Planetwork Forum
at the Exploratorium
in San Francisco
January 9, 2003

Project Presentations:

Ben Discoe - Virtual Terrain Project
http://www.vterrain.org

Guy Lieberman - Innermedia

John Graham - Telescience
http://www.telescience.org

Allan Saxon - Votery.org
http://www.votery.org

Brad DeGraf - Venture Collective
http://www.venturecollective.org

Anselm Hook - Headmap

Projects in slightly more detail:

Ben Discoe - Virtual Terrain Project - The goal of VTP is to foster the creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form. This goal will require a synergetic convergence of the fields of CAD, GIS, visual simulation, surveying and remote sensing. VTP gathers information and tracks progress in areas such as procedural scene construction, feature extraction, and rendering algorithms. VTP writes and supports a set of software tools (VTP Toolbox) and an interactive runtime environment (VTP Enviro). The tools and their source code are freely shared to help accelerate the adoption and development of the necessary technologies.

Guy Lieberman - Innermedia is a South African-based international production house that specialises in the creation of content for global broadcasters, focusing on Spirituality; Global Citizenship; Culture and Wisdom Traditions; Eco-Awareness; Personal Growth; Healthier Living and alternative mainstream entertainment. Innermedia has been the official media partner for projects such as The Parliament of World Religions and the African and Indian events of The World Festival of Sacred Music, millennium initiative of HH the Dalai Lama. We recently created two well-received international documentary series called Innertainment, a 26-episode Mind, Body and Spirit series, and Insights, a 13-part series on international travel to spiritual destinations. These were shot in 14 countries and broadcast on Pan Euro Cable and in Canada, Israel, Australia and South Africa. These series both had websites designed as information hubs, linking the content presented in each episode to the sites of those we documented. We have long experience in webcasting and live-streaming, and have applied this to some of our productions. We envision the continued creation of documentary series for global broadcast on issues that would extend from the personal well-being of the individual, toward the general well-being of the planet. The big picture would be to inform, educate and encourage a broad span of the world's TV audience to understand and engage in the cleanest, most ethical and creatively appropriate way to exist on planet Earth, as we evolve toward a sustainable future.

John Graham - Telescience - Education and Science OpenSource Collaboratory

Allan Saxon - Votery is a web application that is meant to allow groups to distill wisdom through participation. It is based on user feedback and evaluations combined with chat-room like threads. The system is based on visibility and built on top of a trust network (currently Friendly Favors) to protect from spam and flames as well as facilitate reaching wisdom more quickly. Each topic can be setup to ask different questions to sort, evaluate and categorize all submissions, so that the best information will rise to the top and be easily found by anyone joining at any time. Each topic can contain many types of items (books, essays, sayings, images, web sites, ideas, solutions, questions etc.) and each item can be the beginning of a discussion thread. Through the flexibility of Votery many different "experiments" can launched to find out what parameters will best lead to wisdom in each type of content.

Brad deGraf - The Venture Collective is smart mobs of global citizens putting their money where their mouths, hearts, and minds are. It's a people's venture fund, not for-profit but for common benefit. We support enterprises that promote, and thrive on, economic (r)evolution based on eco-social principles; fuel them (as loans or investments, not grants) by aggregating citizen contributions; and re-invest all returns. Our goal is to be a source of capital for such enterprises, and a source of optimism for ordinary citizens, through constructive engagement in inventing the future, as an alternative to reactively fighting the status quo. We do so by pooling resources, sharing strategy and focus, and re-using the money many times.

Anslem Hook - presentation - http://www.p2pmap.org/presentation

February 17, 2003 - 4:00 pm PDT