Pop!Tech Hub

A friend sent me this link the other day and I am just now getting around to looking at it. The tag line for Pop!Tech Hub is "a digital home base, where people come together to make change." Sounds like a very interesting site! On the Hub, you can:

- Establish a personal profile, including a bio and photo, with complete and detailed privacy controls, and browse for new friends
- Join or start a new social group, post messages and share your thoughts with other members of the group
- Create, find, vote on, or join a collaborative project, or track it by its RSS feed
- Participate in a Resource marketplace, where you can offer resources to projects, or browse resources being offered by other members

There is also this to say about it:

The Pop!Tech Hub is a social network and collaboration platform for people interested in vanguard-edge emerging ideas, trends, tools, and technologies, and their application to significant social challenges. It’s open to everyone: past Pop!Tech participants, members of the online Pop!Tech community or anyone with an interest in social innovation. Here you will find people of many different disciplines and perspectives meeting, creating, tracking and evaluating projects; exchanging ideas; and working together on change initiatives of every scale.

Another online world for people to link into. Check it out and let me know what you think. If you have previously written a post about this or are currently a member link back here and let me know what you think about it. I have joined but don't have much time currently to surf around and get any idea what it is like.

Designing for the other 90%

A friend turned me on to this art exhibit currently showing here in Toronto. If you are in the city or plan on coming through check it out. Here is what is available on the website:

Design for the Other 90%
Professional Gallery
Saturday October 4, 2008 to Sunday January 25, 2009
Opening Reception: October 4, 2008, 6:52 pm (coinciding with Scotiabank Nuit Blanche)

A touring exhibition organized by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
The OCAD Professional Gallery will host Design for the Other 90%, a collection of design solutions addressing the basic needs of poor and marginalized populations not traditionally serviced by professional designers.

The exhibition, organized by the New York-based Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and curated by Cynthia E. Smith, explores a growing movement among designers to design low-cost solutions for the “other 90%” — that is, the 5.8 billion people (out of the world’s total population of 6.5 billion people) who have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted. Design for the Other 90% looks at how individuals and organizations are finding unique ways to address the basic challenges of survival and progress — for example, nearly half of the other 90% do not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter.

"Unconventionally, this exhibition highlights products that are economically self-sustaining, yet affordable to people living on a dollar a day — inexpensive irrigation systems for farming, for instance," says Charles Reeve, Curator of the Professional Gallery. "The new forms of ingenuity here focus on pressing issues like poverty relief and environmental sustainability, both of which are key themes in what we teach and research here at OCAD."

Launching as part of OCAD’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche programming, Toronto is the only Canadian stop for the touring exhibition, which is currently showing at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. An extensive website, including a blog, discussion forum and additional resources is available at http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/.

In addition to the exhibition at the OCAD Professional Gallery, the Design Exchange will present a complementary program of exhibits and events as part of Design for the Other 90%.
Gallery hours: Wed. to Fri., 1 to 7 p.m; Sat. and Sun., 12 to 6 p.m.