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Below are books that have helped support the seed of intent
which is now oneVillage Foundation. Typically OVF books of
interest avoid ideological lines of dissent but at the same
time take a critical look at existing practices but from a
solutions based perspective that is focused on human development
Steve
Weber: The Success of Open Source - Steven Weber
discusses, open source's success in a highly competitive industry
has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run,
and how intellectual products are created and protected. Bucking
traditional economic theory Open Source, independent programmers--sometimes
hundreds or thousands of them--make unpaid contributions to
software that develops organically, through trial and error.
Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish
exception to economic principles. Noting that the open source
community is guided by standards, rules, decision making procedures,
and sanctioning mechanisms and that the Open Source movement
itself is part of important evolution of human socioeconomic
development.
EF
Schumacher: Small is Beautiful - Shumacher is
best known as the Chief Economic Advisor to the National Coal
Board of Britain, where he became intimately acquainted with
problems of energy supply and environmental sustainability.
Yet it was his interest in gardening, his study of Buddhist
and Taoist thought, and his admiration for the work and philosophy
of Gandhi that led him to expand his economic thinking towards
a wider set of values that he called "meta-economic."
Schumacher's idea of decentralization proposed the idea of
"smallness within bigness." For a large organization
to work it must behave like a related group of small organizations.
Regional development strategies, are also emphasized which
involve primarily local production for local use, challenging
many assumptions made by international economic institutions
like the World Bank and the IMF. Schumacher called attention
to the quality of people's lives as producers, even stressing
its importance over their lives as consumers. Mainstream industrial
technology has not only served the dubious end of making many
workers redundant, but their prohibitively high cost discourages
self-employment and local community empowerment. As a solution,
Schumacher proposed an "intermediate technology,"
one which can be easily purchased and used by poor people,
and which can lead to greater productivity while minimizing
social dislocation.
Gunter
Pauli: Upsizing - Only when industry mimics nature,
where nothing is wasted, can it achieve the same levels of
material productivity. The world of waste is a world of opportunity.
A world where the waste from one process can become the raw
material for another—a cascade of new materials once
thought worthless supporting new products, new processes and
new wealth—as industries that were previously considered
unrelated cluster together. This is not just a theory: but
is based on functioning Integrated Biosystems. UpSizing examines
how the adoption of the Zero Emissions concept not only radically
reduces pollution and waste but can contribute significantly
to the generation of income and jobs - specifically for those
that need them most: the rural poor in less developed countries.
Jeffrey
Sachs: The End of Poverty - "Extreme poverty
can be ended, not in the time of our grandchildren, but our
time." Thus forecasts Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of The
Earth Institute at Columbia University, whose twenty-five
years of experience observing the world from many vantage
points has helped him shed light on the most vital issues
facing our planet: the causes of poverty, the role of rich-country
policies, and the very real possibilities for a poverty-free
future. Deemed "the most important economist in the world"
by The New York Times Magazine and "the world's best-known
economist" by Time magazine, Sachs brings his considerable
expertise to bear in the landmark The End of Poverty: Economic
Possibilities for Our Time, his highly anticipated blueprint
for world-wide economic success — a goal, he argues,
we can reach in a mere twenty years.
Amartya
Sen: Development as Freedom - Sen explains
how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence,
millions of people living in rich and poor countries are still
unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are
denied elementary freedom and remain imprisoned in one way
or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political
tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of
development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms'
to the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen is the ultimate goal
of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient
means of realizing general welfare. Social institutions like
markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and
the media contribute to development by enhancing individual
freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Values,
institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated,
and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework.
By asking "What is the relation between our collective
economic wealth and our individual ability to live as we would
like?" and by incorporating individual freedom as a social
commitment into his analysis, Sen allows economics once again,
as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social
basis of individual well-being and freedom.
Malcolm
Gladwell: The Tipping Point - It presents a new
way of understanding change. Ideas and behavior and messages
and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious
disease becoming social epidemics good or bad depending on
the intent of the peoples who created them and the way they
are interpreted and incorporated into mainstream society.
The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics
that surround us.
CK
Prahalad: Fortune at Bottom of Pyramid - This
book is a culmination of CK Prahalad's learning curve and
passion as a strategy writer. Its the only Strategy book launched
in America to focus only on cases relevant to corporations
whose strategy, design, knowledge, management, and marketing
is focused on serving the world’s 4 billion majority
of people, starting with the poorest. CK begs us to change
the image of the very poor - they are in reality resilient
entrepreneurs and fussily value conscious consumers. If marketers
can't connect with such people, its profession should be popped
as hi-cost and lo-value. The book's 10 extensive cases show
that reality-making not image-making is vital for serving
the poorest needs whether this is with amputated legs, iodized
salt, eye care, or soap that disinfects, micro finance-
in other words the way advertising in America worked 100 years
ago. The founders of these companies loved the societies they
were dedicated to serving, usually coming from them and so
the explains in large part why they were successful. Thus
while BOP corporations can sustain far more wealth and productivity
for all involved they must be convincing in terms of basing
themselves on a authentic commitment to the people they serve
and simply the desire of those who control these companies
to become incredible wealthy and powerful. More…
Hunter
Lovins, Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken: Natural Capitalism
- Environmentalists have been warning that
human economic activity is exceeding the planet's limits,
yet this book is different in that it explores how sustainable
technologies can actually lead to profits. Natural Capitalism
is an attempt to transform our common notions about commerce
and its role in shaping our future mapping out a future where
business and environmental interests increasingly overlap,
and in which businesses can better satisfy their customers'
needs, increase profits, and help solve environmental problems
all at the same time. Natural capital are the natural resources
and ecosystem services that make possible all economic activity,
indeed all life, yet current business practices typically
fail to take into account the value of these assets—which
is rising with their scarcity and so natural capital is being
degraded and liquidated. To address this a new field of ecological
design is emerging which is now embracing the four interlinked
principles discussed in the book: 1) radically increased resource
productivity; 2) redesigning industry on biological models
with closed loops and zero waste; 3) shifting from the sale
of goods (for example, light bulbs) to the provision of services
(illumination); 4) and reinvesting in the natural capital
that is the basis of future prosperity.
Duane
Elgin: Voluntary Simplicity - Voluntary
Simplicity has so thoroughly been incorporated into the progressive
language of the counterculture that many do not realize that
it was first started as a title for a book, which was first
published way back in 1981. It quickly became recognized as
a powerful and visionary work in the emerging dialogue over
sustainable ways of living. Voluntary Simplicity is not a
book about living in poverty; it is a book about living with
balance. It illuminates the pattern of changes that an increasing
number of Americans are making in their everyday lives --
adjustments in day-to-day living that are an active, positive
response to the complex dilemmas of our time. By choosing
lives of great simplicity, people have the power to develop
more satisfying and soulful ways of living, and the power
to change the world.
John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said - Bill
Joy writes in the August 2005 edition of Technology Review
in an article titled “The Dream of a Lifetime”which
features the really early history of the computer and the
stories of Doug Engelbart (for more about Engelbart's work
go here)
and John McCarthy, of the Augmentation Research Center as
well as Stanford University AI Lab (SAIL). Dormouse according
to Joy, chronicles the origins of the personal computer and
its place in the Bay Area culture of the 1960s. The central
figure in Dormouse is Doug Engelbart, whose long-time passion
was to build a working version of Vannevar Bush's "Memex"
machine who imagined a "machine that could track and
retrieve vast volumes of information," and then wrote
about his idea in the July 1945 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
Engelbart encountered the idea of the Memex while serving
as a radar technician in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
It took root in his imagination and, in 1950, he had an epiphany,
one that guided him and his work for the next two decades.
Joy says “Markoff writes that Engelbart "saw himself
sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different
symbols....He would create a workstation for organizing all
of the information and communications needed for any given
project....he saw streams of characters moving on the display.
Although nothing of the sort existed, it seemed the engineering
should be easy to do and that the machine could be harnessed
with levers, knobs or switches. It was nothing less than Vannevar
Bush's Memex, translated into the world of electronic computing."
More…
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