One Village Foundation

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Description

OVF's about page is at http://blog.onevillage.tv/?page_id=2

Background

AIDS Relief Foundation started from a desire to use information and communications technologies (ICTs) to improve the way in which we address the AIDS pandemic in Africa. The central focus was on AIDS, the tragic results of which Joy Tang, ARF’s founder experienced first hand while traveling through Africa.

The name "AIDS Relief Foundation" implied that "relief from AIDS". It was determined that the organization's actual focus was on leveraging information and communication technologies to bring people and groups of synergy together with the overarching belief that we are all one (that this planet really is all one big village). This gave rise to the name "oneVillage" as the appropriate replacement.

As of April 20, 2003, the AIDS Relief Foundation began doing business as the oneVillage Foundation.

Mission

OVF sees the challenge and opportunity of using Information Communication Technology (ICT) to address World Urgent Issues, by providing a platform for an integrated approach to sustainable development. People have lost, or stopped practicing, the knowledge of sustainable living. Our mission is to connect art, science and education with proactive, hands on, community oriented actions on the ground that promote more sustainable ways of living in both developing and developed parts of the world. We are devoted to increasing collaboration and access to ICT in under-served communities, facilitating local content creation and dissemination, and building bridges among digital and physical communities globally.

Vision

The oneVillage vision entails the creation of ICT centers in rural villages and developing countries connected by a collaboration portal that allows resource matching, project management, documentation and corruption-free allocation and accounting of funds.


Joy Tang's ideas explained:

"For me the idea of OneVillage is we are in Unity as human beings on this earth or we seeking Unity through the evolution of global communciations, systems and processing for communicating in ways that transcend cultural and political barriers. So in creating the Global Village, we consider a new era of human interactions in which indigenous culture and tribal traditions do not necessarily die but rather are reinvented and reconfigured to suit the new global cultural emergence. The Internet thus is a tool not simply to survive in the digital age but also to reinvent ourselves and our local cultural identity within the larger global society context of sharing information and perspectives within a rapidly digitizing society." (http://blog.onevillage.tv/?p=1755)


Background

"Paolo Soleri’s Arcology (architecture and ecology) theory and vision represent an attempt to link sustainability issues around key areas of development: concerns about consumption, land use and the architecture we create in the form of our habitats. So for Soleri it is the idea of humans building in line with the evolution of the universe. We have not figured that out yet as we are building a human reality that exists not only contrary to the laws of nature but in contempt of them. The vision of Arcology is very similar with oneVillage in the sense that we want to consider how to create prototype centers to replicate a compelling hologram of human innovation within a certain space upon which the nodes of a global and local network come together in a synergistic way to make the best and most optimum use of space, resources and people. This really is the idea of what he calls the Urban Effect in which the greatest and highest potential of human beings is realized. Its there already in many great cities such as NYC, Paris, London and most recently I saw in Taipei and so I specifically refer to the accelerated Urban Effect to define Soleri’s reaching for more optimum levels of human productivity + well being as he envisions in his the Arcology manifestation.

Imagine a place or global network of spaces where people are brought together into a compact urban node and through the intensity of those interactions create new and innovative ideas at a pace that overcomes current trends toward global inertia and entropy of systems towards lower levels of ecological (think of the fact that when ecologies are degraded the lower level species take over and dominate) and urban ecological succession (think Mad Max in that just as with ecological degradation, the lower level life forms take over).

Traditionally rural areas have not been such places of cultural, social, economic and technological innovation, so an human ecology and evolutionary framework emerged in which the most critical and thoughtful thinkers escaped to the cities. Now with the Internet we have the externalization of the City into the Net a global net that spans the globe. We no longer have to migrate to the City to seek and find the preconditions for innovation but simply seek out a computer terminal with an internet connection. The idea is that innovation cannot occurr in a bottle, but rather is a process of interaction with other like minded folk who have similar but not identical goals, values and aspirations. The Internet has simply lifted what has been previously a geographical constraint to tribalization and this poses many questions as to whether the urban rural dichotomy needs to be thrown out the window, particularly when it leads to biased decisions in relation to how modern policymakers overlook some of the more valid and redeeming aspects of rural and indigenous lifestyles when making important decisions about how to proceed in relation to Development.

While Soleri has an urban bias, his ideas can in fact be emulated anywhere there is a desire to reconsider human spatial relationships. Historically this is not without precedent as many preindustrial tribes have sought to live in high density communal environments (such as the Anastazi and most recently the Hopi in northern Arizona). In relation to Soleri’s Arcology theory the view is that as we proceed through the duration of human planetary existence on earth, we evolve towards higher levels of complexity and also in that proceed interiorize, much the same as the way Moore’s Law explains or exposes the process by which is computing capacity increases exponentially it actually uses less space and not more.

So for Soleri the idea is that the Future – while it does not exist in the way that the past and present do/have existed – it does provide a roadmap of potential scenarios upon which we can consider our evolution. The ability of people to use the Internet to effectively articulate an alternative model of development in which greater consideration is given for long term and authentic human and ecological well being (with the idea that you cannnot have one without the other) will lead to a future worth living in the present reality." (http://blog.onevillage.tv/?p=1755)

More Information

  1. Joy Tang on Networked Improvement Communities