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The Internet: A Powerful Organizing Tool
Power Tools for the Nuts and Bolts of Organizing
Robert Pollard, Information Ecologist
Information Habitat: Where Information Lives
ecology2001@gmail.com
information-habitat.net
52nd Annual DPI/NGO Conference
Challenges of a Globalized World:
Finding New Directions
1999.09.17 - Friday 17 September
Conference Room 9
United Nations, New York, NY
The following is an edited version of an outline for a presentation on "The Internet: A Powerful Organizing Tool" at the 52nd Annual DPI/NGO Conference at United Nations Headquarters in New York. The theme of the Conference was: Challenges of a Globalized World: Finding New Directions.
The outline is intended to sketch a broad range of aspects of the Internet and its power, including an identification of some of the underlying foundations of a networked information economy and society, and incorporates the premise that the Internet - in conjunction with other information systems and processes - can be developed so as to support a profound millennial transition to a permament information ecology framework for sustainability and peace.
Central to the viability of this framework is an appreciation of the fundamental economic, material and mathematical properties of information: information has zero mass, zero physical size and can travel at the speed of light, and thus essentially is free of material limitations, and has the characteristics of a free good.
These properties of information an allow the development of an economy and society that enables virtually free access to a wealth of information and knowledge and uses that capacity as a primary tool for the eradication of poverty and to support the commitment of resources to education - learning and teaching - as a primary foundation of civil society.
The framework incorporates the remarkable ability of the Internet to support communication and information exchange among networks, organizations, committees and task forces - especially through the use of electronic mailing lists. There would be great value in developing the capacity of non-governmental organizations, community organizations, local, provincial and national governments, to make effective of electronic mailing lists, in the context of strengthened understanding and practice of information ecology.
This outline includes some of the key electronic mailing lists that are part of the Habitat Partners Network that has been instrumental in supporting communication within many of the key networks and committees that relate to the United Nations on issues of sustainability, human settlements, social development, globalization and the Millennium under the general framework of ngos@un - Non-Governmental Organizations at the United Nations.
Information ecology includes a conceptualization of information and information systems as life forms and life support systems in the context of a broader perspective of unity with nature, that sees all of the material world - including technology and the fruits of technology - as part of nature.
The Internet: A Powerful Organizing Tool
Power Tools for the Nuts and Bolts of Organizing
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