Comics: Storytelling for Cultural Imperatives

Three_portraits

Three Portraits

Image © Alice Merkel on Flickr

 American comic book writer, Joshua Dysart, asks for a strong, intelligent, diverse global debate on the individual vs. the collective - to address humanity's integration with each other and the natural environment.

Josh's use of art, metaphor, and dialogue brings storytelling to a new level. Stories once limited to single dimensional reporting are shared now as mature art forms brought to life by sophisticated digital platforms connecting audiences everywhere. New levels of aesthetic integration enhance our ability to share as one global voice, one world.

Josh is known for dark themes, humanist horror and a fascination with the roots of violence. He has created work for DC Comics, Vertigo Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Image Comics and worked on high profile projects like Van Helsing, Swamp Thing, and Hellboy (with Mike Mignola).

You can learn more about Josh's work at http://www.joshuadysart.com

Comics: Storytelling for Cultural Imperatives from I-Open on Vimeo. 

Learn the wisdom of civic leaders across these I-Open communities:

Three Portraits was taken at the Savannah College of Art & Design Student Center, October 2010.

Copyright 2011 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) 2563 Kingston Road Cleveland OH 44118 Phone: 216-220-0172 Web: http://i-open.posterous.com/

 

 

 

Connecting Children, Learning and Justice

4650572466_b98d5fa402_b

Interpretation

Image © Alice Merkel on Flickr

Perry White, Founder and Executive Director, Citizens Academy of Cleveland, Ohio, talks about his passion to connect children, learning and justice in the video below. Since 1999, Perry has led what is now a transformative model of charter school education, and one of the top-performing urban schools in the state of Ohio with a national reputation for successful students.

"I think many people settle and tend to let themselves off the hook,” said Perry White, a former social worker who founded the Citizens’ Academy charter school in Cleveland in 1999 — naïvely, he now recognizes — and has overseen its climb from an F on its state report card in 2003 to an A last year. “It took us a while to understand we needed a no-excuses culture,” he said, one of “really sweating the small stuff." - New York Times, Education, May 1, 2010 Article Here. 

Connecting Children, Learning and Justice from I-Open on Vimeo.

Reference Links
    •    Citizens Academy http://www.citizensacademy.org/

Learn from the wisdom of civic leaders across these I-Open communities:

    •    Facebook I-Open http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Open/170817416694?ref=ts
    •    Flickr     http://www.flickr.com/people/iopen/
    •    Friendfeed http://friendfeed.com/iopen
    •    Livestream http://www.livestream.com/iopen/
    •    Posterous http://i-open.posterous.com/
    •    Scribd http://www.scribd.com/I-Open
    •    Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/IOpen2 
    •    Twitter http://twitter.com/iopen2
    •    Vimeo http://tiny.cc/106p0
    •    You Tube http://tiny.cc/j5rse
 
Copyright 2010 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave Suite 301 Cleveland, Ohio 44103 USA

 

Dialogue & Inclusion: The Nature in Leadership

Message_receiver

Message Receiver

 Photo: Alice Merkel

Jackie Stevenson, Founder and CEO, The Spirit of Leadership, is a thought leader and research practitioner studying how we relate to one another in meaningful ways to strengthen social engagement.

In the video below, Jackie shares a brief introduction about why her work applied in relation to nature, natural systems and fine-tuned through shared experiences with large animals - specifically horses -advances the discovery of successful leadership practice. We can apply all of these lessons to building social networks for collaboration in open innovation systems.

The Nature in Leadership - Introduction from I-Open on Vimeo.

Learn more about Jackie's insightful work at The Spirit of Leadership. We'll be posting the complete video interview, transcription and photo collection here soon.

Copyright 2010 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave Suite 301 Cleveland, Ohio 44103 USA 


Designers Accord 2009: An Important Conversation Exploring the Future of Design in Open Systems

Note to readers:  I-Open mistakenly posted the Designers Accord 2009 document as a shareable piece of information. Apologies to our Design colleagues! The document has been removed.

We've asked the authors to supply us with a shareable version we can post here. The Accord unquestionably offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs working in Open Source Economic Development.
You're encouraged to continue to follow along and learn about the related efforts in the design industry at the October Design Ethos conference hosted at SCAD. Thanks for your patience. - Betsey Merkel, I-Open.

Back to the original post:

I-Open is co-sponsor of the COINs2010 conference Oct 7-9 hosted at SCAD in Savannah, GA. The conference will collaborate with the concurrent Design Ethos Conference also hosted at SCAD during the same time frame. SCAD Professors Scott Bolyston, Graphic Design, and Christine Miller, Design Management - hosts of each conference - are developing ways for the two gatherings to intersect, learn, and explore collaboration opportunities.

The Designers Accord document posted here offers an important snapshot of the global educational design community's desire to pursue discovery of the role of design at the intersections of social, economic, environment, and cultural issues today.

Links to learn more:

More about this important 2009 conversation and this resulting report:

The Designers Accord Final Comments document was submitted as a report to the editorial committee of the 2009 Designers Accord Global Summit 2009.

On October 23 and 24, 2009, the Designers Accord convened 100 individuals from some of the world’s most distinguished academic and professional institutions, for two days of highly participatory discussion, planning, and action around the topic of design education and sustainability.

This group of thought-leaders, design educators, and experts discussed, challenged, and conceived of a new path for undergraduate and graduate design programs to integrate sustainability. We tackled topics ranging from creating curricula and writing grants, to communicating to trustees and motivating students. These topics were culled from pre-Summit meetings and brainstorm sessions.

The format of the Summit was structured to enable this group to create a collective point of view about best practices and methods for integrating sustainability into design programs all over the world. We are currently synthesizing the outputs from the Summit. We plan to publish the output online and in printed form. The medium and format will be determined by the content.

You can learn more at this link:
http://www.designersaccord.org/initiatives/summit/

From David Wilcox, social reporter and thought leader in "civil society"

Latest Post

Building Big Society giving and doing by making it easier to listen

 

Update and summary: Lord Nat Wei, one of the authors of the Big Society idea and Network founder, will no longer blog about the vision. He will be working as unpaid advisor to Government. Meanwhile, many people are talking about Big Society, but finding it difficult to get to the core idea and connect with each other. The network could make a virtue of listening, and encouraging many voices.

There’s been lots of discussion around Big Society over the past couple of weeks, as you can see from my bookmarks, the Twitter stream, and this smart way of displaying content generated in many different places.

Using paper.li you can agree a hashtag (keyword with # before it) then ask people to post links (URLs) of blog items or other content in a tweet containing the hashtag. Set up paper.li to search for the tag, and it displays both the tweets and the original articles – creating your own news page refreshed daily (thanks @evangineer). (read more...)

David Wilcox has offered considerable thought leadership in understanding modern civil society and the idea of civic engagement.

Social Reporter extends the discussion between face-to-face and online engagement around the powerful issues affecting neighborhoods today.

David's earlier blog, Designing for Civil Society, began exploring and reflecting on the intersections and possibilities of social media, engagement, and collaboration in August 2007.