Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

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 people 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.

As tweeted: on equinox, marking 7 years of war on Iraq, walked with 20 people to remind town we're occupying a couple countries and ruining lives.

From the common where the vigil always is to the army labs. No blockade, no action. Police facilitating our crossing at intersections.

And media representation - somehow i ended up talking to the press about PWGD and Visions Unite!

Well, here's an e-mail i just wrote on the topic:

Walked in a commemoration and protest of seven years of war on Iraq, from

Sent to MJ Petroni of http://causeit.org

Confirming our talk scheduled in two and one-half hours from now, with an important proviso - if this is a for-fee consult, and i am quite aware that consulting is exactly what people pay you for, i will need to beg off for now or do a deferred payment.

One large, slow-paying client means no expenses until i know i can get money to all the people i already have commitments to-- as in yesterday i canceled dealer maintenance on a ten-year-old Honda Insight hybrid.

ACORN makes a sobering case study for the goal of a large organized base of people including the excluded and disadvantaged.

Quoting from http://www.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=14767

Lansing organizer Guzman says she first learned about the group the way most people did back in the 1980s.

"Someone came and knocked on my door and asked me to become involved," she recalls. The issue then was an effort to keep a neighborhood school from being closed.

I have tons to do. How did i spend three and a half hours this morning, from 5 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., reading the last year and a quarter of Candorville?

I've been rocking the work the past week or so. Maybe i should have really fully taken Saturday off like i planned. Because productivity this Sunday wasn't supposed to be an option.

Sledding this morning was good though!

Also read an essay on the women's liberation movement by Jo Freeman,
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html

Content has a life cycle of it’s own and the value of content is pretty much built up by it’s freshness (how breaking is the content), how unique is it, and how emotional the content is. Breaking news content will always be in high demand. The life time and stickiness of the content improves with supporting relevant material such as context, facts and opinions, together with providing the audience with the capability of interacting with the content with ratings, comments and topical forums.

[...]

Got some mail from Lambda Legal which put me on their begging list somehow. Their only tagline on the envelope is "making the case for equality" but somehow I knew it was an LGBT rights organization.

Which... is a little problematic.

The unfair legal treatment of homosexual couples and even more so society-wide discrimination against queer people generally is shocking at this stage in history, a shame, and a whole network of injustice that requires redress.

Introduction by Suren Moodliar:

Ashraf Cassiem's Saturday evening presentation at e5 concerning the Anti Eviction Campaign that he coordinates in South Africa's Western Cape. Several people have written back trying to locate (or asking me to situate)
the Campaign within the traditions of South Africa's national liberation struggle and/or the global justice movement.

Awesomeness.