these matters from a global perspective, is that we are not going to get very far with the challenges if we do not learn to make imaginative uses of the full range of which are at our disposal. Which brings us right up in front of information and communications technologies, an area where there is a huge amount going on and where the tools available to support the international sustainability movement are advancing with great strides. This section of the site will share with the readers leads that have come out of our own hands-on work with these challenges and technologies over a number of years now. A rapidly expanding portfolio of approaches and means which need to be monitored closely not only for careful use in the interests of sustainability and social justice -- but also since they are subject to laws such as Moore's and the like, which means that the process of change in on-going and unrelenting. Technology is a very sharp two-edged sword, so let's make sure that we are making best use of it. Click here to go to Connect Technologies. Back to top International peer support of sustainailbty innovoation On 6 June 2000 Eric Britton and The Commons were awarded the prestigious Stockholm Challenge Prize for the Environmentt , jointly with Enrique Peñalosa, mayor of the City of Bogota, for our successful collaboration on the first Car Free Day project ever to be organized on a Third World mega-city, and which has subsequently led to the Sustainable Bogota program which is now in full swing. (You can also see the prize-giving ceremony by clicking here.) This, by the way, is exactly the sort of thing that we think we should be doing a lot more of in the future. As an example, we would invite you to have a look at the on-going effort to develop a board base of international support to back the nomination of the Mayor of London Ken Livingston for his leading role in creating Europe's first major congestion pricing project, which incidentally is the subject of lively debate and diversity of opinion even among the experts. But that too is what The Commons is all about. Back to top Home World @Forum Post Office Copyright © 1994-2004 EcoPlan , Paris, France. ® All rights reserved. Last updated 4 April 2004 Site Map   What's New    Search