GIVE

= Globally Integrated Village Environment

Initiative by Franz Nahrada to promote the expansion of Global Villages

The origins of Franz Nahrada's Global Village initiative GIVE

Source: contribution to the Cooperation Commons mailing list, May 2008.

Franz Nahrada:

"Actually a meeting with Doug Engelbart in Stanford was the original and central reason why I dared to start the GlobalVillages project.

It was back in 1990 and I travelled through the bay area, visiting all pilgrim places like Berkeley, San Francisco and so on....of course also Palo Alto.

I strolled through Stanford University and saw his name on the door of an Office in Sweet Hall. I knocked the door and told his secretary I would like to see him, a sociologist from Austria working with HyperCard.

I waited several days until I could meet him, because his schedule was very busy. I stayed in the Stanford Arms motel and remember that finally the call came from his secretary that he was available for an hour or so.

Doug greeted me very warmheartedly, saying he was extremely happy to meet a young sociologist. I was wondering, because I left my studies behind me without much emphasis and I hated my so called "profession" for its lack of reality perception and scientific zeal.

So Doug explained to me that being the inventor of mouse and windows (he also showed me his incredible mouse with 5 keys), being the first one to implement hypertext and so most likely being the father of modern computing, he bore a deep dissatisfaction with technology:

"Technology is dull" I heard him say.. "Society takes it for granted and mostly does nor really know how to apply it in the best possible way. We cannot solve this by engineering. There must be a completely different approach, putting technology in social laboratories to find out what is really empowering and augmenting human mind and action".

He told me that he had increasingly shifted his interest from the technical to the social side of things, He had adopted the "bootstrap concept" that people like Capra and Chew used in physics to research and development policy. "You cannot assume that any single group of humans are experts that can solve the problem when we are transgressing into the unknown", he said. Yet society needs advice to react and adopt technological changes as early as possible.

So the answer is that society develops social laboratories aka "Bootstrap communities" , These Bootstrap communities include all stakehoders of technological development, not only business and politics and experts, but also users. So a technology is openly developed and tested in a multiperspectivical framework, which is not determined by the interested view of marketing people trying to push finished products into the market, but by a real assesments of peoples needs and and intensive dialogue in which there is no axioma and no intellectual property.

Rather than that, truth (in the broad sense of the word) emerges from the confrontation and intensive, magical interaction of perspectives.

Doug sent me down to have a "world lesson", a full experience on this instead of a "word lesson", by visiting the institute for the research on learning in Palo Alto. There I would see what he meant: That children have a real say about educational tech- nologies, as do have teachers and parents, all of them interacting with scientists in non-prestructured, seemingly "chaotic" ways. The played with technological gadgets, tried to find out there usefulness (or uselessness) and even made suggestions.

I began to understand.

Doug then told me that such a research community must be built around a goal. "What brings these people together is the urgent need to solve a problem together and the recognition that each single person or group does not have the answer, but only the interplay of perspectives can help us find correct answers and patterns.

He asked me if I was interested in such work. My HyperCard stuff suddenly was vaning, going into the background of things. I told him that indeed I had a grief, a real deep problem.

In the years before, I had gone many time to Greece, I discovered the beauty of those villages in the mountains of the island of Samos and in Crete or elsewhere. Not just beauty - it was as this was the environment in which I could really feel well, the smell of oregano and dozens of other herbs filling the air, the life being non-hectic, the conviviality on the plateia, the village plaza, being like one big living room, and hundreds of other small things that are too insignificant to mention here...but all together lifted my spirit up.

I had witnessed that young people left those villages in masses, because the agriculture was not profitable any more, crafts were outcompeted etc. They were dazzled by the ease of getting jobs in tourism that brought them out of what seemed miserable and stuffy for them. Their exodus drew them more and more away from their homes, and the villages stayed, deserted by the active popolation, started to decay, and the decay was also the suffering of the old people that remained.

I said that I wanted to find ways to save the beauty of villages, use technological progress to reinvent and reinstall the beauty that we had lost.

He said: "wonderful proposal for a bootstrap community!"

On this day, the GIVE Project was born, although the name "Globally Integrated Village Environment" only emerged a few months later when Hannes Wolf said "try to fill this acronym with life"."