IN  SEARCH  OF  COMMUNITYSHIP  THAT  MATTERS

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Written by Francois Knuchel

Published: 02 February 2015

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SOLE - Self Organising Learning Environments

Anyone who has come across Sugata Mitra' hole in the wall computer experiment in India (TED: The Child Driven Education) will realise that organisational management is not the only human activity facing a crisis nowadays, but so is education and schooling in its traditional forms. Both management and teaching suffer from the innate habit of its professionals wanting to micro-manage everything, wanting to command and control, indeed trying to control outcomes, rather than letting them emerge. Sugata Mitra calls for creating Self-Organising Learning Environments (SOLE), and his experiments have shown some surprising results. If you are not familiar with SOLE, please view this TED: Build a School in the Cloud talk first, as the rest of this article will make less sense without it.

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Written by Francois Knuchel

Published: 24 January 2015

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Sociocracy: revolution, chocolate, peace, work - a history

Early history, pacifism and Quakers

Little known in the UK, sociocracy is more widely practiced in mainland Europe, after being developed in depth in the Netherlands several decades ago. First proposed in 1851 by philosopher August Comte, founder of sociology and the Religion of Humanity in response to the French Revolution, and further developed by Lester Frank Ward, prominent early environmentalist and advocate of equal rights for women, and Kees Boeke. Boeke was influenced by the Quaker movement in Britain and married Beatrice Cadbury, of the famous chocolate family; together they became Quaker missionaries and were expelled from Britain during the first world war as pacifists. Boeke was nearly executed as a result of a paper he wrote developing sociocracy, that was found after he was arrested during the second world war in the occupied Netherlands, for harbouring Jews.