Conference Dial-in number: (507) 726-4253

Participant Passcode: 100039#

For more details see the Haiti page at http://sustainableleadershipforum.com/?page_id=587 and our latest updates athttp://sustainableleadershipforum.org.

Some colleagues of ours at the Institute for Sustainable Enterprise met last week to discuss what we could do to contribute to a longer-term recovery, that would try to address the social, environmental, and economic challenges facing this troubled nation. We talked about a great many things, including the fact that many of us feel powerless in the face of such catastrophes, especially those that afflict human beings in distant places. We are all “overcommitted” to many worthwhile and challenging tasks already, and taking on such a monumental task as helping to chart the way forward in Haiti clearly seems to require that we steal time and energy from other causes. But if we can make even a small difference, while honoring our other commitments, this seems a compelling goal.

And the reality is that we do have a number of resources, ideas, and opportunities to contribute, and after discussing a great many aspects of what’s needed we agreed that as a minimum we would take a couple of small steps: 1) to write up what we had discussed (a forthcoming discussion paper to be published shortly), and 2) to reach out to others and invite them to join the conversation. Our hope is that others will step up to lead this conversation, and will simply be able to use what we have suggested as a basis for their own action.

Essentially, our discussion helped us to identify some of the obvious problems of Haiti’s long-standing plight, to sketch out the areas – infrastructure, public health, energy, housing, education, jobs, justice and security, government, ecosystem restoration, and so on – where a more sustainable approach is required, and to highlight some of the concerns that we have going in: that we empower Haitians to build a new society that is their own, not one handed to them (or, depending on your point of view, foisted upon them) from the outside.

We worried that we cannot think of a single instance where an impoverished society has entirely shaken off a culture of corruption and inequity; or – apart perhaps from the Marshall Plan – where a massive foreign intervention aimed at societal reconstruction has gone well. We noted that more than 8 billion dollars has been poured into Haiti since 1965, and yet the standard of living and the quality of life are no better than they were in 1945.[citation?] We also briefly acknowledged the possibility that there might be some hidden motives behind the interests of the US and other foreign governments because of rumors of significant oil and natural gas reserves that have yet to be fully documented or made available for exploitation. (See The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti, by by F. William Engdahl of Global Research, for some evidence of this.)

All of these are legitimate reasons for concern, but they are not reasons for inaction. In a remarkable piece by travel writer Rick Steves in yesterday’s USA Today, many of the realities of Haiti are plainly stated.

“as soon as the passion of this moment fades, the U.S. government, and others, will continue pursuing repressive trade policies that help keep places like Haiti poor.”

“We can blame Haiti’s chronic poverty on its heritage of slavery, on corruption, or on the fact that its main “export” is topsoil (in a treeless land, each rainstorm flushes precious soil into the sea). But we must also examine global trade policies that help keep nations like Haiti “banana republics,” poor lands whose economies are often dominated by the export of their leading natural resource.”

“Domestic subsidies for U.S. agricultural products also hamper development in poor nations…. In Haiti, fields that once grew rice sit unplanted. And across the street, a shack sells rice grown in the USA.”

Steves points out that in the face of any human suffering that affects others, each of us has to make a personal choice – to (a) ignore it, (b) respond charitably, or (c) “ask why, learn and act to address the roots of the problem.” We hope that most people who have the means to do so will respond with (b) – but also that enough of us will take up the challenge of (c) to make a difference in the long term.

Nor should we gloss over the fact that many of the “responses” to Steves’ article are ignorant and mean-spirited. Just as many Americans are incredibly generous, and have finally elected a President capable of responding to this humanitarian tragedy at the level it deserves, many others are cynical and uncaring.

So let’s not imagine that, as Americans, we have “the” solution for Haiti, or the means to implement it. But if we are able to inform ourselves as to our own country’s complicity, and to frame a dialog with Haitians themselves, with the international development community, and with sustainability leaders here at home, we should seek to do this.

We’re planning a conference call on the topic of “Haiti: The Way Forward” within a few weeks, to bring others into this conversation and see if we can identify and support those who will take action and seek to influence the outcomes for what has been the poorest county in the Americas, but may now have the opportunity to “leapfrog” our own unsustainable economic model and develop a sustainable society of its own. If you are interested in being part of this conversation, email me at jcloud@slforum.org and I’ll send you a copy of the formal outline of our discussion and let you know when the conference call has been scheduled. Thanks.

Original published as Toward a Sustainable Future for Haiti at www.SustainableLeadershipForum.org.

EVA stands for “Electronic Virtual Assistant,” an idea I came up with in the 1980s, and actually tried to create, in HyperCard. The idea was to use a kind of rudimentary, mostly simulated, artificial intelligence to have a program be a secretary / executive assistant / project manager / and sometime playmate. I had some fun with her, but ran aground with a few challenges – how to get her to learn, remember, and remind me about things, for example.

Of course, this can probably be done pretty easily through “extensions.” My goal right now, however, is to develop a system for branching conversations in meaningful directions…

Here are some of the things I’m currently working on:

1. Outlining the book
2. Conference planning
3. Completing the feasibility study
   1. http://sbifeasibility.wik.is/
4. Getting the Incubator approved and funded
5. Moving and backing up all web sites
6. Learning wikis and mailing lists
7. Follow up on Sustainable Business Network

Here are some of the current links I’m following:

Wikis:

• http://techrepublic.com.com/2415-3513_11-158276.html
• http://atg-host.com:2082/frontend/x3/fantastico/autoinstallhome.php?app=TikiWiki
• http://sbi.atg-host.com/feasibility/tiki-admin.php?page=look
• http://sbi.atg-host.com/feasibility/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage&saved_msg=y
• http://www.wikidot.com/more:explore-features
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_farm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindTouch
• http://sbifeasibility.wik.is/
• http://www.netcipia.net/xwiki/bin/view/MyNetcipia/
• http://grou.ps/superwiki.php?gclid=CIr9_tvu1pcCFQwDGgodJVsgCw
• http://www.google.com/search?q=free+wiki+sites&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=mozilla&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial

Mailman:

• http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Frequently+Asked+Questions
• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=learning+mailman&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=
• http://atg-host.com:2082/frontend/x3/mail/lists.html

Other:

Green Jobs Conference

• http://www.greenforall.org/2009gjgj
• https://www.kintera.org/site/apps/ka/rg/ecreg.asp?c=rvI3IiNWJqE&b=4783267&en=ffIFKSNCJ9LCKVNAK7ICLQMtHhJXIYOzGnJPJWOwFfKQKVMDKtH

NJ SRECS:

• http://www.srectrade.com/how_it_works.php
• http://www.srectrade.com/
• http://www.google.com/search?q=understanding+srecs&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=mozilla&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial
• http://www.lbelectricco.com/

DCA Grants

• http://www.state.nj.us/dca/grants/
• http://www.state.nj.us/dca/
• http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&client=mozilla&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&q=nj+state+dca+neighborhood+stabilization&btnG=Search

Referral

• http://www.creativity-law.com/firm.php

• Wikis
• Mailing lists
• Other CMS systems such as Mambo and Joomla

and generally trying to extend my capabilities without too steep a learning curve to make it worthwhile.

Every time I adventure out I come back chastened at how little I really know about how to use the tools available, and what this marvelous collective brain that we call the Internet has wrought. Mostly, I decide it’s just too complex, and easier to stick with what I know, but over the winter holidays this year I’ve decided to give it a push, and figure out at least the first two items, wikis and mailing lists. This post is designed to record my early learnings in these two fields.

First, wikis.

Fantastico, the “autoinstaller” that comes with many self-serve hosting accounts these days, will install TikiWiki and PHPwiki with one click, but I’ve found them less than intuitive to get going with. TikiWiki, which seems the more user-friendly of the two, is described as:

TikiWiki is designed to be an international, clean and extensible Content Management System and Groupware that can be used to create all sorts of web applications, sites, portals, intranets and extranets. TikiWiki also works great as a web-based collaboration tool. TikiWiki has a lot of native options and sections that you can enable/disable as you need them.

Installing either of these systems is dead easy. The problem is then finding a step-by-step guide to setting them up and using them. The best I’ve seen so far is Jack Wallen’s description at TechRepublic.com. (Of course, every time I find something like this, I get distracted by something else on the page. The first thing I noticed was that TechRepublic.com was not actually the URL of the web site – it was TechRepublic.com.com. This meant that the actually site was www.com.com, and that turns out to be an alias for cnet.com, which runs news headlines at the top of the page, and the one that just happened to be there was “Can 365 Nights Of Sex Bolster A Marriage?” Needless to say, I had to check this out before returning to the task at hand.)

Anyway, as Jack describes it, “I’ve covered a lot of CMS systems, but none of those systems had me as wide-eyed as TikiWiki. Why? This system has a plethora of options and tools. There is so much here that, upon installation, I wasn’t exactly sure where to start first. It’s almost too much, but not too much to be useful. You’ll probably never use 100 percent of TikiWiki’s offerings; just choosing the features you’ll stick with will take you a while.”

He goes on to add,

“What is TikiWiki, really? As you can infer from the name, it’s a wiki: a collaborative bit of technology used to gather information, or an open source dictionary, if you will. Visitors (those with permissions, at least) can add, remove, and edit content as they see fit. Wikipedia is probably the most popular wiki. However, albeit enormous in scope, Wikipedia is limited to what it does for the public.

“TikiWiki takes the wiki one giant step further: TikiWiki has a feature set that looks like it belongs to a large-scale system.”

So maybe it’s not so surprising that I’m a bit lost trying to set it up. The problem is not installation, since Fantastico handles all that, it’s getting started. So I pretty much skipped over the section on installation, and went right to the part on administration:

Naturally, the next step is to log in as the administrator to start administering the system. If you remember back to the installation process, an administrator account was never set up. Once again, never fear — the TikiWiki team has this covered. To log in as the administrator, use the username admin and the password admin. To make matters safe, the first thing you will be required to do is change the administrator password. You won’t have a choice in this case.

The creation of your TikiWiki site is done and ready for you.

…One of the first things you will notice is how enormous the menu is. Figures B and C highlight just how many entries you have to play with.

Obviously I’m not going to repeat all this here, since all you have to do is go there to see it. So the next step is to pull up my own TikiWiki installation and start administering it. First thing, according to Jack, is “to focus on the Admin home entry. Select the Admin home link to reveal the full set of admin tools.” At the top is a note that says, “Tip: Enable/disable Tiki features in Admin > Features, but configure them elsewhere.”

The Sustainable Business Incubator and Sustainable Business Network site also have blog entries, and the Incubator also has its own “resource network” site, at sustainablebusinessincubator.com/network/. (The SBN site currently points to a Ning site, where anyone can join.) The Green Ventures Conference site / JumpstartGreen.org is also a blog site, currently an archive of the Conference, which is out on audio CD.

The SustainableLeadershipForum.org site is another blog site, and can also be reached at SustainableLeasershipForum.com, SustainableLeadershipNetwork.com and SustainableLeadershipNetwork.org.

I have lots of other WordPress sites, but the other main ones are the Bernards Democrats site, and the Bernards Voices site. Here are some of the others:

• Altonomy
• Green NJ
• Fortellus, LLC
• Ilana Cloud’s Art & Poetry site
• Ilana Rose Cloud’s Art
• NJ Community Clean Energy Aggregation

More to come, as they get moved over from the previous hosting provider…

All of these sites, except the Ning site and Altonomy, which is just a placeholder page, are WordPress sites. Technically, all these sites are blogs, though some of them focus on the “pages” rather than the “posts,” which makes them more like traditional web sites. But the WordPress innovation is to separate form and content so successfully that it’s actually not worth building a traditional HTML site anymore. Here’s an example of the difference between a blog or WordPress site – Somerset Hills Business Network – and a traditional, “hand-built” site – the old SHBN site – which was a complete bear to maintain.

There are all kinds of open-source tools to do this, ranging from complex project management systems to simple (but nonetheless very powerful) wikis. One of the best, and yet in many ways the simplest, is WordPress. Originally designed purely as a blogging system, WordPress has become a full-blown CMS or content management system, and it has an architecture that allows for virtually unlimited extension. Importantly, if you don’t want to allow the world to see what you or your colleagues are doing – at least until it’s ready for prime time – there are several ways you can limit access to the site. (The one I prefer for non-sensitive sites is to use the option in the Settings tab to exclude search engine crawlers, but otherwise allow non-password access. But you can also limit access to just those with passwords.)

Here’s an example of a non-password-protected planning site, for our 2009 green ventures conference, Jumpstarting the New Green Economy: http://sustainablebusinessincubator.com/conference/. You won’t find this even if you Google “sustainable business incubator conference,” so you need someone to give you the link in order to find it (and it may well now begin to show up because it’s referenced here, and this is not an excluded site).

Even as an individual you can benefit from this kind of site, if only to manage your personal projects. For a limited time, we will provide our clients with these sorts of sites at no additional cost, in subdirectories off their main site.