The next 12 days hold one of my favorite annual traditions. Each year we look around in the less-obvious places for ideas, organizations and people we believe in. Then, during the 12 days following Christmas and into the New Year, we donate a piece of our profits each day on behalf of each of our clients. Using social media, we’ll share our giving choices each day. This isn’t to show off how generous we are, although we are proud of our giving culture. The purpose is to inspire others to do the same, or to discover new ways of supporting positive change in the world.

Tonight is our kickoff, with contributions on behalf of our client Excent, via our microfinance partner Kiva, to support a small, woman-owned business in Iraq. The proprietor’s name is Jwan:

Jwan is 35 years old and a proud mother of four children. She is also a proud and successful Iraqi working woman. For the past three years, she has been working hard in her beauty salon. Her clients are very pleased with the service they receive.

Jwan is requesting a loan of $2,400 from Relief International-Iraq to make some changes to her salon and improve the working area, which will allow her to hire an employee to work with her in the salon.

To learn more about Kiva and/or micro-finance, click here.

We’ll update this post in a few weeks with a complete roundup. In the mean time, if you are inspired, send us a comment or email and let us know!

Thanks for reading. May your 2012 bring abundance, liberation and joy…

Respectfully,

Ian Bryan

President & Founder

Afternoons at Sensible City are usually filled with coffee and e-mails. Last week we took a break from our regular programming for the betterment of our Asheville Community.

Partnered with Hands On Asheville-Buncombe, The Sensible City Team spent a day volunteering day at the Family Resource Center’s community garden in Emma. There was plenty of fresh air and sun at Emma Elementary School as everyone worked to set the Community Garden to bed for the winter. The afternoon was spent planting winter cover crops, mowing, and cleaning. “The clients we work with are geared towards education and social change,” says Sensible City Multi-Media Producer Andrea Desky, “so we like to reflect that with our own values.”

Take a look at the video to see the crew in action.

In partnership sith local civic and business leadership, Barrett Values Centre has announced We Are Asheville, a community values assessment intended to inform and empower local problem-solving, decision-making and sustainability through an understanding of our community’s shared values.

If you call Asheville NC your home, take the survey! www.weareasheville.com

Clear Village Founder Thomas Ugo Ermacora shares his thoughts on sustainability, lengthy urban planning process, his hope for a human pace in planning through micro-urbanistic interventions and vision of resilient and empowered communities.

(See the full report at www.TEDxPhillyED.com)

We’ll have more in-depth reports shortly, but first, session by session, quick glimpses that make us happy, with photos courtesy (and thanks) of participant Kevin Jarrett.

"In order to make anything a reality, you have to dream about it first." - Adora Svitak

"Be that one teacher, be that one voice that sees deep." - Ashara Ekundayo

"Rather than a journey into the future, we're going to navigate current day glimpses of what's invisibly creating future change." - Christine Weiser

"Who is an expert? What is a primary source? Let's break down the information challenge of the digital age." - Joyce Valenza (wheeling a circa 1989 library cart on the stage)

"What distinguishes one child from another is not ability, but access." - Barbara Chandler Allen

"Everytime I saw a teachable moment, the teacher said, 'Class, open the textbook...' / ...the iPad removes the shackles of the book" - Matt MacInnis

"The universe matters because we are the universe mattering." - David McConville

Collaboration break at TEDxPhiladelphiaED

Art abounds during collaboration breaks at TEDxPhiladelphiaED

Here is a shout to Ology Media from our multimedia crew, and a quick explanation of how Ology Social works. Sign up, or just poke around at http://my.ology.com/

Under the header ‘what Kieler want’, the Clear Village team arrived in Gaarden, a district of Kiel in North Germany, to conduct qualitative interviews  for making a well-being analysis of the community and distill solutions to help bring about the future they wish for.

Kiel is a City historically dominated by its proximity to the Baltic Sea. In fact, the City has built up on both shores of the Bay, making water and water carried trade and traffic very present in the City. On the western shore is the old market town, main infrastructural, educational and financial institutions. The Eastern shore has always been where the maritime production of all sorts took place. Therefore, the eastern shore was heavily bombed under WWII as a strategic point (u-boats where build here) for the allied forces. In the fifties, a built environment was hastely reinforced to accommodate the shipyard workers and keep the industry running in Kiel.
It is one of those estates, that we are focusing on in this analyses, and it has, to this day a connection to both water and shipyards. But also hasn’t been untouched by German demographic development over the last couple decades, creating a diachomy of ‘the old’ and ‘the new’ residents. This is typical for many European Cities of this size and very interesting to dig into!

Gaarden, the  eastern district of Kiel that Clear Village is working on, is less than a mile from the city centre. However, many see themselves segregated from city-life, in terms of understanding, opportunity and connectivity. Many factors reinforce this belief, but it is brutally manifested by a main road and a cargo container parking spatially separating Gaarden from the view to the bay -and the city itself.

Click here to watch the videos from the original post on Clear Village’s first days  in Gaarden.

Frank Catalano: Having spent a February week at a major technology industry trade show, I was delighted to see key Seattle-area companies well-represented on the Austin exhibit floor.

The 450 exhibitors included DreamBox, co-founded by a Microsoft veteran and now backed by Reed Hastings of Netflix;GlobalScholar, run by a former Amazon.com and Drugstore.com executive and recently purchased by Scantron; McGraw-Hill’sCenter for Digital Innovation with its Planet Turtle virtual world;Qwizdom, one of the top players in hand-held devices showing its new QTopia digital environment; and several others.

What? You’ve never heard of these local firms? Perhaps that’s because the conference was the Texas Computer Education Association 2011 conference, and the companies are among the many Seattle-area firms in education technology.

In a city where the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation makes headlines every time it talks about education reform or with the grants it issues in that arena, local companies actually providing the cutting-edge tools and digital technologies are virtually invisible. Not just to the general public, but to the tech community here as well.

As someone who has straddled both consumer and education technology markets over the past decade, I’ve been puzzled by this lack of awareness. It’s not just the companies who were at the Austin conference that have low local visibility, but other established Seattle area K-12 firms like Giant Campus and Apex Learning (both forces in online learning), Headsprout (K-5 reading instruction), and more. My conference litany didn’t mention every Seattle exhibitor. Even Microsoft had a small booth, focused on cloud computing and teacher professional development, though I’ve heard the bulk of its business lies in other markets.

Why does the ed tech industry have this unexpectedly low profile on the home turf of the Gates Foundation?

1) It is not easy to understand the market. Getting companies and products to K-12 school customers is a complicated and frequently convoluted mess. It combines the worst of government/B2B sales (differing state and federal regulations, long sales cycles) with the worst of consumer sales (finicky individual customers, be they educators or students). Plus, the terminology and products aren’t necessarily mainstream or part of our collective memory of our school years: adaptive web instruction, interactive white boards, classroom response devices (requiring one panelist at another recent conference to field the question from a puzzled parent, “What are they doing with their thumbs?”). Trying to succinctly communicate how it all works to an outsider is maddeningly complex, a puzzle-wrapped-in-an-enigma-sealed-in-an-egg-shape-to-be-celebrated-by-Lady-Gaga kind of complex.

2) Few venture capitalists understand the models. Not a lot of tech investors seem to truly understand how K-12 education business models work (even fewer than those who understand higher education business models). Those tempted to learn may lose interest when they hear, as was described at the recent Ed Tech Business Forum in New York City, that it’s a “get rich slowly” business. Still, some do, and a few

Read the rest here: http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/02/seattles-invisible-tech-industry.html