Mississippi Rising: Home Page - A cooperative program aimed at using the World Wide Web and other means of getting together, to the end of improving the deployment and management of technology as it effects all of us in our daily lives in the towns and countryside of Mississippi. One of the main goals of this program is to identify, encourage and support particularly imaginative attempts at addressing the problems that are holding back economic and social development in our state, and in the process making life more difficult than it should be for all too many people and places. Sponsored for now by The Commons and EcoPlan International, other sponsors and partners, including particularly from Mississippi, are being sought to join in to advance these common objectives... Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi

Some External Web Sites of Potential Interest

In the following we have selected a certain number of sites on the Web which we believe could be of interest and use to visitors to this site. In addition to these, we would suggest that you might wish to check out some of The Commons programs that you will find just to your left, which have been selected from the total number of current sites bearing in mind those which might be most appropriate here. In due course, this list will be refined and expanded. By the same token, however, you will find it easy enough to move out from this first group of references in the usual ever greater concentric circles, following out the links, and their identified links in turn, which look to you to be useful.

From The Commons
Selected Sites - A First Listing
New Approaches to Planning and Improving Our Towns

From The Commons

The Commons

Unconstrained by bureaucracy, schedules or hidden agenda, The Commons is an independent forum offering an evolving cluster of cooperative World Wide Web sites, each of which set up as a learning space targeting a more or less well-defined set of problems and opportunities brought on by the impact of changing technology on people in their daily lives. These issues are posing great, often apparently intractable problems for policy makers and the society they are supposed to serve. The dominant characteristics of ceaseless change, awkward overlap, uneven impacts, social and political devisiveness, unwieldy interdependence, and unrelenting systemic complexity, together with the need for comprehensive, innovative, non-specialist and above all broadly participatory problem-solving approaches, are common themes of these sites.

Each site is run on an open basis. Sharing, participation and support is welcomed from policy makers, researchers, students, practitioners, private sector groups, and citizens concerned with advancing our understanding and control of these complex and fast-changing issues. Each is by definition "work in progress", and each attempts to provide a lively set of links to other people, places and sources concerned with these vital issues of technology, economy and society. The reader is asked to bear in mind that this is at the end of the day a modest effort, and that if it sets its sights on so many important and complex issues this is simply because we have observed that they appear to need more thinking, more energy and a broader base of participation. Thus, what you have here is not an answer, certainly, but perhaps a small step in the right direction.

Turning Point 2000

TURNING POINT 2000 is, in its authors' word, "about shifting to a new path of progress, enabling for people and conserving for the Earth. For more than twenty years these twice-yearly newsletters have been suggesting links and synergies between different aspects of this transformation, and encouraging readers to contact each other." This electronic edition under The Commons is cooperative undertaking led by the founders and authors, Alison Pritchard and James Robertson. Please do visit and let them (and us) have the benefit of your views and suggestions.

Rethinking Work

Twenty million-plus people officially unemployed in Europe today and more than twice that involuntarily separated from their work and associated income. The reaction on the part of the policy makers and those in command: deck chair shuffling. The American solution? At the same time more than thirty million Americans out of a job, in jail or prison, or caught in a trap of hopeless poverty without a decent job in sight. MAjor rethinking as needed there as in our poor Europe, albeit for a different set of reasons. This forum is trying to make a contribution to shaking off the trammels, the mental and social blinders, which are effectively excluding the possibility of the substantive changes and solutions that are needed to break public policy and private practices out of their present remediless doldrums.

The Information Society and Sustainable Development -

The emergence of the "Information Society" provides some grounds for (cautious) optimism concerning our collective ability to negotiate the heretofore quite unlikely move to a more sustainable society in our time. This site is intended to help us get into these issues without the hype or narrowed thinking that characterizes so much of what one encounters not only in the press but also in places of so-called 'expert' opinion. A comprehensive statement of our position on these issues will be found in our small book under the same name which you will find here in the Electronic Library, or can be obtained in a print version from the office of Dr. Peter Johnston at DG XIII of the European Commission.

Ciudades Accesibles/Accessible Cities

This joint international cooperative program is to be thoroughly documented in the weeks ahead on this bilingual Spanish/English site. (The Web site under development. Available in incomplete working form for now.)

Access - Sustainable Transport Forum -

Unconstrained by bureaucracy or schedules, this independent forum is being developed within The Commons to provide an open platform for critical discussions, exchanges of materials and views, and innovative forms of collaboration international on the difficult subject of "sustainable transport". Building on the base established over the last eight years by EcoPlan's cooperative Access program, this forum provides international support in a variety of forms for this leading edge of transport thinking and practice, which, after many years of occupying a distinct minority position, is now taking over swiftly from the older "build ahead of demand" school which emphasized non-systemic point, link or single-modal analysis, infrastructure construction, heavy subsidies for virtually all forms of travel, operated as an open drain on resources and variously attached the ecological, built and social environments. (This site is presently being integrated into the parallel STEP - the Sustainable Transport Emergency Program. For the time being the visitor will find numerous hot links between the two which are being progressively refined and distinguished.

Sustainable Transport Emergency Program -

The Sustainable Transport Emergency Program is an informal international collaborative communications and support activity being developed under the aegis of EcoPlan and The Commons. It had its origins in a series of ad hoc email exchanges among a gradually expanding network of researchers, academics, planners, public servants and activists in different countries, a number of whom had attended the March 1996 OECD international conference, Towards Sustainable Transportation. The central thesis of STEP -- which was reflected in some but not the majority of the presentations made at that conference -- is that the clock is ticking and that we cannot afford to wait before beginning to make our transportation systems much more sustainable. STEP has been created as a practical reaction to what a number of us consider to be a real emergency situation which calls for prompt and wide-spread action -- starting today! It is, thus, the chafing or leading edge of the Access program to which it is closely linked and will in due course be more closely integrated.

Einstein -

An international partnership program aimed at combating exclusion through new approaches and technologies of learning. First stages in partnership with TERC Global Lab program > (Cambridge, Mass.) and UNESCO's new Learning Without Frontiers program. The site is offering coverage of first regional Einstein pilot program currently being initiated on a cooperative basis in the Basque Country. An application has been made to the European Union to support this first stage pilot. Partners with related interests or projects are invited to contact the Einstein team to explore areas of mutual interest and possible joint action.

The Commons Electronic Library (ftp site)

This portion of the site is just beginning to be developed. Check in however and you will already be able to download potentially interesting and useful print sources on the matters under study here. An update on the current contents of the library site will be found under What's New. And give us your ideas and first class materials (in electronic form, please) that can be added and thus shared with people who need to know about the best of the work available on these tough topics. Your suggestions here

Some Other Selected Sites - A First Listing

The Technology/Education Index is a first rate site with good didactics and interesting technology content. Not a bad place to gain some international perspective on these matters.
The Open University: the international pioneer in the field of supported open learning, has, over the past 27 years, gained an immeasurable wealth of knowledge in the effective delivery of open learning to students around the globe.
Library of Congress home page
Index - World Wide Web Virtual Library: Sustainable Development - includes links to resources, organizations, events, projects, discussion groups, libraries, journals, databases, and documents.
Uncover Database Uncover searches more than x thousand scientific and other periodicals for you. Be a bit patient and get to know this source. Once you do, you'll find yourself using it.
Research-It! your one-stop reference desk. Or at least that's what they say!
The European Telework Development Initiative is a flexible collaborative program sponsored by DG XIII of the EC which has provided encouragement and support for this project over the first half of 1997.
The Center@Hamline of Hamline University in St. Paul, MN has joined is collaborating by making available their interactive conferencing capability for the Discussion Panels within our conference.
Sustainable Development: From Concept to Practice UNU-IAS Project Website: The electronic forum will discuss the UNU's response to Agenda 21, the progress with sustainable development made since Rio and how to effectively implement Agenda 21.
The Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development is a program of the U.S Department of Energy dedicated to promoting the use of sustainable technologies and practices.
The United Nations Environment Programme: Working Group on Sustainable Development 'Our work involves looking at the environmental impact of products, services and systems that meet human needs. The objective is to make them more sustainable'.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development. A rich reference resource.
The Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment - an educational and research foundation, established to support environmental goals based on individual liberty and responsibility and harmonized with economic prosperity.
The Center for Information and Communications Research (Sweden)">
The WBSCD - The Sustainable Business Challenge (Norway)
CSF - Communications for a Sustainable Future (Colorado) - hosts over a dozen mailing lists on topics related to a sustainable future. Environmental lists include Ecofeminism, The Environment and Latin America Network (ELAN), and Ecological Economics.
Global Change Electronic Edition Site Outline seeks to familiarize the public with the issues associated with climate change and ozone depletion. covers Global Change and the Global Climate Change Digest.
The New York Public Library is being regularly extended and improved so that there is more of their huge collection available to their distance visitors, and faster.
The World Wildlife Fund HomePage - Worth a visit, and certainly a thought or two.
Adbusters The shining hope for a revolution in human consciousness lies in the actions of everyday people
Global Lab The Testbed for Telecollaboration, the Hub and the Regional Alliancefor Mathematics and Science Education Reform. (Now tell us that the Web is a waste of time.>
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New Approaches to Planning and Improving Our Towns

City Limits: New York's Urban Affairs New Magazine
Planners Web: City & Regional Planning Resources
The Neighborhood Works: building alternative visions for the city
Chronicle of Community: a publication of the Northern Lights Research & Education Institute
Metropolis Magazine: architecture, design, and a changing world
NHI: jobs and resources
Congress of the New Urbanism
UK Downtown Design Center
Congress on New Urbanism Bibliography
The View From Mokum

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