Notes from a Sustainopreneur | on Sustainability Entrepreneurship

[#socialweb:#blogs] Today: Got featured on 'Social Entrepreneurship' on Alltop

 

Thanks to a quite magic interaction flowing in - a story shared later - I ended up getting featured on Alltop.

And I added the badge to the sidebar!

Who said that blog posts needs to be longer than this? Macroblogs could be used for tumblelog lengths too :).

 

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[TOMORROW: Guest blogging, part two, on #Internetdagarna - screenshot preview- and, now we're talking Sustainopreneurship - Mobile Internet For All!]

#BAD09: Go for Good Carbon Offset to Drive Sustainability Innovation

[this is my contribution for Blog Action Day 2009]

 

When we adress the problem of climate change, one method that usually gets mentioned, is ”carbon offset”. The basic thinking is that you compensate for your action results of CO2 emission by buying different kinds of compensating efforts – to go ”carbon neutral”. There is a strong difference in offset methods, though, and this needs to be prominently addresses. In one end it could just maintain ”business as usual”, investing in methods such as planting trees to absorb CO2 or take the greenhouse gases into the mountains. This does not affect the original source of the emissions – it is ”end of pipe” solutions. What we need is to focus ”beginning of pipe” innovations – and if the offset program focuses on the necessary technology shift towards sustainable distributed energy and mobility scaling, then it is of the better. In fact, then it becomes a main driver and (investment) forces to support this shift, in demand of disruptive sustainability innovation.

 

I would specifically like to adress three areas for these kinds of solution-oriented, long term-focused investment – solar energy for developing countries, aeroplanes and cars.

Developing countries - solar energy

Shifting kerosene and charcoal as energy sources in developing economies, and increasing access to electricity is crucial for development. Modern applications of renewable energy sources emerging from “clean tech” can literally (em)power the people! Extending the homework hours for the kids and some extra job hours at home can be made possible through Solar Home Systems, at the same time as the health damaging effects from kerosene lamps are gone. Micro hydro is also an efficient small-scale solution as opposed to the big water dams. Power at family and community level means power to the people, community up, not top down.

Solar energy and other forms of sustainable distributed small-scale infrastructure organized energy forms are financed through E+Co. There you can directly calculate how much an investment in small-scale renewable energy solutions providers mean in CO2 displacement, oil barrels and numbers of people helped to get a solar home system. Here, in this context, Grameen Shakti is worth mentioning, using micro finance as a model to provide villagers with renewable energy. Grameen Shakti have won the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’: The Right Livelihood Award.

 


Aeroplanes

One of the strongest emission sources is aeroplanes. There is no tendencies that we decrease our travel through flights, with the latest Airbus now swallowing beyond 600 persons and additional tracks are added to airports. What we need is a shift of the means of driving these planes, an area that Virgin Green Fund and Sir Richard Branson has addressed in the billion dollar investment portfolio.

 

Cars

The technology holding the promise in relative short term to provide a technology shift of cars is the “plug in hybrid”, where you use both electricity with recharging aside fuels such as ethanol, and further along the road maybe a hundred percent electrical car, such as the one developed by Tesla Motors – the Tesla Roadster.

 

Go Sustainable in Carbon Offset – choose the right program

Looking for carbon offset providers that focus renewable energy and energy efficiency improvement method development is far more sustainable, and generates a change engine empowering the so much needed shift towards a sustainable emission vision of getting to 350 parts per million of CO2 concentration in the biosphere (visit 350.org campaign site for more info). And we're in a hurry. Act fast - the clock is ticking. Let the Tesla Roadster be symbolic of the speed needed for the urgent technology shift and implementing  the solution. You can make a change - with both your purchasing and investing power!

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Note: A guide with evaluation of different carbon offset vendors have been published by David Suzuki foundation. David Suzuki recieved this year's Right Livelihood Award.

Note 2: Some other campaigns worth noting:

• Hopenhagen - get yourself on the map before the Copenhagen December meeting!
• Seal the Deal 2009 - sign the petition!
• Tcktcktck - The World is Ready - sign the pledge!

[#socialmedia:#BAD09] TOMORROW - Blog Action Day 2009: Theme Climate Change

"Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices."

via www.blogactionday.org

I will participate. Will you?

[#1Mcc] Wikirank: Comparing Sustainopreneurship with affinity concepts

Today, I found the trend watch tool Wikirank through @mashable, and instantly - of course! - I had to compare Sustainopreneurship with some similar (but not same, I'll get back to that in the Concept Part of the book!) concepts. In a sense, it outsmarts the Pageview Statistics tool (found through Wikipedia Article History pages, where you also can subscribe through RSS for changes), with its 2.0-ish design features and compare 30-60-90 days, and also the option to compare other media streams such as Google News, Twitter and New York Times (nota bene: Twitter as a news service in this context!). In another sense, it only covers the maximum of three months back, rolling, whereas Pageview Statistics cover all calendar months in its archive, so both act complimentary.

Screenshot of comparison of Sustainopreneurship, Social Business, Social Enterprise - and the leader of the pack: Social Entrepreneurship. You can also click below to go to the comparison page in itself from the embedded graph and play around, and also to view intro paragraphs to each article in one page - that's cool too!

By the way, Sustainopreneurship is on its way to the fifth consecutive view-per-months record set - in steady growth! See earlier posting here "Googling Sustainopreneurship Part One". I will get back to Part Two, the Blog-o-sphere, soon (with pingbacks and trackbacks - be sure to add your voice in THAT coverage ;).

Sustainopreneurship, Social entrepreneurship, Social business, and Social enterprise on Wikirank

[coverage] We-think, We are Smarter than Me, The Long Tail - about Collaborative Book-writing

I see snippets of a huge sea-change come in to play, where the concept of "Book" is about to be socially deconstructed, delearnt, relearnt, and reconstructed. Imagine such an intro to a book, would you put down the book immediately and say - "oh, my, that was a heavy digest - too deep - demands too much of me in my reading - I am too lazy/too buzy/too fixed in my world-view/too whatever to read more".

Maybe I have lost you - as a reader! - already now.

Maybe you don't read books at all, anymore.

Maybe just Harry Potter is a bestseller of huge event-marketed proportion at release.

Maybe.

Or Maybe NOT.

Because - in a time of alot of "maybe's" there are some modes of the process of book writing turned upside down.

• Pioneering experiments - where I participated, Seth Godin's Crowdsourced "What Shall Google Do?".

• The Long tail - Chris Anderson writing a book through a blog, sourcing input from his readers before the first (needless to say, bestselling) print.

• We are Smarter than Me - a book written through a Wiki about how business can approach new social media forms emerging from the CCI @ MIT as a research experiment.

• We-think, on Wikia - with an igniting intro by Charles Leadbeater (who are one of the pioneering authors in the Literature Review in my Master Thesis on the emergence of the concept sustianopreneurship with his book the Rise of the Social Entrepreneur) - through @alheri • Lilly Evans :).

And, of course, the King of Kings, the Queen of Queens - Wikipedia with all the siblings, daugthers, sons and distant relatives in the whole Wikimedia Family, proximate and distant projects hosted on the MediaWiki platform, and complimentary Wikifying of all domains of human (inter)action on all Wiki-platforms. And the rest of eco/biosphere, cosmos and beyond...

We need a new conceptual framework on the process of authoring "books" of these collaborative kinds, but it already happened in a sense with the sixties "happening" - the Audience is on the Stage.

I shut up here, and encourage you all to make yourself able to say - "I am not reading books. I write them" ;).

Punch-line, ad lib, fade:

Feel free to join the "Chris Anderson Model" of book-blogging, which I tentatively have called "Pro-Active Crowdsourcing", in a response to Jimmy Wales, the King of Wikipedistan, and his critique of the concept crowdsourcing, where I add pro-active, in the write-up of "Sustainopreneurship - Business with a Cause. The Whys, Whats and Hows of Entrepreneuring for Sustainability" - but the proactive peer2peer crowdsourcing of that book already have changed the sub-title from the original "The Why, What, How of Creative Organizing for Sustainability". And it can be changed once, twice or maybe three times more. Or a Gazillion :). 11 people have joined the potential process of adding their input to it in the Group at the Sustainopreneurship Community. Three have used their sphere of influence already. Thus, the change!

I set example by deeds, not words.

Go to the Book Peer2Peer Review Group on Sustainpreneur's Café to see the evolvement!

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Post Scriptum: Time to reveal my motive for the categories bracketed in the subject lines, introduced on this blog just some weeks ago - they correspond to Book Parts, where the outline already is out, uncommented, on the Book Group ;). I will return here with a post blogging away the semi-final results when the convo over at the group have made their input at next stage - the Outline leading to a Synopsis, leading to a re-visiting to Older Texts, re-edit, recycling, revolving, revolutioning and ...reconstructing them into a new context, in which also a new context is introduced, new content is created, new concepts are constructed and new cases are crowd-sourced - pro-actively.

Thus will this text form some/any part of the Part Zero: Part 0. The Coverage. An intended kind-of intro chapter, where I believe this will be the chapter that is authored and putting final touch to latest in the process before the book goes in print...