This picture by Prashant Bhardwaj won the Development Gateway Foundation photo competition last year. It is from a handwriting competition held in one of the centers where they teach children who once used to work as child labor in the brass industry in the city. Prashant Bhardwajtalks more about this photo, explaining why he took it and the hope that it stands for,  on the Foundation’s photo webpage.

This year’s photo competition just opened today, and the winner will receive a $1000 prize. The competition organizers are looking for compelling photographs of socio-economic development in developing countries. Four types of photographs will be accepted. 1) The images may show information and communications technologies helping ordinary people. 2) The images may show people making something, selling wares, working in a field, constructing a building or type of infrastructure, or acquiring knowledge. 3) The images could be abstract images representing hope, the future, or capacity building. 4) The photographs may also include images of original artwork from a developing country.

Each entry must include a written statement explaining how that image is representative of development. Images will be judged on technical excellence, composition, overall impact, and artistic merit.For more information on entering go to the Development Gateway Foundation photo contest page.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. The picture cloud above uses the words in this ’sparks for change’ blog page.

The We Are Media Project is bringing together people who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world. This project builds on the growing reasons for using social media that are set out in Marta Kagan’s punchy presentation below.

Over the next six months the We Are Media Project will develop a “Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits”. The project is being supported by NTEN and is being facilitated by Beth Kanter.

This is an open project so if you are beginning to get interested in social media for your nonprofit - or business - visit the We Are Media Project and have a look at what is being developed, or even share your thoughts and be part of the project.

Its rather punchy title aside, if you are wondering what all the hype about social media is then the skideshow below is very informative. Marta Kagan has developed a slick and professional presentation, and provides an excellent introductory snapshot of social media statistics that characterize contemporary Internet use. For example, 73% of on-line active users have read a blog, and 39% subscribe to an RSS feed. 57% have joined a social network site. Combine this with the fact that only 14% of people trust adverts while 78% trust word of mouth and you begin to see the potential of social media and the growing networks they support to get your message across.

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Along the way Marta reminds us that this is not about the Internet, but about people.

“The new communication model is a dialogue … which means it’s transparent, inclusive, authentic, vibrant, and consumer-driven.”

According to Slideshare, this presentation has had more than 20,000 views in the past week, and more than 280 embeds … which is impressive, and makes this well worth having a look through. Besides which, it shows us what we can aspire to with powerpoint presentations!

… showing the power of web graphics for creating environmental awareness

This short film takes viewers on a provocative tour of our consumer-driven culture —  from resource extraction to iPod incineration — exposing the real costs of this use-it and lose-it approach to stuff. If you aren’t one of the 3 milion people in more than 200 countries to have seen this then it is worth a view.

The film can be found on-line at http://www.storyofstuff.com/ Throughout the 20-minute film, activist Annie Leonard, the film’s narrator and an expert on the materials economy, examines the social, environmental and global costs of extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal. The film features Leonard delivering a rapid-fire, often humorous and always engaging story about “all our stuff — where it comes from and where it goes when we throw it away. Annie Leonard stays on track from start to finish and her engaging style makes us laugh and moves us to take action, all at the same time. I especially liked the way she centers people and power in the film.

Produced by Free Range Studios , the Story of Stuff - http://www.storyofstuff.com - looks appealing enough to usher in a new era of documentary expression for environmentalists and scientists to mainstream their knowledge in a way that mainstreams new stories and norms. Most importantly, the film leaves us in a good place to move forward to a better future. Well worth watching and sharing around your friends … for entertainment, the environment, and as a prompt to new consuming patterns.

Annie and her team put out their first e-mail newsletter today. There is a blog up at the site at http://www.storyofstuff.com/blog/, and their website will soon be out with translations into seven languages.

I really enjoyed being able to hear Etienne Wenger present in Christchurch, New Zealand yesterday. We are a little far from most of the established international travel circuits, so it is always special to be able to go to these sort of days. The morning provided an opportunity to talk about the theory and meanings behind communities of practice, and to hear these points illustrated through stories from Etienne’s experiences. His wording helped provide a richer picture of the power of communities of practice as these few phrases that I jotted down show:

“Learning has to be uncomfortable enough that it keeps you on your toes, yet comfortable enough that you are happy to remain involved.”

“The social value added (by communities of practice) is not based on (prescribed) design - but is based on what emerges from co-operation and collaboration”

While the concept of ‘communities of practice’ is enjoying currency as an important topic of the moment in business, the phenomenon it refers to is age-old. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop collective resources including stories, experiences and ways of addressing recurring problems – in short they develop a shared practice. Etienne has been particularly influential in promoting the concept that deliberately fostering people to learn in this way can be a useful management practice. More information is available through his website - http://www.ewenger.com/.

Another good resource for those interested in working with communities of practice is CPsquare - the community of practice on communities of practice. CPsquare is like a town square, a place where people gather to connect and learn together.

Canadian ecologist and scientist Crawford “Buzz” Holling has won the 2008 Volvo Environment Prize for his theories on how ecosystems deal with sudden changes. His message stressing the importance of increasing our society’s ability to be flexible and cope with change provides a pathway forward to those worrying about global climate change and unexpected natural disasters.

“Crawford (Buzz) Holling is one of the most creative and influential ecologists of our times,” the jury said in its citation.

“His integrative thinking has shed new light on the growth, collapse and regeneration of coupled human-ecological systems.”

The Volvo Environment Prize is awarded by an independent foundation, assisted by a prize jury of internationally-recognized experts in the environmental field, and is awarded to individuals who explore the way to an equitable and sustainable world. Since 1990, the prize has been awarded to 34 individuals. For more information on the Volvo Environment Prize, including this month’s 2008 award to Buzz Holling, go to www.environment-prize.com.

Since May 1 (3 days before Cyclone Nargis) Fanista, the US Campaign for Burma and the Human Rights Action Center have been running a campaign called Burma: It Can’t Wait. I learned about this event from Beth Kanter’s blog How nonprofits can use social media. The campaign site features a number of short films starring actors, filmmakers and musicians on the topic of human rights and Burma. The slogan “ASSK why it can’t wait” - builds on the acronym for Aung San Suu Kyi’s name.

The campaign finishes on June 19th, Aung San Suu Kyi’s 63rd birthday. Influenced by both Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and by more specifically Buddhist concepts, Aung San Suu Kyi entered politics to work for democratisation, helped found the National League for Democracy on 27 September 1988, and was put under house arrest on 20 July 1989. She was offered freedom if she left the country, but she refused. One of her most famous speeches is the “Freedom From Fear” speech, which begins:

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”

The Burma: It Can’t Wait campaign has provided 50 days where people across the web have been able to work together to educate and inspire online users to join and/or donate to the campaign, promoting the idea that freedom is the best birthday present.

Recently I heard Hilary Campbell of the Wellington-based Sustainability Trust talking about personal change and their Eco Kiwi networking project. Hilary graphically demonstrated why working with individuals for change can be so powerful by inviting her audience to think about some personal change they had just made - or were making. She then ran through a list of possible reasons for why we were thinking and acting on this change and asked us to think about whether any of these had influenced us, and how powerful an influence it had been. From memory the list went something like: marketing/advertising, advice, friends/family, an external upheaval in your life, and personal aspiration. Without exception, personal aspiration was the biggest driver, highlighting the importance of working at the individual level.

The Eco Kiwi networking project supports change from the bottom-up, and acknowledges that everyone’s needs and priorities are different. So the initiative works through talking and listening, rather than just ‘telling’. This scheme enables community networkers to get out and about in the community, talking and listening to groups and individuals and providing individualised support to help people all make those little changes that can really make a difference.

The sparksforchange blog has been created as a way to educate myself, and hopefully others, about the many ideas and people out there that are making a positive difference for social change. It aims to be a part of and contribute into the wider on-line community sharing information about things that empower individuals groups and communities to feel better about themselves and make the difference they want. Topics of particular interest to me include different ways that we can seed, grow and support networks, the use of social media, and innovative approaches to support social learning and collective action.

Please let me know if you have any sites you’d like to see added, thoughts you want to share, or stories you think need to be written - you can e-mail me through the form at http://learningforsustainability.net/contact.php. The idea is that the site will be written in an interesting and engaging fashion …. but time will tell.

The sparksforchange blog is being developed to complement the main Learning for Sustainability portal - http://learningforsustainability.net - a reference guide for researchers, government and agency staff, NGOs and other change agents working to support social learning and collective action around sustainability issues. A central section of this site links the reader to a range of guides, tools and checklists that can be used to address issues involved in multi-stakeholder participation and engagement. Practice areas covered include networking, dialogue, adaptive management, facilitation, evaluation and knowledge management. Other pages link to areas such as social marketing, narrative, action research, capacity building, integration, empowerment and the growing role of the Internet.

The lessons here come from a range of sectors including the HIV/AIDS sector, public health, environmental management, disaster management and protected natural areas. Collectively, these references highlight the fact that each sector is looking at similar issues around social change, and that the more we share lessons across sectors the better.