Despite the fact that Toronto’s politicians want to make the city more dangerous for cyclists (by encouraging more car use and removing bike-focused infrastructure) the people of Toronto are loving bike riding more and more every year. Companies have caught on to this and some are now giving employee some
Continue readingTag: Direct Action
Sketchy Thoughts: Two Aspects of Power: Consciousness and Physical Force
Left: A Freedmen’s school, a place of learning established by New Afrikans who had escaped the slave-system in the south of the united states. Right: a mob of euro-americans burns a Freedmen’s school to the ground. It is necessary, first, to overcome the opposition between a physicalist vision of the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Open Source Ecology Explained
Way back in 2008 I blogged on Open Source Ecology (OSE) which is an open source project to create tools and knowledge to build a fully sustainable village. The project has grown since then and they are going even further by designing tools that can be fabricated on site. Recently,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Leave Loved Ones With an Exit Plan
Get Your Shit Together (GYST) is a website dedicated to making it so that other people don’t need to experience what one mother had to go through when her husband suddenly passed away. Losing someone you love is hard enough, but what made things even harder was that the couple
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Beer for Butterflies
Beer is delicious so it’s exciting to find out that at least one brewery is out there using their delvious suds to help a threatened species. Pelican Pub & Brewery in Oregon are using profits from one of their beers to fund the protection of butterflies from encroaching development and
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: AFN update on meeting with PM Harper, Chief Spence and Idle No More
by Assembly of First Nations | Jan 16, 2013 The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) is pleased to offer this update regarding recent discussions, strategy sessions, meetings and developments regarding the First Nation-Crown relationship, and the continued priorities of First Nations in achieving change for our peoples, communities and nations. Meeting
Continue readingThings Are Good: Social Media Helps Global Development
Social media can actually be useful for more than sharing pictures of your lunch! There is a whole collection of apps and web services that can be used to help development efforts around the world. They provide the ability to track how projects are coming along and their current status
Continue readingThings Are Good: Better Block is Bettering Cities
The Better Block initiative was started in Dallas, Texas as a rapid urban revitalization project of an underused, nearly abandoned block of old buildings along an old streetcar line. They project takes the “pop-up” business model to completely revitalise old city blocks with storefronts, community events, and cafés, and sustainable
Continue readingThings Are Good: An Extra 32 Minutes a Day for People in Greater Toronto
Your32 is an effort by CivicAction to promote a financially sustainable and more efficient transit solution for people living in the greater Toronto area (GTA). This project is a great way to engage the people in the GTA as the region is regressive when it comes to transportation, even going
Continue readingThings Are Good: We’re Helping the NotFound Project
Sadly, even in these modern times, children go missing and finding them can be difficult. The NotFound Project hopes to help find missing children by making use of 404 pages online. 404 pages refer to pages on a website that cannot be found, so it makes thematic sense to use
Continue readingThings Are Good: ForestWatchers Wants You to Look at Forests
Forests around the world are in danger and a new group, ForestWatchers, is looking to the average person to save all the trees. It’s a very simple idea: use people to scan tree lines from images to help scientists focus their efforts. Citizen science for the win! We propose a
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Social Capital Project
Have a lot of stuff you no longer need or want but is still in a good enough shape to be used? Well, you can take inspiration from The Social Capital Project which is one person’s idea to get rid of things she no longer wants. Instead of disposing of
Continue readingThings Are Good: Physicists Open Up
Results from publically-funded research often ends up in places that the average person can’t access the findings because scientific (and other) journals where results are printed cost an arm and a leg. Physicists, who are already renowned for being open, have taken the next logical step and said that any
Continue readingThings Are Good: Commit2Act a New Mobile App to Better the World
TakingITGlobal has released a new digital tool to make the world a better place through direct action. It’s a mobile app for iOS (Windows phones soon available) that has a gamification approach to encourage people to participate in good activities. Small actions can have a big impact! Join other people
Continue readingThings Are Good: In the Future Cities will be Sharing Centres
Urban centres are already more efficient than their surrounding suburbs and this looks like it will continue for the foreseeable future. Due to the close proximity of people in cities it allows for local sharing projects that can greatly reduce waste awhile increasing access to things we think we need.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Volet Vegetal – Simple Urban Gardening
Space for a small garden can be hard to find for a lot of people in urban areas. Some French designers have modelled a new way to hang a garden from a window. Their design is simple and provides people with an easily accessible garden space and as a bonus,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Crowdsourcing the Meaning of Life
Some filmmakers are channelling the world to find out what the meaning of life is. Their project has started an Indiegogo campaign to fund their project and they can use your help. The world we live in is extremely confusing and precarious. With economic meltdowns, global terrorism, ecological disasters, civil
Continue readingThings Are Good: Charlottetown Transforms a Street for People
Residents of Charlottetown, P.E.I. decided to make their city nicer, more sustainable, and more fun by transforming one of their streets from car-dominated to people-friendly. They’ve made a great video showing what they did and hopefully it’ll inspire other communities to realize that streets are for people and we should
Continue readingThings Are Good: Use Your Smartphone to Advance Science
Smartphones aren’t just for games and checking your email anymore! Today, these mobile devices can be used to better the world around us by helping scientists understand more about it. Thanks to the distribution of mobiles research can be crowd-sourced to provide information that would otherwise go unnoticed. Below is
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Fine Example of Culture Jamming
The Yes Men are at it again and this time with Greenpeace to show how efficient Shell is….at killing all of us. They created a website called Arctic Ready that looks like Shell is looking for crowd sourced advertising content, and of course, people around the net have submitted some
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