Tag Archives: culture

Whole Earth Flashbacks

Meet the creators of the Whole Earth Catalog and the community they inspired. We invite you to watch Whole Earth Flashbacks, our video history of the Whole Earth culture, which covers 50 years of collective innovation in just a half-hour.

Our video retrospective takes you on a dazzling journey through time, from the first Whole Earth Catalogs to the Co-Evolution Quarterly, the Whole Earth Review, the Hackers Conference, the Well, Wired, Burning Man and the 10,000 Year Clock. 

Whole Earth Flashbacks features insights from thought leaders like Stewart Brand, J. Baldwin, Lloyd Kahn, Ted Nelson, Doug Adams, Howard Rheingold, Wavy Gravy, Kevin Kelly, Larry Harvey and Danny Hillis, to name but a few. They empowered people to change the world, by giving them access to tools and ideas.

Watch the full half-hour video, right here:

This final release version is also available here on YouTube (35 minutes).

If you’re short on time, watch the quick preview for this video (17 minutes).

If you like Whole Earth Flashbacks, please share it widely in your community. It’s a great way to spread the word about this amazing culture and what we all accomplished in just a few decades.

Thousands of people have watched the video already, and their responses have been really positive, with hundreds of likes, shares, retweets and comments.

It’s also been covered here by some of our friends in the press:

• San Francisco Chronicle, by Leah Garchek

KPFA, by Victor Bedoian

• Wired, by Bruce Sterling

The New Yorker, by Anna Wiener

Here are a few other links you might enjoy:

Whole Earth Lightning Talks (featuring alumni like Larry Brilliant, Carolyn Garcia, Wavy Gravy and more, recorded by my friend Gary Yost)

• Whole Earth Event Livestream (featuring public evening talks with Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and more, starting at 16:45, after our preview)

• Whole Earth Photos (with 450+ historical photos from our community)

Whole Earth Event Photos (with 500+ mug shots of alumni at the event)

Whole Earth Collection on the Internet Archive (hundreds of articles, sample issues, interviews and other gems, curated by Robert Horvitz)

You can learn more about our video retrospective on our planning page, which has all the production details you could ever want.

Whole Earth Flashbacks was created by Fabrice Florin, with a world-class production team: Ahmed Kabil, David Lawrence, James McKee, Robert Horvitz, Susan Ryan, Mark Petrakis, Matisse Enzer and Phyllis Florin, to name but a few.

Over 60 community members and friends graciously shared their images, videos, sounds and comments to make this retrospective possible. They are listed in the credits below. We’re very grateful to their generous contributions.

Our video premiered at the Whole Earth Catalog’s 50th Anniversary on October 13, 2018, at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Many thanks to Stewart Brand, Ryan Phelan, Danica Remy, the Point Foundation and all the amazing volunteers who organized this event and made this community creation possible! To support this worthy cause, consider making a donation to the nonprofit Point Foundation.

Whole Earth Flashbacks has the potential to become an open-source documentary, which we hope will keep evolving over time, so that it may inspire people to take action for the next 10,000 years! If you have important footage or information for this living document, or if you would like to help create another edition, please email us.

Thanks again to all the creative minds who made this production possible!

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THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS!

We are deeply grateful to all our 60+ gracious contributors for donating your content and your time to this community production. None of this could have happened without you!  

Here is our credit roll for this project. 

Producer/Director: Fabrice Florin

Executive Producers: Stewart Brand, Ryan Phelan

Video Editors: Fabrice Florin, Ahmed Kabil, David Lawrence

Sound / Music Consultant: Jim McKee, Earwax

Researchers: Robert Horvitz, Susan Ryan

Story Consultant: Mark Petrakis

Production Crew: Matisse Enzer, Phyllis Florin

VIDEOS

Ecological Design: Christopher Zelov / Brian Danitz

Lama Commune / Saline Valley: Stewart Brand

Inside the Catalog: Lloyd Kahn

Demise Party: Ant Farm, Raindance, Media Access Center, Media Burn Archive

Hackers: Fabrice Florin

WELL Party: David Kennard, InCA Productions

Cyberthon: Cyberthon Doc Squad, KO Beckman, David Lawrence, Michael Naimark

Wired: Kevin Kelly, Louis Rossetto, Wired

About Long Now: Long Now Foundation

10,000 Year Clock: Jimmy Goldblum, Public Record

Revive & Restore: Ryan Phelan, Revive & Restore

Earth Footage: NASA, International Space Station

MUSIC

Chocolate Coffe Pot: David Gans

Logical One: Rama Kolesnikow, Cruelty Free Sound

Bell Studies: Brian Eno

Eternal Structures: Asher Fulero

Vision: Christopher Willits, Ghostly International

PHOTOS

Stewart Brand, Matisse Enzer, Kevin Kelly, Ryan Phelan, Danica Remy, Howard Rheingold, David Wills contributed the most images.

Other photo contributors include: Jeanne Campbell, Hilarie Coate, John Coate, Vickisa Feinberg, James Fulton, Carolyn Garcia, Matt Herron, Art Kleiner, Isabella Kirkland, Tiffany Lee Brown, Kathleen O’Neill, Tom Parker, Alexander Rose, Don Ryan, Susan Ryan and many more!

SPECIAL THANKS

Diana Connolly, Colleen Fiaschetti, Isabella Kirkland, Art Kleiner, John Markoff, Danica Remy, Alexander Rose, Peter Schwartz, Jason Sussberg, Andrew Warner

Copyright © 2018 Point Foundation and its licensors.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.


#wholeearth50 #wholeearth50th #wholeearth #wholeearthcatalog #coevolution #well #wired #burningman #longnow #stewartbrand #pointfoundation

Communications at Wikimedia

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I am happy to announce that I have joined the Wikimedia Foundation’s Communications team as Movement Communications Manager.

I have really enjoyed my work as product manager at Wikimedia in the last three years, leading the development of new tools like Notifications, Thanks, Beta Features, Media Viewer and other multimedia products. I am grateful for this opportunity to improve so many different parts of the Wikipedia user experience.

One of the lessons I learned during that time is that ‘better communications’ are really important to make the Wikimedia movement more effective. I also think that growing a ‘culture of kindness‘ is key if we want to engage a broader community of contributors. I hope to support both of these goals in my new role. 

I am now working with the WMF communications team on the Wikimedia blog and movement communications. My focus for the blog includes improving contributor workflow for community members and foundation staff, and providing editorial guidance for contributors. I also act as the main contact point for authors submitting new blog posts, and shepherd the publication process. Within movement communications, I work to improve the availability, distribution, and timeliness of communications from the foundation to the broader community.

I’d like to thank all my colleagues on the multimedia and product teams — as well as our many community champions — for being such wonderful collaborators over the past few years. I am proud of what we accomplished together, and I hope that the features we created can help many more people share knowledge productively in years to come. 

I’m delighted to take on this new assignment, and I look forward to many more productive collaborations in the coming year.

Onward!

A Culture of Kindness

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Many community members think that ‘being nice to each other’ can help improve Wikipedia.

Can we improve Wikipedia by being nicer to each other?

This was the topic of my talk at Wikimania 2014, which you can watch in the video below. In this short post, I would like to share some ideas from community members for growing a “culture of kindness” on Wikipedia.

Over the past few years, I have asked hundreds of Wikipedians the same question: ‘How can we improve Wikipedia?’. I invite them to write down their idea on a notepad, and then I take their photo, which I then share with other community members, as shown here.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales invites community members to 'be kind to each other' at Wikimania 2014 in London.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales invites Wikipedians to ‘be kind to each other’.

Here are some of the most frequent responses I have collected: “Be nice,” “Help the newbies,” “Be friendly.” Participants often observe that participating on Wikipedia can be a frustrating experience for new and experienced users alike, because many of our members lack civility. That hostile behavior turns away many good people, who might otherwise contribute to our cause — and this seems to harm the free knowledge movement.

‘A Culture of Kindness’ Slides

With that in mind, here are some of the ideas I have collected for building more trust in our communities:

  • help newbies
  • train editors
  • reward kindness
  • build more social tools
  • use friendlier channels
  • give everyone a voice

Help newbies

Be more encouraging to new users. Improve the way we welcome new contributors. Let them know they can help. Show them easy, fun things to do. This can be done through community programs like the Teahouse, as well as through personalized tasks and to-do lists.

Train editors

Invite current editors to be more effective in their interactions with other users, through online training events and mentoring programs. This is easier said than done, as many editors don’t feel like they need to be trained or don’t have the time for this. But everyone can benefit from a bit of coaching when it comes to empathy. And special rewards could be offered to editors who take this practice seriously.

Reward kindness

Identify people who treat others nicely, show them appreciation, celebrate their acts of kindness, honor them as role models, encourage them to show others how to do the same. Kindness can be contagious!

Build more social tools

Simple features can help encourage kindness in subtle but powerful ways, like the popular Thanks notification feature that my team developed for Wikipedia. Other software tools could help invite more civil interactions, such as a better discussion system, real user profiles, or user avatars.

Another way to build more trust is to invite anonymous users to use a persistent identity, with some form of authentication that is more reliable than IP addresses. This idea is still controversial in our movement, but worth considering if we seriously want to improve current community relations.

Use friendlier channels

Communicate over more user-friendly channels: from face-to-face meetings to video conferences — or other ways to humanize how we interact with each other — to complement text-only channels that don’t convey emotions or body language very well. Our video roundtables are a good example of how civil conversations can be encouraged on multimedia channels.

Give everyone a voice

Make it easier for diverse user groups to contribute to our movement. For example, our nearly 500 million readers can help with simple feedback on how to improve Wikipedia content, as our largest user group. Women should also be empowered to participate more actively on our sites: to this day, a vast majority of Wikipedia editors are still men, and more kindness could help close that gender gap. And the same goes with many ethnic minorities and other disenfranchised groups. Giving all these users a voice can help make them feel part of our movement, and eventually engage them as future contributors.

Watch the video

To hear more about these ideas, you can watch this video of my half-hour presentation at Wikimania 2014, which provides more insights collected from community members:

Fabrice Florin presents ideas for improving how we interact with each other on Wikipedia, speaking at Wikimania in London on August 10, 2014.

This video is also available in other formats on Vimeo and YouTube. Key points of that presentation are featured in these slides.

I take these issues seriously, as they can slow down our collective work and prevent us from growing as a movement. The hostile behavior many users have experienced on our sites harms us all; I hope that over time, we can all make Wikipedia a safer place, so that more people can feel comfortable sharing knowledge in our projects. To that end, I am now studying the impact of kindness in collaborative environments — and I would be grateful for any recommendations you might have, as well as links to research studies, tools or best practices on that topic.

Some of the ideas above are easier to implement than others, some of them are more controversial. But I believe most of them could make a difference towards encouraging a kinder, more civil behavior within our movement.

Onward!

This personal blog post was re-published here on the Wikimedia blog on December 24, 2014. Fabrice’s talk on ‘A Culture of Kindness’ was first presented at Wikimania Social Machines Weekend, held by video conference on May 24, 2014. It was then shared with a larger group at Wikimania 2014 in London, on August 10, 2014. See also: Wikimania audience comments and video conference chat log.

Greetings from Bali

I had a wonderful trip to Bali with my yoga studio in March 2014. We spent a week near Ubud, in the heart of island — and found a healthy balance between cultural and spiritual explorations.

Here is a short slideshow with highlights from this trip, set to the hypnotic gamelan music we heard everywhere.

To see more, check out this full slideshow. The individual photos can be viewed and shared here on Flickr (browse the full photo archive here).

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The trip was led by my longtime teacher Erika Trice, and organized by International Yoga, in partnership with the Bali Institute.  We stayed at Furama Villas, a lovely resort in the rice terraces near Ubud, where a friendly staff provided a great service with gamelan, incense and sweet fruits.

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We usually started and ended each day with an energizing yoga session — and ventured off in the island during the afternoons and evenings.

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On day 1, I met with the master mask maker I.B Anom, who introduced me to some of the special powers of his art. With the help of my driver Pinda, we found a nice miniature Garuda for our art project — and went off on a chase for Ooga-Oogas, giant demon figures which each village is building to fend off evil spirits for the upcoming New Year.

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On day 2, we went into nearby Ubud to visit the inspiring Neka art museum and watch a mesmerizing Legong dance performance.

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On day 3, we joined a cleansing ceremony to purify holy objects with ocean water — thousands of villages across the island made the same trip to the beach and we were honored to be part of this ritual.

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We then visited a master puppet maker, who brought a few of his characters to life for us and showed us around his family compound.

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And we ended the day with a hypnotic performance of Kecak — a ‘choir’ of men sat in a circle to re-enact the Hindu Ramanya epic with a spellbinding chant.

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On day 4, I met the talented young mask maker I.B. Anom Suryawan. We connected on many levels, and he is excited to collaborate on our Balinese Cuckoo Clock project: I now feel like I have a new friend in Bali.

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We then joined celebrations for the Balinese New Year, when every village in the island parades ‘ogoh-ogoh’, large demonic statues symbolizing malevolent spirits that need to be exorcised. It was really fun to meet our neighbors in the small village of Bindu, who made us feel part of their community.

On day 5, the entire island shut down to observe Nyepi, the Day of Silence, to reflect and meditate: no flights in or out of Bali, nobody in the streets, no electricity; we stayed in our hotel and I did my part by not taking any photos. 🙂

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On day 6, we went to Tirta Empul, where Balinese purify in the holy spring waters, then visited the Prince of Paliatan to discuss the future of Bali.

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On day 7, we went to the amazing Royal Pitahama for an afternoon by the river and a divine yoga session in this enchanted spot.

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Overall, this was an amazing experience for me, at all levels: physical, cultural and spiritual. I will miss this special place — but I now have some new friends I hope to meet again on my next visit.

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Throughout this trip, I’ve been moved by the kindness of our hosts, who are incredibly friendly with strangers like us: I hope we can bring some of that goodwill home with us, our western world could use more of that communal spirit and generosity, which seems especially strong here at the local level.

We have much to learn from the Balinese, to whom I say: Suksuma — thank you!

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