Repossessing Virtue (4/5)

And what are you doing now that is different?

I’m choosing the people I seek information or advice from more carefully than I once did. I am learning as much as I can about why we are in the mess we are, but I don’t feel as if I know enough yet to make proper decisions about what to do or change.

Concretely, we choose carefully where to shop and who to give our business to. There is a long tradition, in most German towns, of small stores and businesses. You can go and buy nearly anything you need directly from the owners of the shops. I have the feeling that I am helping keeping their business open. I also try to be conscious of mentioning how wonderful it is that there are such shops or businesses to people I know. Some say that the most effective form of advertising is word-of-mouth.

It’s odd, but I used to find a lot of comfort and inspiration in reading contemplative or religious texts. And even though I still find comfort doing that, I’m now more interested in learning about people* who are doing great things using technology in smart ways. It is through them that I leaned about concepts such as social networking, creative commons licensing, crowdsourcing, extreme-scale collaboration, tribes, and massive cognitive surpluses, public distributed computing. The language they use might be different than that which we are accustomed to, but the intrinsic principles behind their ideas are very sound and based on the traditional values I was raised with.

So much of my own ideas and actions have changed by reading what they write and watching what they accomplish. For, instance, the creative commons movement slowly came into being about 10 years ago at a time when it was almost impossible for a normal person to obtain use of photo material online. Now there are over 100 million photos on Flickr alone that anyone can use for free, within certain restrictions. A hundred of my own collages are part of that 100 million. Equally, I made my first micro-financing loan to a shop owner in the Ukraine in 2006, and now I’m helping some women in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Cameroon set up their own businesses.

I’m involved in co-ordinating various projects in different countries, which I do on a volunteer basis. These projects concern the health, education and care of orphans and vulnerable children. We are building new schools, setting up women co-op businesses, organising new sources of clean water, and other things.

On the surface people think I am the one who’s leading the projects, but in reality, the people I am involved with in these projects are teaching me very important things about how to live well, or meaningfully. They often live very different lives to the one I am living, but still manage to kindly share their worries and joys with me. And in return, I share all of these lessons and stories with my husband and children. This gives us a lot to talk about over the dinner table.


* People like Lawerence Lessig, Seth Godin, Garr Renyolds, or Clay Shirky.