$100 Projects

AndriusKulikauskas and SashaMrkailo

CharlesWilliams and DavidEllisonBey

EdwardCherlin

GrahamKnight and WendiLosheBernadette

PeterOngele and PeterBurgess

FranzNahrada and TomasCepaitis and GlebTurin

FredKayiwa and creating websites

Freddie

BenoitCouture and FredKayiwa

CathyStubington

KennedyOwino, TomOchuka differently-abled

MasimbaBiriwasha

phonics flash cards

Do-It-Yourself Projects

AndriusKulikauskas, June 12, 2007, SocialAgriculture: We seem to be converging around the development of hands-on, do-it-yourself projects, large or small. Marcin Jakubowski is farming in Missouri, Rick Nelson is preparing to build a home in Malaysia, and Jeff Buderer is exploring his options for the future. Christine Ax brings us the possibility of local shoe production, James Ferguson is organizing a conference in Vilnius on Ecological Architecture, and Lucas Gonzalez is focusing us on concrete preparations for flu pandemics. Yet I encourage us not to overlook some of our most "real" commitments. Sasha Mrkailo in Serbia is establishing himself as an organic beekeeping in a country where not so long ago the most realistic career was being a police officer. And he has had several wonderful chats with Fred Kayiwa in Uganda who is studying in the capital Kampala but wants to motivate his relatives in the countryside to try out beekeeping, bricklaying and other ways of making a "rightful living". I note also that our great successes in Africa have come because Samwel Kongere and others appreciate and communicate our "values" based approach where we expect each person to be accountable as an "independent thinker". I believe that the deeper the despair, as in Chicago, Palestine, Africa, Bosnia or India, the more people are lifted to know that we truly do place our values first. It is by acknowledging our independence within as "independent thinkers" that we recognize that we are at heart global, even universal, transcending the centuries and the time zones, and that we truly understand each other better than any "thing" within reach. This is the foundations for our "commons". Our map of endeavors is most greatly influenced by the visions of Benoit Couture, Janet Feldman, Chris Macrae, Fred Kayiwa and others who are acknowledging our heart and soul. We are pursuing this by creating a culture. Along with Maria Agnese Giraudo and Chris Macrae we have invested greatly in equipment for making videos and taking photos in Africa, and here in Lithuania we will be purchasing video bridge equipment to make real Franz Nahrada's dream. We will be learning a lot about video publishing and organizing ourselves for such work. I myself am growing creatively in Lithuania, writing a drama and songs and also drawing. My ambition is that within ten years we have a culture of 100,000 active and 1,000,000 supportive independent thinkers, with about 10% in a country like Lithuania so that our values might dominate there. We will rule by having the most viable culture. At the heart of our do-it-yourself culture will be a multitude of small projects, incremental and experimental, typically, what can be done with $100 of parts and $100 of labor. Our goal for our culture is to learn how to fit such projects together so that they ever combine to form bigger projects, both locally and globally. We will learn to be honest as to "what works" and what doesn't, especially with regard to our own selves, our inner voices. We will develop our greatest sensitivity - which is our inner sensitivity as to how we feel - so that we might apply that as empathy for others but also our environment where they are yet to be. This faculty is the guiding light by which we can discover a "pattern language" to fit together a "global village design" as Marcin, Franz, Rick and Jeff seek. We're actually making progress as to agreeing on an overall vision, but I believe the real discoveries will come one pattern at a time, and be confirmed by a wide variety of situations that may seem remote from global villages. I think we will discover many of these patterns through the many small projects where we make the best of what we already have. I therefore am primarily interested to work for clients who likewise want to accumulate experience, relationships, resources and opportunities from many small original projects.

OlderMaterial

• WorkingInParallel] is a set of pages for our working group Working In Parallel, but it has not been very active, and the material may move to the Toolsheds at Global Villages.
• IntegrativeFederation is a set of pages that Andrius set up for Graham Douglas, but nothing yet has come of that
• GlobalYouthSummit AndriusKulikauskas was invited to this summit in Tokyo, Japan, and took the initiative to set up these pages. The summit was postponed, however.