3.1 Our Maps

When is a map more valuable than anything you could possibly own?

Idea 1 Family Tree: There are tiems when my career has gained more from looking for wisdom in my family tree than anything else that I had ever been taught. Ho about if you could extend the faily tree to anyone that family members were very close to (eg 1 degree of separtaion in www language - what might you be able to innovate or value multiply). And then if you found some peers who action learned the same way; what might you colaboratively trade. Would lifelong education start to chnage, and at what age could we start exploring people's diverse interactions for all they were communally worth? Idea 2 When world is changing Imagine the value of a map when revolutions happened in transport : the first ship captains once it was known the world is round; how did their logs web together as an atlas? Or in communications: so now we have the printing press, what content shall we explore first? Idea 3 Who do you feel owns or governs the maps people love most? Is that an extraordinary power for good or evil? Is democracy dependent on how openly we map (what?)? -more on co-mentoring and mapping -more at simplysee

What should every 9 year old and up know about Tim Berners Lee? Vote whether you feel he is one of the 100 most trusted people all children should be taught about at school, as well as any other nominations you'd like us to rank timbl invented the www Without his crusading to keep the www an open space accessible by and for everyone, we who collaborate at mapmaking the world's most life critical social projects forecast the cross-cultural chances of sustaining future generations as far as century 22 to be very low. We have no idea if timbl would rate the compound risks of global abuse (eg lost transparency) of power so highly but other mathematicians and engineers from Einstein to Buckminster Fuller have warned how transforming to a much more connected system (in which every vilage is interlinked with every other around the globe) is a chnage challenge without precedence. Humanity has made messes of much smaller challengers. The inconvenient truth of globlisation system is that if nature or other climactic events compound vicious spins, there comes a stage where the loss of sustainability is irreversible. My father, a leading economics journalist, wrote about this in 1984 (partly as an updated tribute to George Orwell) so it may be that I am biassed but I hate to see people under-estimate compound risks just because they only see the precipice of compound arithmetic after falling over it. Here's some more from the childrens' Q&A which timbl values most Q Why do you keep saying everything is so simple? A Well, because it is basically. No, honestly... I want you to know that you too can make new programs which create new fun ways of using computers and using the Internet. I want you to realize that, if you can imagine a computer doing something, you can program a computer to do that. Unbounded opportunity... limited only by your imagination. And a couple of laws of physics. Of course, what happens with computers is that you have a basic simple idea and then you have to add things on to it for practical reasons. So real-world computer programs can end up with a lot of stuff in them. If they are good, they are still simple inside. So do you think the Web is basically been a good idea or a bad one? Some people point out that the Web can be used for all the wrong things. For downloading pictures of horrible, gruesome, violent or obscene things, or ways of making bombs which terrorists could use. Other people say how their lives have been saved because they found out about the disease they had on the Web, and figured out how to cure it. I think the main thing to remember is that any really powerful thing can be used for good or evil. Dynamite can be used to build tunnels or to make missiles. Engines can be put in ambulances or tanks. Nuclear power can be used for bombs or for electrical power. So the what is made of the Web is up to us. You, me, and everyone else. Here is my hope. The Web is a tool for communicating. With the Web, you can find out what other people mean. You can find out where they are coming from. The Web can help people understand each other. Think about most of the bad things that have happened between people in your life. Maybe most of them come down to one person not understanding another. Even wars. Let's use the web to create neat new exciting things. Let's use the Web to help people understand each other. Q What did you do when you were a child? - more here