The Global Idea Bank

October 29th 2004 at 4:02 pm

The Global Ideas Bank is an online system of posting ‘ideas’ for the world (they seem to be social) that are rated. They’re looking for some submissions from blogs some day soon.

Clicking around, here are some of my favorites.

Cocooning Families sounds like a small co-op basically. From what I’ve talked to some co-ops can work if they’re mostly interested in bringing costs down (think Kibbutzes), but I’ve heard of many idealists whose mini-communal living fantasy has fallen apart. This idea is interesting because it’s a proposed solution for ‘at risk’ families to try and help them get back on their feet:

With the help of private organizations who serve the public’s at risk population, a marriage of families, two or three at each privately owned home, , can be a wonderful pathway of support.

My rating… eh, sounds a bit pie in the sky, but it stuck out at me enough to open it.

Submit extra books to 3rd world countries is something I think some organizations do, but something I maybe should look into being an activist about somehow…

My rating… I like this, it’s already being done, though, so why is on here?

Saving islands from the devastations of tourism is an interesting tid bit about the Greek Isles of Skyros and what we can learn from them:

- There are virtually no hotels, so everyone has to stay in the homes of residents,
who move out of their bedrooms in the summer to make some money. These are really
charming local houses with beautiful china plates and brass pots hanging on
the wall. So tourism money goes straight into local pockets, and visitors get
a more intimate contact with local people than they would otherwise.

- Buildings are allowed to be three storey maximum.

This is something worth considering in the Caribbean, where the hotels are internationally owned, and while they do ‘give jobs’ the profits are all sucked back out of the island so it could almost be considered a zero-sum game in some way.

My rating… good points.

One of my favorites is Brazilian neighbourhood where residents allocate public budget:

In 1989, the city of Porto Alegre came up with a radical solution to its major problems of unaccountability and extreme poverty: a participative budget. For the last decade, the people of the city have been deciding how the budget for public works should be allocated. Neighborhood groups propose projects, and people from community groups and non-profit organisations who have been elected by their neighbours, decide which projects will go ahead. In some cases, the community delegates also oversee implementation of the final projects. This has had the triple result of avoiding corruption and mishandling funds, improving concrete matters on the ground, and increasing democratic participation in the process by a huge amount.

As ‘Smart Mobs’ taught us mob systems are useful, and in this case I think this should be rolled out in communities around the world. Holy cow is this a GREAT idea or what? [more on Porto Alegre]

More city and social engineering can be found in an analysis of how small direct loans worked in the slums of Orangi. This is interesting, because the IMF and NGO loan operations continue to insist micro-loans don’t work in 3rd world countries and it’s just bullshit, pure bullshit, when we’re seeing micro-loan repayment rates are always extremely high. A student of mine from Africa had the opportunity to talk to these people and they told her ‘micro-loans’ don’t get repaid.

What, and billions to corrupt governments get paid back better.

I wonder if the problem with micro-loans is not that they don’t get paid back, I wonder if it’s harder to get kick backs.

And last, but not least, the ever popular Curitiba success story in Brazil. Brazil seems to be on fire.

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