Image/Chad Hagen - The New York Times Company

submitted by Samuel Bendett

by Steve Lohr - The New York Times -February 11, 2012

GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.

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submitted by Gerald Eisman

everyday-democracy.org

Everyday Democracy and the Kettering Foundation collaborated to produce Sustaining Public Engagement: Embedded Deliberation in Local Communities, a research report providing insights into how public engagement initiatives can grow into a regular practice involving people from many different parts of a community and spanning multiple issues. The new report by Harvard University researchers Archon Fung and Elena Fagotto argues that the most successful of civic engagement efforts are those that address not only particular public issues such as school redistricting, domestic violence, or racism, but also improve the quality of local democratic governance. Sustaining Public Engagement will be of interest to researchers and community organizers. The report features concrete examples of sustained community-led dialogue and problem solving efforts that draw upon different approaches to public deliberation. (2009)

(FREE DOWNLOAD OR ORDERING OPTIONS IN LINK BELOW)

http://www.everyday-democracy.org/en/Resource.136.aspx

by Derek Top - greenbiz.com - January 31, 2012

Maybe it's a West Coast thing. While the VERGE discussion at last week's GreenBiz New York City event centered on the city's famous competitive edge in finance, research and development, and, ahem, football, the folks on the San Francisco GreenBiz Forum panel concluded that a VERGE city should focus on "how does it make living in a city better."

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submitted by Albert Gomez

un.org - January 30, 2012

Report

The High-level Panel on Global Sustainability presents its report to the Secretary-General on 30 January 2012 in Addis Ababa.

The 22-member Panel, established by the Secretary-General in August 2010 to formulate a new blueprint for sustainable development and low-carbon prosperity, was co-chaired by Finnish President Tarja Halonen and South African President Jacob Zuma. The Panel's final report, "Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing", contains 56 recommendations to put sustainable development into practice and to mainstream it into economic policy as quickly as possible.

During the Davos Economic Summit, there were several interesting presentations under "Big Data, Big Impact."  One presentation focused on possibilities for international development.  As San Francisco builds out its distributed smart grid in a post-peak oil world, the issues of how "Big Data" are applied becomes evermore critical to the resilience of the City and the sustainability of its neighborhoods.

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A flood of data is created every day by the interactions of billions of people using computers, GPS devices, cell phones, and medical devices. Many of these interactions occur through the use of mobile devices being used by people in the developing world, people whose needs and habits have been poorly understood until now. Researchers and policymakers are beginning to realise the potential for channelling these torrents of data into actionable information that can be used to identify needs, provide services, and predict and prevent crises for the benefit of low-income populations. Concerted action is needed by governments, development organisations, and companies to ensure that this data helps the individuals and communities who create it.

Continuing to explore the ways in which technological and social change affect our relation to money…

First, there is great value in a systems approach as a heuristic for understanding interlocked social-ecological-technological processes, and in analysis across multiple scales. Yet we need to move beyond both systems as portrayed in resilience thinking, and the focus on actors in work on vulnerability, to analyse networks and relationships, as well as to attend to the diverse framings, narratives, imaginations and discourses that different actors bring to bear.

For More:

http://resilienturbanism.tumblr.com/post/7573475902/reframing-resilience

There are many definitions of resilience from simple deterministic views of resilience anchored in Newtonian mechanics to far more dynamic views of resilience from a systems perspective, including insights from quantum mechanics and the sciences of complexity.  One baseline perspective of resilience sees it in terms of the viability of socio-ecological systems as the foundation for sustainability.  For those that are ready to look beyond resilience as the ability to return to the "normal state" before a disaster, take a look at:

http://www.resalliance.org/

What does it take to become a smart city?  Why are mesh cities important to sustainability?

For more information:

<http://www.meshcities.com/>

Empowering Sustainability in San Francisco’s Neighborhoods

Using a Cloud Computing-based Distributed Smart Grid

There is a saying that trends are built in San Francisco, and when these innovations (born in the Bay Area and tested in California) hit New York, they are already beginning to fundamentally change the world we live in.

Overview

The San Francisco Bay Area has one of the largest concentrations of high technology companies and venture capital firms in the world.  As a result of its innovative cultures, history of strong earthquakes, and the recent economic downturn in California under conditions of rapid global change, the City of San Francisco is ratcheting up not only its emergency preparedness, but also its resilience and sustainability initiatives.  The goal is to create a new type of vibrant citizen-based leadership facing forward into the 21^st century that enables San Francisco neighborhoods and communities of interest to thrive under otherwise uncertain and challenging times.

How are you and your neighborhood doing in terms of your ecological Footprint?  There are many ways to calculate ecological footprint and many different tools that can be used.  Below is a mainstream assessment tool that will give you a quick sense of your ecological footprint and how to reduce it.  

http://www.myfootprint.org/

To know more about your environment in San Francisco, go to:

http://www.sfenvironment.org/our_programs/topics.html?ti=19

San Francisco has some of the healthiest neighborhoods in the nation according to U.S. health statistics.  What specifically makes San Francisco's neighborhoods healthy? What are their current challenges negatively impacting the health or San Franciscans?

How is your neighborhood doing?  What do you need to work on in your neighborhood to improve the health of your community?

Take a look:

http://www.healthmattersinsf.org/index.php