Green Design » About Worldchanging

The U.S. Health Care Debate, Simply Put: An Original Animated Short

Julia Levitt — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:54:47 +0000

We always like to share the great work that Worldchanging team members are creating in their own corners of the globe. Over the summer months, Worldchanging contributor Andy Lubershane wrote and produced an original animated short that makes a simple, clear (and very entertaining) case for single-payer health care in the United States.

We hope you'll check it out:

Head to the Worldchanging archives for more discussion on health care solutions:
Thinking Differently About Health Care
Notes From the Field: The Future of Health Care
Treating Health Care as a Commons
A Tool for Building Healthier Public Projects and Policies
Advance Market Commitments: Bringing Medicines to Developing Nations

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in About Worldchanging at 10:54 AM)

Seeking an Editor for Worldchanging Seattle

Julia Levitt — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Worldchanging is looking for a talented, curious and connected volunteer to take the helm of Worldchanging Seattle, our locally focused blog about sustainability and innovation in the Emerald City.

We're looking for a Seattle-based writer and editor who can, after training with our Worldchanging editorial team, become largely independent in developing and maintaining the Seattle site. We'll be here to support you, but we expect to give you a large amount of editorial control in working with writers, planning content, continuing series like Seattle to the World and 20 Minute Cities (and starting your own), and making the site a go-to voice in Seattle for solutions-based coverage of Worldchanging ideas.

We hope this position will culminate in project-managing a PDF magazine of Seattle's best solutions, designed for distribution to our donor base at the end of 2009.

To apply for this volunteer position, please send an email titled "Worldchanging Seattle Editor" to managing editor Julia Levitt at Julia [at] Worldchanging [dot] com. In the email, introduce yourself and tell us what inspires you to write for us. Then describe your plan for the site, including how much time you'd expect to devote to it, how much new content you'd expect to publish per week/month, what kinds of content you think you will generate and how you expect to reflect the unique culture of Seattle. Attach your resume and up to 3 samples of your own writing (relevant content preferred).

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in About Worldchanging at 3:00 PM)

Sponsor Us Today through 1% for the Planet!

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 01:27:03 +0000

Hey Worldchangers,
Worldchanging is a member of 1% For the Planet, a non-profit that helps companies donate 1 percent of their sales to environmental organizations. We're looking for sponsors who share our vision for the future. If you own or work for a company that is interested in donating to our award winning website, visit 1% For the Planet to give today.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 5:27 PM)

Links Now Fixed in Attention Philanthropy Feature

Julia Levitt — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:59:57 +0000

Dear Worldchanging Readers,

We experienced a system crash this morning and our Attention Philanthropy collection hit your RSS feeds (and our homepage) with a lot of broken links. Please accept our apologies (and thanks to those of you who emailed to let us know you were concerned).

The feature is now fixed. Click here to read it.

For those of you who read Worldchanging via RSS feed: you'll get each new Attention Philanthropy grant in your feed as we publish them throughout this week. But if you want to share the full list with others, please use the link to the feature on our site to ensure they get the most updated version.

Thanks for understanding, and thanks for reading!

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in About Worldchanging at 6:59 AM)

Alex Steffen on The Visionary Activist Show

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:37:21 +0000

Unique visionary activist and astrologer Caroline Casey recently interviewed Alex Steffen on The Visionary Activist radio show, a live weekly radio program broadcast by KPFA in Berkeley, California. Also featured is Carolyn Raffensperger of the Science and Environmental Health Network.

The show originally aired July 2, and will be available in the audio archive until Thursday, July 16. Visit the site to download or play.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 1:37 PM)

Stay Connected: Worldchanging Now on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and LinkedIN

Sarah Kuck — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:27:46 +0000

Hey Worldchangers! Staying informed and keeping in touch with Worldchanging solutions and people has never been easier. We are constantly tweeting news, posting to Facebook, updating Myspace and connecting to friends on LinkedIn. Click on the icons below to stay up to date on the latest news from the Worldchanging team:

...and click these icons to stay in touch with our executive director, Alex Steffen:

Now, you can become a fan of Worldchanging on Facebook! Get good news about Worldchanging innovations straight from Facebook by signing up to be a fan.

Looking forward to seeing you online!

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in About Worldchanging at 5:27 PM)

Stay Connected: Worldchanging Now on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and LinkedIN

Sarah Kuck — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:27:46 +0000

...and click these icons to stay in touch with our executive director, Alex Steffen:

Now, you can become a fan of Worldchanging on Facebook! Get good news about Worldchanging innovations straight from Facebook by signing up to be a fan.

Looking forward to seeing you online!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Sarah Kuck in About Worldchanging at 5:27 PM)

TED talk translations: update

Alex Steffen — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:39:44 +0000

Last month, noting the cool new translation platform that TED is using to facilitate translation of the talks it's put online, we asked for volunteers to translate my TED talk. That talk is now available not only in the original English, but in Brazilian Portuguese and Chinese, with a Hungarian translation completed and translations in Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, Danish and Norwegian underway. (We'd love to see translations into other languages as well, so if you're bilingual, we'd love your help.)

Thanks to everyone who's working on this, and thanks again to the good folks at TED and their partner dotSUB for making something cool happen!

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in About Worldchanging at 8:39 AM)

10,000!

Nancy Scola — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:49:24 +0000

Just a quick note: this is our 10,000th entry!

Thanks for all the support, encouragement and feedback, all you worldchangers. We couldn't ask for a better set of friends, allies and colleagues. I hope the work we'll be unveiling over the next year will surprise, delight and inspire you as much as you all have surprised, delighted and inspired us over the last five years.

-Alex

(Note for sticklers: not every story published on Worldchanging is still available -- we've taken a handful down here and there for various reasons -- and not every entry written has been published (I have at least 30 draft stories doomed to languish unfinished for all eternity in the depths of Moveable Type), so technically we don't have 10,000 stories yet. But who wants to be a stickler?)

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(Posted by Nancy Scola in About Worldchanging at 7:49 PM)

Alex Steffen on Smart City Radio

Julia Levitt — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:24:10 +0000

The intelligent discussion of urban futures on Smart City Radio has frequently been a great resource for us, so it was an honor to have host Carol Coletta return the compliment. Head to their website to hear Coletta interview Worldchanging's Alex Steffen about the meaning of solutions-based journalism, the true nature of the planet's biggest problems, and the audacity of the name "Worldchanging."

Link to the program.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in About Worldchanging at 1:24 PM)

Official De-Lurking and Re-Introducing Thread

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:31:13 +0000

All right, everyone, let's get to know one another.

Worldchanging readers -- that's you -- are smart, engaged, diverse and dispersed all around the globe. We're generating virtual scenius here around the best ideas and paradigm-shifting innovations out there, and when it comes down to it, our greatest strength lies in our network. Those connections, of course, each begin with an introduction. So please take this as your invitation to let us know who you are, where you're from and what you're doing and thinking about these days.

Photo credit: flickr/vanderlin, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 2:31 PM)

Worldchanging’s New Office

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:53:55 +0000

Worldchanging has moved into a brand new office! GGLO, an integrated architecture, urban planning, landscape and interior design firm, has generously offered to house Worldchanging's core operations within its headquarters in downtown Seattle.

Harbor Steps in downtown Seattle

We're really excited about our new space. It's located within the Harbor Steps development, a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use urban community that's earned an award from the Urban Land Institute. The GGLO Space at the Steps, where we work, is LEED Silver Certified. And we are thrilled to be sharing space with a team of smart, engaged designers who understand the role their industry plays in creating a bright green future. We're eager to learn about their experiences, and to share our own perspectives, in conversations over the coming months.

GGLO Space at the Steps (also pictured at top of page)

We offer our sincere thanks to the principals and team at GGLO for their incredible show of support for our work. We look forward to continuing to bring you, our readers, independent and solutions-based coverage of the best and brightest Worldchanging ideas.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 8:53 AM)

Worldchanging Ideas in Many Languages; TED Translations and a Call for Volunteers

Alex Steffen — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:35:17 +0000

Why aren't Worldchanging ideas available in more languages?

Sure, a majority of Worldchanging readers live in North America, the U.K. and other countries where English is spoken like New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and India. That's I think to be expected of a publication in English.

But many of you reading this live elsewhere, and speak other languages. Worldchanging readers are particularly concentrated in Brazil, China, the Scandinavian nations, Japan, Germany, Spain, Poland, Korea, France, Turkey, Russia, Israel, the Netherlands, and the Philippines. Translations of our book are doing very well in French, German and Korean, and more translations are on the way. So we know that there's an interest in what we have to say outside of the Anglosphere.

The challenge has been that we're a small nonprofit, with very limited resources for encouraging translation, even crowd-sourced translation. Lots of various translations have been done of different pieces we posted (especially by readers who blog in Spanish and Portuguese), but we haven't had the ability to encourage translation on a more regular basis.

That's why I'm excited about the TED Open Translation Project. It makes transcripts available in English of the various TED talks, and provides a structure for adding translation of those transcripts to the talks as subtitles.

It would be really cool if we could take that opportunity as a challenge and see how many languages we could my TED talk from 2005 into.

I did a rough count just now, and as far as I can reckon, I know regular Worldchanging readers who speak at least 22 languages. I know some of you must speak other languages as well.

Can we make my Worldchanging talk the first TED talk translated into 25 languages?

All you need to do to get involved is sign up here http://www.ted.com/translate/step1. It's easy. The English transcript is already up (I'll copy it at the bottom of this post, too). After signing up, you'll have the opportunity to translate the text, which will automatically subtitle the talk in the language you're translating into.

Some readers have already begun. Tony Yet from TEDtoChina has made a Chinese translation that's up already on dotSUB.

So, in short:

1) Lots of people are interested in Worldchanging ideas.

2) Many of those people prefer to get their information in languages other than English.

3) My TED talk, though old, is one quite popular expression of Worldchanging ideas.

4) TED has made it easy to translate that talk of mine into any of a number of languages.

5) Many Worldchanging readers are smart, articulate people who speak several languages and could use the TED engine to translate that talk.

6) That newly-subtitled talk can make these ideas accessible to many more people.

7) 25 languages seems like an impressive, yet achievable, number; it might even help draw more translators from outside Worldchanging's readership.

I think this would be really cool, so I will happily send a signed, personalized copy of Worldchanging: A User's Guide to anyone who translates the talk into a new language.

What do you think? Who's willing to volunteer?

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in About Worldchanging at 10:35 AM)

Worldchanging Ideas in Many Languages; TED Translations and a Call for Volunteers

Alex Steffen — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:35:17 +0000

Why aren't Worldchanging ideas available in more languages?

It would be really cool if we could take that opportunity as a challenge and see how many languages we could my TED talk from 2005 into.

I did a rough count just now, and as far as I can reckon, I know regular Worldchanging readers who speak at least 22 languages. I know some of you must speak other languages as well.

Can we make my Worldchanging talk the first TED talk translated into 25 languages?

Some readers have already begun. Tony Yet from TEDtoChina has made a Chinese translation that's up already on dotSUB.

So, in short:

1) Lots of people are interested in Worldchanging ideas.

2) Many of those people prefer to get their information in languages other than English.

3) My TED talk, though old, is one quite popular expression of Worldchanging ideas.

4) TED has made it easy to translate that talk of mine into any of a number of languages.

5) Many Worldchanging readers are smart, articulate people who speak several languages and could use the TED engine to translate that talk.

6) That newly-subtitled talk can make these ideas accessible to many more people.

7) 25 languages seems like an impressive, yet achievable, number; it might even help draw more translators from outside Worldchanging's readership.

I think this would be really cool, so I will happily send a signed, personalized copy of Worldchanging: A User's Guide to anyone who translates the talk into a new language.

What do you think? Who's willing to volunteer?

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Alex Steffen in About Worldchanging at 10:35 AM)

Last chance to bid: Worldchanging tote bag filled with our favorite books

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:37:55 +0000

Get it now for as little as $51 (as of 5:30 p.m. PDT on 5/14/09)

Click here and here to bid on this item.

This Worldchanging canvas tote bag is packed with a few of Worldchanging's favorite titles, hand-picked from our library by Executive Editor Alex Steffen. In addition, we will add a signed copy of our book, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.

Bidding in the Worldchanging Ideas Auction closes Friday, May 15 at 10 a.m. PDT.

Click here to browse and place your bids!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 5:37 PM)

Last chance to bid: Worldchanging tote bag filled with our favorite books

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:37:55 +0000

Get it now for as little as $51 (as of 5:30 p.m. PDT on 5/14/09)

Click here and here to bid on this item.

Bidding in the Worldchanging Ideas Auction closes Friday, May 15 at 10 a.m. PDT.

Click here to browse and place your bids!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 5:37 PM)

Last chance to bid: Signed copy of Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:10:59 +0000

Get it now for as little as $15.50 (as of 5 p.m. PDT on 5/14/09)

Click here or here to bid on this item.

Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century is a groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future. This paperback copy is autographed by the editor, Alex Steffen.

Bidding in the Worldchanging Ideas Auction closes Friday, May 15 at 10 a.m. PDT.

Click here to browse and place your bids!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 5:10 PM)

Last chance to bid: Signed copy of Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:10:59 +0000

Get it now for as little as $15.50 (as of 5 p.m. PDT on 5/14/09)

Click here or here to bid on this item.

Bidding in the Worldchanging Ideas Auction closes Friday, May 15 at 10 a.m. PDT.

Click here to browse and place your bids!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 5:10 PM)

Last chance to bid: Private tour of CAS in San Francisco for you + 8 guests

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:48:28 +0000

Street value: $350
Get it now for as little as $158.53 (as of 4:30 p.m. PDT on 5/14/09)

Click here to bid on this item.

Join the California Academy of Sciences' Manager of Sustainability Programs, Aaron Pope, as he takes you and eight guests on a special green tour of its new, cutting-edge green facility and its exhibits. Aaron will provide a unique, behind-the-scenes perspective on the Academy’s sustainability program, climate change exhibit, environmentally friendly building design, living roof, and all other things green-related at the Academy. The winner will coordinate with Aaron Pope on setting a date once the auction ends.

Bidding in the Worldchanging Ideas Auction closes Friday, May 15 at 10 a.m. PDT.

Click here to browse and place your bids!

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 4:48 PM)

Last chance to bid: 2009 Polar Bear Expedition for 2 with Natural Habitat Adventures

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:37:53 +0000

Street value: $9,790 for a 2-person trip
Get it now for as little as $4,078 (as of 4:30 p.m. PDT on 5/14/09)

Click here to bid on this item.

Natural Habitat Adventures is the world’s premier nature travel company, dedicated to providing our guests with the planet's greatest nature expeditions. Bid on a trip for 2 for a 2009 Classic Polar Bear Expedition by Natural Habitat Adventures. This Classic Polar Bear Expeditions is Natural Habitat Adventures’ "flagship" polar bear adventure. Polar bear watching in the polar bear capital of the world -- Churchill, Manitoba!

Included:
R/T flight from Winnipeg to Churchill, accommodations, all meals (except either lunch or dinner on your final day in Churchill), services of NHA's professional Expedition Leaders and assistants, all activities/entrance fees, evening wildlife and cultural presentations, all taxes and service charges. Read more about the trip here.

Bidding in the Worldchanging Ideas Auction closes Friday, May 15 at 10 a.m. PDT.

Click here to browse and place your bids!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 4:37 PM)