Saturday, February 21, 2009

Go back to the community

The current economic situation demands more than macromanagement. We all have a responsibility, and in this context, we all ought to pay attention on how we micromanage our resources: from the water we consume, the carbon footprint we make, the waste we produce.

Paeng has succinctly pointed out that this crisis was born of consumerism: of that oh such a lovely feeling of having new things to play with every three months or less.

Technology has indeed made our lives faster, and in more ways that we can appreciate, has also made our lives efficient. The Information Age has revolutionized sharing (like what wifey says in this post). We should share more than culture (the songs, the stories); we should also share among our societies technologies that lead the way to sustainable development.

Community-based management programs seem to be effective in sustaining development and at the same time, stewarding efficient management of resources. We can view Wikipedia as a community-based project; community-based companies such as Canonical (for Ubuntu) and Mozilla Foundation (for Firefox and Thunderbird) are proving to be competitive against profit-driven companies such as Microsoft and Apple.

This crisis is clearly a result of global greed. Our lives right now prove that the world is a small, global village: we are all interconnected, more than we can ever know. Share more, then you live more, then you earn more... more than monetary rewards.

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