We Did It! OpenWiser Raised Over $10,000

(I’ve been meaning to cross-post this here for a week. It originally appeared here. -LU)

This little experiment in crowd-sourced fundraising worked! At 9:25AM US Pacific time, we beat our goal of raising $10,000 to help WiserEarth complete development of their API. All told, since April 22, just over five weeks ago, 102 donors contributed $10,319 to make this project a reality. This is a powerful, heartening example of the community coming together to benefit the whole of humanity.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen: to the hundreds who helped spread the word across the social web; to the 28 tech leaders who lent their names to the OpenWiser appeal; to the folks at CivicActions and ONE/Northwest whose matching grants helped build early momentum around this campaign; and most of all the 102 donors who in these tough economic times contributed generously to a project that will truly benefit us all.

The ChipIn donation tool for the OpenWiser campaign is now closed. But you can still support WiserEarth financially.

Much of the work on the WiserEarth API is already done. In fact, a beta version of the API is now available for WiserEarth Organization records. If you would like to get your hands dirty now, you can join the WiserEarth API Developers Group and help with the beta testing and documentation of the API.

Finally, if you are planning to use the WiserEarth API yourself, or just have a creative idea for how it could be applied, we’d love to hear about it. Are you thinking of building a mobile app, a browser plugin, a web widget or tool that lets users browse and display WiserEarth data in new ways? Or perhaps a mashup that mixes WiserEarth data with maps or tweets or some other datasets that support new social change initiatives? Share your ideas in the WiserEarth API Developers Group.

Again, thank you for all you do.

Leif Utne
VP Community Development
Zanby

Jon Warnow
Internet Director
350.org

Fierce Light: From Spirit to Action – New film by Velcrow Ripper

I can’t wait to see “Fierce Light: From Spirit to Action,” the new documentary by Velcrow Ripper. Check out this trailer:

This is a follow-up to his previous film, the hauntingly beautiful “Scared Sacred,” which chronicled the Canadian auteur’s 7-year journey, visiting sites of deep human tragedy — Bhopal, Hiroshima, Kabul, NYC after 9/11, the West Bank, and others — to find and document examples of extraordinary beauty and resilience.

AC/DC Rock N Roll Train – ASCII music video in Excel

This is seriously incredible. Download the Excel spreadsheet with the full video at http://acdcrocks.com/excel

Israelis For Obama

This is a powerful video. It nearly brought tears of hope to my eyes.

I’m on Twitter

Follow me.

Mo’ I Love You

“Mo’ I Love You,” says our 2 year-old son Mateo, as he demands to watch the video of his favorite song, Michael Franti’s “Say Hey,” again…and again…and again…

But it’s so cute when he says it — “mo’ I love you” — that we just can’t resist.

Architects Get Talking at Oregon Conference

The following article appeared in the June newsletter of the Conversation Cafe, an important dialogue initiative I’m involved with. If you were there, and even if you weren’t, I’d love to hear what you thought about this dialogue process

Case Study: Architects Get Talking at Oregon Design Conference

By Leif Utne

The classic Conversation Cafe — a small group gathered weekly at the neighborhood coffee shop or in a host’s living room — is just one way to use this powerful dialogue method. The CC process is a useful tool to get just about any group of people in any community or organization to go deep quickly. We frequently hear reports from hosts who use it in schools, conferences, churches, and workplaces. But I, personally, had never had such an opportunity until recently.

Car-Free Blogs

Dang! There are a crapload of car-free blogs out there. Hanging out with my friend Kurt the other day, who is six weeks into chronicling his just-begin year sans automobile,  got me wondering just how many car-free blogs there might be. A quick Google search on “car-free blogs” turned up 181,000 hits, including a few particularly interesting ones:

Car-Free USA blog is the first hit on the list. Self-described as “A blog promoting the joys of car free life in the USA.” The blogger behind it is Brian Smith, a communications guy at the Oakland-based environmental group EarthJustice, who I met last year at a meetup for

WorldChanging.com’s team of Bay-Area contributors.

There’s Carfree Family, by Paul Cooley, a 41 year-old father in Santa Fe.

There are a slew of blogs about World Car-Free Day, including some of its local iterations.

There’s even a link to an index of all blogs on WordPress.com that contain the tag car-free. (This post will no doubt turn up there once I hit Publish.)

One of the best is the Year of Living Car-lessly, an experiment undertaken by Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank. After his teenage son totaled the family car, they decided to simply not replace it.

And in a bit of cruel irony, the sponsored link that turned up above that Google search was an ad for MotorAddicts.com.

I can see clearly now…

A historic first! I’ve never worn glasses in my life. My eyesight is still quite good. But as time and years of working with words on screens and pages would have it, my eyes don’t focus quite as well as they once did, and I sometimes have to strain a little too much for comfort to see clearly. (Hey mom, how about a lesson in some of those Bates Method exercises you used to teach?) That, and Antigua is known for having excellent eye doctors who’ll sell you designer glasses for about a third of what you’d pay in the US. These frames are from Spain and ran me about $130, lenses and all.

So I decided it was time.

I’m still not used to wearing them. (I’m not wearing them right now, frgzmpl.) They definitely work, making everything a little clearer. But it feels a bit like snorkeling.

Well, what do you think? Do they suit me?

/Leif

Vid: Motorcycle Classics and Team MOMBA

I edited this little vid for Motorcycle Classics magazine.