Young people looking for jobs and new skills … community problems needing innovative solutions … smartphones increasingly popular … apps for these phones a big growth area. Their mission is: … to transform lives and strengthen low-income communities by empowering people with information and communication technology. This approach is being piloted in the UK at Why not mix those elements and create a new project Apps for Good? Which is exactly what CDI launched last week, with a big grant from Dell . Is

This involves a paradigm shift from what James Scott, in Seeing Like a State , calls social organizations that are primarily “legible” to the state, to social organizations that are primary legible or transparent to the people of local communities organized horizontally and opaque to the state. The latter kind of architecture, as described by Kropotkin , was what prevailed in the networked free towns and villages of late medieval Europe.  I believe that the growing fiscal crisis of the state, and the growing tendency toward high unemployment and underemployment becoming a norm, will have two long-term results:  first, the production of a growing share of value in the informal economy in place of its purchase with wages; and second, the decoupling of the social safety net from both the welfare state and wage employment.

There is community here for sure, and its a darn interesting one, but the physical look of the city leaves much to be desired. Since 1971 when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement was reached, people have lived not so much as citizens of a community or members of a nation of Tribe, but as shareholders of a corporation.  And This has resulted in a number of swirling dynamics including accelerated prosperity of some Native communities while at the On the stepe of the Chugach Mountains north of Anchorage. I’m still trying to figure out Alaska.  When