Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Visions Unite helps us consciously turn our attention to media, news and journalism, that we want to support.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/06/who-pays-for-the-media.h...

The subject should be halfway between being part of what you're doing and "i'm with an organization you should know about"- but my organization is a bare shell now (not even a web presence, and i'm a web developer).

I'm at NCMR and just saw you on the panel, excellent, thank you. I think i have something to offer in your goal to see everyone on the planet connected: how to make it scale.

Research the hell out of the costs born by society due to the way McDonald's does business:
- unhealthy food, cost of health care, lost productivity
- trash produced
- environmental destruction where cows graze, such as Amazon destruction
- loss/degredation of the local water table due to the parking lot
- contribution to global warming due to traffic
- underpayment of employees

One or two volunteers stand outside each of the 15,000 McDonald's 24/7 (or quickly learn when the busiest times are) and cheerfully ask people to pay a tax on their purchase to reflect its true cost.

Knight Foundation:

http://newschallenge.org/blog/knight-news-challenge-101-basic-breakdown-...
http://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/nov/09/knight-news-challenge-2011-t...

(Talking about Germany, here, i don't know that the U.S. can be said to have learned in the first place from its centuries of extreme, institutionalized racism and their aftermaths.)

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has courted growing anti-immigrant opinion in Germany by claiming the country's attempts to create a multicultural society have "utterly failed".

Speaking to a meeting of young members of her Christian Democratic Union party, Merkel said the idea of people from different cultural backgrounds living happily "side by side" did not work.

We need to wage war strategically against the institutions at war with our rights to justice and liberty. An obvious case study for interests sharply and actively at odds with our common interest, that is getting some ink recently, is the brothers who currently own Koch Industries. (To be fair, the Koches are much more on the attack against economic and environmental justice than the more common perceptions of liberty; in the foundations they fund, at least, there's some internally coherent commitment to libertarian principles.)

William Alder reports:

Americans vastly underestimate the degree of wealth inequality in America, and we believe that the distribution should be far more equitable than it actually is, according to a new study.

Or, as the study's authors put it: "All demographic groups -- even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy -- desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo."

Stephen Cataldo's idea.

Proposed names:
Dinner Theory
Dinner Discussions

I am not a gamer, this is not the perspective that i'm coming from at all, but key parts of Jane McGonigal's vision unites well with the aims of Visions Unite.

Specifically:

• Always being able to give a person something they, personally, can do
• Making the possible believable.
• Achieving that epic win after great individual effort and collaboration with others.

All of those mean connecting people (both into smaller dream teams of compatible, complementary talents and into a large number of supporters).

I'm more interested in bringing what makes games satisfying to self-organizing to make things better, than to making games a vehicle to saving the world, which is the direction she goes in, but please, watch:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/799

[Original (not edited for space) proposal to the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit.]

Self-rule in any group or society needs a democratic system of
communication, in which sending and receiving information is free and open
to all. Equal power, let alone equal participation, cannot be approached
without this equal access. A transparent way for people to filter for the
most important messages can prove an essential tool in working together for
a better world.