Inspiring: People-Powered Alternative Systems News Stories

Rappler, founded by a group of journalists in 2012, has evolved over time to become one of the leading, most trusted news outlets in the Philippines. In December, the organization launched Rappler Communities, a trailblazing mobile app which it had built and connected directly to their news feed. Built on the open source, secure, decentralized Matrix protocol, the app has the potential to become a global independent news distribution outlet, and promises to pave the way for a “shared reality” — a call [founder and Nobel laureate Maria] Ressa has been making to counter “the cascading failures of a corrupted public information ecosystem.” "At this moment, if news journalism doesn’t come together with communities and civil society that cares about a shared reality, democracy cannot survive," [said Ressa]. "Most important, is that we really have a shared reality. Once our community is set at the matrix protocol chat app, it can then work with other news organizations and become a trusted news distributor. So we will own our distribution, and we could strengthen our communities. Before the end of the year, we aim to have four other new sites, in different parts of the world, federated on this protocol. The matrix protocol is end-to-end encrypted; it is decentralized, similar to the Internet Governance Forum — like having a co-op, it isn’t individually owned, or profit-driven. It’s, literally, a place where we have a shared reality."

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In the final bay of an old, mustard-colored mechanic’s garage in the middle of the Hoopa Valley Reservation’s main settlement is the headquarters of Acorn Wireless. This small, relatively young Internet service provider is owned and operated by the tribe’s public utilities department—an unusual arrangement in the United States, where Internet service is more often the purview of predatory corporations like AT&T and Verizon, whose regional monopolies enable them to charge exorbitant rates for uneven service. Before the launch of Acorn, residents had to choose between a HughesNet satellite connection (more than $100 per month), a bare-bones Starlink kit ($600), unreliable wireless hot spots—or, as was often the case, nothing. Download speeds are nearly 75 percent slower in tribal areas, yet the lowest price for basic Internet service is, on average, 11 percent higher. Acorn’s operation is based on the idea that local, democratic ownership can help address the coverage disparity by eliminating the profit motive. Because it is owned by the tribe and administered by the tribe’s public utilities department, Acorn can focus on equity instead of revenue. Its premium service package is set at $75 a month, [but] most Acorn customers can get service at no personal cost. Hoopa’s experiment in public broadband remains a work in progress, embodying hopes (and facing hurdles) that are shared on tribal lands all over the country.

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There is one thing that practically everyone can agree on: politics has become bitterly divided. Yet what if it doesn't need to be this way? For the last five years, Taiwan has been blending technology with politics to create a new way of making decisions. And with certain limits, it has found consensus where none seemed to exist. Taiwan's burgeoning scene of civic hackers ... were invited to join the government. Their creation was called vTaiwan - with the "v" standing for virtual - a platform where experts and other interested parties can deliberate contentious issues. It works by first seeking to crowdsource objective facts from those involved. Then users communicate with each other via a dedicated social media network called Pol.is, which lets them draft statements about how a matter should be solved, and respond to others' suggestions by either agreeing or disagreeing with them. Once a "rough consensus" has been reached, livestreamed or face-to-face meetings are organised so that participants can write out specific recommendations. Pol.is lifted everyone out of their echo chambers. It churned through the many axes of agreements and disagreements and drew a map to show everyone exactly where they were in the debate. There was no reply button, so people couldn't troll each other's posts. And rather than showing the messages that divided each of the four groups, Pol.is simply made them invisible. It gave oxygen instead to statements that found support across different groups as well as within them. "Change the information structure," Colin Megill, one of its founders, told me, "and you can tweak power". Rather than encourage grandstanding or the trading of insults, it gamified finding consensus. "People compete to bring up the most nuanced statements that can win most people across," Tang told me. "Invariably, within three weeks or four ... we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements, most of the time."

Note: Dozens of laws have been passed from this process. For more along these lines, read our inspiring summaries of news articles on tech for good.

In 2016, a coalition of media, tech, and community organizations launched the Equitable Internet Initiative, a project that will result in the construction of wireless broadband internet networks across three underserved Detroit neighborhoods. Leading the initiative is the Detroit Community Technology Project, a digital justice project sponsored by Allied Media Projects. “During the economic and housing crisis, communities had to fend for themselves,” [executive director of DCTP Diana] Nucera says. That’s why, she explains, “we developed this approach called community technology.” The coalition raised just under $1 million from local and national foundations. Funds were used to hire employees, buy equipment, and internet bandwidth. They purchased three discounted wholesale gigabit connections from Rocket Fiber, a Detroit-based high-speed internet service provider. Their contract with Rocket Fiber allows the coalition to share its connection with the community—a provision not allowed by other companies. Each neighborhood is represented by a partnering organization, whose locale is used as the central connection hub for service. The community members are responsible for installation. DCTP trains a representative of the partnering organization, who then trains five to seven neighbors to install the equipment. “Being a digital steward was completely out of the range of what I usually do,” [neighbor and digital steward Roston] says. “I was so used to using the internet ... but I didn’t know how internet networks work.” So far, he’s helped with getting 19 of the 50 designated households in the Islandview neighborhood online. The bottom-up approach ... strengthens community relationships, increases civic engagement, and redistributes political and economic power to otherwise marginalized neighborhoods. “If the community has ownership of the infrastructure, then they’re more likely to participate in its maintenance, evolution, and innovation,” [Nucera] explains. “That’s what we believe leads to sustainability.”

Note: More than 750 American communities have built their own internet networks. For more, read about the rural Indigenous communities building their own internet networks.

More communities than ever are embracing building their own broadband networks as an alternative to the Comcast status quo. According to a freshly updated map of community-owned networks, more than 750 communities across the United States have embraced operating their own broadband network, are served by local rural electric cooperatives, or have made at least some portion of a local fiber network publicly available. The map was created by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit that advocates for local economies. These networks have sprung up across the nation as a direct reflection of the country’s growing frustration with sub-par broadband speeds, high prices, and poor customer service. They’ve also emerged despite the fact that ISP lobbyists have convinced more than 20 states to pass protectionist laws hampering local efforts to build such regional networks. The Institute’s latest update indicates that there’s now 55 municipal networks serving 108 communities with a publicly owned fiber-to-the-home internet network. 76 communities now offer access to a locally owned cable network reaching most or all of the community, and more than 258 communities are now served by a rural electric cooperative. Many more communities could expand their local offerings according to the group’s data. A recent study by Harvard University researchers indicated that community broadband networks tend to offer notably lower pricing than their private-sector counterparts. The study also found that community broadband network pricing tends to be more transparent and less intentionally confusing than offers from incumbent ISPs like Comcast or AT&T.

Note: Read about the rural Indigenous communities building their own internet networks.

Community currencies — alternative forms of money sometimes also referred to as local or regional currencies — are as diverse as the communities they serve, from grassroots time-banking and mutual credit schemes to blockchain-based Community Inclusion Currencies. Local currencies were common until the 19th century, when the newly emerging nation states transitioned to a centralized system of government-issued money as a way of consolidating their power and stabilizing the economy. Far from being a neutral system of exchange, a currency is a tool to achieve certain goals. Inequality and unsustainability are baked into our monetary system, which is based on debt and interest with practically all the money ... being created by private banks when issuing loans. Well-designed community currencies eliminate two main sources of financial inequality: money’s perceived inherent value and the interest rates, which both incentivize people to hoard their money. Like the pipes that bring water to your house, money is the conduit that gives you access to goods and services. The value of money is created in the transaction. In 2015 it was estimated that almost 400 of them are active in Spain alone, and across Africa blockchain-backed systems, like the Sarafu in Kenya, help underserved communities do business without conventional money. Elsewhere, local currencies like the Brixton pound in the U.K. or BerkShares in Massachusetts are a way to keep money in the community, buffering it against the pressures of a globalized economy.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on reimagining the economy.

In 2015, [Jo] Nemeth had quit her community development job, given the last of her money to her 18-year-old daughter Amy and closed her bank account. “I was 46, I had a good job and a partner I loved, but I was deeply unhappy,” Nemeth says. “I’d been feeling this growing despair about the economic system we live in.” Her “lightbulb moment” came when her parents ... gave her a book about people with alternative lifestyles. “When I read about this guy choosing to live without money, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to do that!’” The first thing Nemeth did was write a list of her needs. "I discovered I really didn’t need much to be comfortable. Then I just started ... figuring out how I could meet my needs without having any negative impacts.” For the first three years, Nemeth lived on a friend’s farm, where she built a small shack from discarded building materials before doing some housesitting and living off-grid for a year in a “little blue wagon” in another friend’s back yard. Instead of paying rent, Nemeth cooks, cleans, manages the veggie garden and makes items such as soap, washing powder and fermented foods. And she couldn’t be happier. She soon started tapping into the “gift economy” more deeply, giving without expecting anything in return, receiving without any sense of obligation. “That second part took a while to get used to,” she says. “It’s very different to bartering or trading, which involves thinking in a monetary, transactional way: I’ll give you this if you give me that. I actually feel more secure than I did when I was earning money,” she says, “because all through human history, true security has always come from living in community and I have time now to build that ‘social currency’. To help people out, care for sick friends or their children, help in their gardens. That’s one of the big benefits of living without money.”

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on reimagining the economy.

Brooklyn is known the world over for things small-batch and local, like designer clogs. In a promising experiment in an affluent swath of the borough, dozens of solar-panel arrays spread across rowhouse rooftops are wired into a growing network. Called the Brooklyn Microgrid, the project is signing up residents and businesses to a virtual trading platform that will allow solar-energy producers to sell excess-electricity credits from their systems to buyers in the group, who may live as close as next door. The project is still in its early stages — it has just 50 participants thus far — but its implications could be far reaching. The idea is to create a kind of virtual, peer-to-peer energy trading system built on blockchain, the database technology that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The ability to complete secure transactions and create a business based on energy sharing would allow participants to bypass the electric company energy supply and ultimately build a microgrid with energy generation and storage components that could function on their own, even during broad power failures. “The long-term goal is to be at least partially independent of the grid in emergencies, which was a reasonable argument to join,” said Patrick Schnell, whose Gowanus basement flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “Hopefully it will expand and more people will join and it will be more worthwhile.”

Note: Our latest video explores the potential for blockchain to transform society for the better. Explore more positive stories like this in on technology for good.

Time banks offer an alternative, powered by 21st-century technology, to the U.S. dollar. About 70 exist across the country — some with a few members, others with hundreds — to give value to work that members say often goes uncompensated in a traditional market economy. The Silver Spring Time Bank formed in 2015 and has about 300 members, said co-founder Mary Murphy. Last year, she said, 1,000 hours were exchanged for basic home repairs, dog walking, cooking and tailoring, among other services, without the exchange of money. “You get to save that money that you would have spent,” she said. “You get to meet somebody else in your community and get to know that person. That's a bonus.” Edgar S. Cahn, an 84-year-old law professor who had worked on civil rights and anti-poverty legislation in president Lyndon B. Johnson’s Justice Department, suffered a heart attack in 1980. He said doctors gave him two years to live, with “maybe two good hours a day. I thought: What do I do with two good hours a day?” he said, having beaten doctors’ expectations by nearly four decades. “I have to teach people to value themselves ... We’re all trained as human service professionals: 'How can I help you?'' ” he said. “None of us is trained to say: ‘How can you make a difference?’ I need you as much as you need me.” Cahn became a proselytizer for what he called the “time dollar” — a currency in which an hour of work is worth an hour of work, whether it’s performed by a maid, a mechanic or a mechanical engineer. In 1995, he founded the D.C. nonprofit TimeBanks USA, which developed the software used by many time banks around the world. Time banks can serve as small-business incubators and a way for seniors to remain active after retirement.

Note: Read more about the potential of time banking. Explore more positive stories like this in on reimagining the economy.

Tangles of grapes and blackberries grow in clusters along a trellis. Leafy rows of basil, sweet potatoes and mesclun spring from raised garden troughs. Most striking are corridors of elevated planters stacked four high, like multilevel bunk beds, filled with kale, cabbage, arugula, various lettuces, eggplants, tatsoi and collard greens. Run by a gardening wizard named Jamiah Hargins, this wee farm in the front yard of his bungalow provides fresh produce for 45 nearby families, all while using a tiny fraction of the water required by a lawn. At just 2,500 square feet, this farm forms the heart of Mr. Hargins’s nonprofit, Crop Swap LA, which transforms yards and unused spaces into microfarms. It runs three front yard farms that provide organic fruits and vegetables each week to 80 families, all living in a one-mile radius, and often with food insecurity. Rooted in the empowering idea that people can grow their own food, Crop Swap LA has caught on, with a wait list of 300 residents wanting to convert their yards into microfarms. The mini farms bring environmental benefits, thanks to irrigation and containment systems that capture and recycle rain. That allows the farms to produce thousands of pounds of food without using much water. “Some people pay $100 a month on their water because they’re watering grass, but they don’t get to eat anything, no one gets any benefit from it,” Mr. Hargins said. “I can’t think of a more generous gift to give to the community than to grow delicious, naturally organic food for the direct community,” [says Crop Swap LA subscriber] Katherine Wong. “This is one of the noblest things anyone is doing today.”

Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing our bodies and healing the Earth.

Rhoda Phiri was having a hard time sleeping. She found it difficult to mingle with people in her community and at church. Even basic chores were hard. She was, she says, in a “dark corner.” Then one day in 2020, a couple of women knocked on the door of her home in Zambia. The women were with StrongMinds, an international nonprofit that provides support for depression, particularly among women and adolescents. She accepted the women’s invitation to join a group therapy program, held under a tree in an area near her home, and as she learned about depression, she recognized the signs in herself. “All the symptoms they were talking about, it’s like they were talking about me,” Phiri says. “It’s like they knew what I was going through.” Instead of relying on mental health professionals, StrongMinds offers group therapy facilitated by trained community members — often clients who have completed the treatment themselves, like Phiri. This group therapy model has proven to be an effective way to treat depression. Since the organization launched in 2013, half a million people have gone through the treatment program. Three-quarters of participants screened as being free of depression symptoms two weeks after completing it. “What we’ve learned in 11 years is that depression treatment can be, what we call, democratized,” says StrongMinds founder ... Sean Mayberry. “You can take it out of the hands of doctors and nurses and give it to the community itself.”

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

What if there was a way to create more community, instill a deeper sense of belonging, and begin bringing healing to the vast sense of isolation experienced in modern Western culture? The Gift Circle, as founded by Alpha Lo and spread by Charles Eisenstein, is a group facilitation format that holds great possibility as a way to match resources with needs, create community and inspire gratitude and generosity. The goals of a Gift Circle are simply to provide a warm, free, and welcoming space for community to gather and share Gifts and Needs, most often while literally sitting in a circle. The Gift Circle format [provides] a sense of psycho-spiritual belonging and connection to ameliorate the vast sense of alienation and scarcity experienced by so many. We would eat and socialize a bit, then gather sitting in a circle, and go around the circle with each person speaking what gift they’d enjoy sharing with the community. For instance someone might offer giving a massage, making a custom mix CD, giving a life coaching session, dance class, or a home-cooked meal – the gifts were generally more service-oriented, though there was an occasional item gifted as well, like a futon or pair of headphones. Most importantly, there would be a time at the end where we’d leave 20-30 min for givers and receivers to connect with one another directly and coordinate a time to meet up later to give or receive whatever it was. It was highly encouraged to schedule the gift or need session during that meeting, while the energy was still fresh.

Note: Read the full article to see how you can start a gift circle in your community! Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

A time bank does with time what other banks do with money: It stores and trades it. “Time banking means that for every hour you give to your community, you receive an hour credit,” explains Krista Wyatt, executive director of the DC-based nonprofit TimeBanks.Org, which helps volunteers establish local time banks all over the world. Thousands of time banks with several hundred thousand members have been established in at least 37 countries, including China, Malaysia, Japan, Senegal, Argentina, Brazil and in Europe, with over 3.2 million exchanges. There are probably more than 40,000 members in over 500 time banks in the US. Many time banks are volunteer community projects, but the one in Sebastopol, [CA] is funded by the city. “Every volunteer hour is valued around $29,” Wyatt calculates. “Now think about the thousands of dollars a city saves when hundreds of citizens serve their community for free.” The Sebastopol time bank has banked more than 8,000 hours since its launch in 2016. Five core principles ... guide time banks to this day: First, everyone has something to contribute. Second, valuing volunteering as “work.” Third, reciprocity or a “pay-it-forward” ethos. Fourth, community building, and fifth, mutual accountability and respect. “What captured me is that people are doing things out of their own good heart,” Wyatt says. “Many years ago, a woman ... said to [civil rights lawyer] Edgar Cahn, ‘I have nothing to give.’ Edgar Cahn listened and finally responded, ‘You have love to give.’ And the whole room just went silent.” Every hour of service is valued the same, no matter how much skill and expertise a task takes, whether it’s an hour keeping someone company, helping them file their taxes or repair a roof.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

More than 300 electric cooperatives across the United States are building their own Internet with high-speed fiber networks. These locally-owned networks are poised to do what federal and state governments and the marketplace have not accomplished. First, they are protecting open Internet access from the Internet service providers (ISPs) that stand to pocket the profits from the rollbacks of net neutrality the Trump administration announced. Second, they are making affordable and fast Internet accessible to anyone. In Detroit, for example, 40 percent of the population has no access of any kind to the Internet. Detroit residents started a grassroots movement called the Equitable Internet Initiative, through which locals have begun to build their own high-speed Internet. The initiative started by enlisting digital stewards—locals who were interested in working for the nonprofit coalition. They aim to build shared tools, like a forum and a secured emergency communication network—and to educate their communities on digital literacy. Just 30 of the more than 300 tribal reservations in the United States have Internet access. Seventeen tribal reservation communities in San Diego County have secured wireless Internet access under the Tribal Digital Village initiative. Another local effort, Co-Mo Electric Cooperative ... has organized to crowdfund the necessary resources to establish its own network. The biggest dilemma for cities is the erosion of the capacity for communities to solve their own problems. As a result, local Internet service providers are bringing the power back to their people.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

For now, it’s only a gaping hole in the ground. But when construction is complete next April, the Lower Sioux—also known as part of the Mdewakanton Band of Dakota—will have a 20,000-square-foot manufacturing campus that will allow them to pioneer a green experiment, the first of its kind in the United States. They will have an integrated vertical operation to grow hemp, process it into insulation called hempcrete, and then build healthy homes with it. Right now, no one in the US does all three. Once the tribe makes this low-carbon material, they can begin to address a severe shortage of housing and jobs. Recapturing a slice of sovereignty would be a win for the Lower Sioux. They lost most of their lands in the 19th century, and the territory finally allotted to them two hours south of Minneapolis consists of just 1,743 acres of poor soil. That stands in contrast to the fertile black earth of the surrounding white-owned farmlands. Nearly half of the 1,124 enrolled members of the tribe need homes. “The idea of making homes that would last and be healthy was a no-brainer,” said Robert “Deuce” Larsen, the tribal council president. Leading the national charge on an integrated hempcrete operation is no mean feat, seeing that virtually no one in the community had experience with either farming or construction before the five-person team was assembled. Hemp can grow in a variety of climates. What’s more, hemp regenerates soil, sequesters carbon, and doesn’t require fertilizers.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

The free, moneyless economy is flourishing in America. Roughly 250 million people were still visiting Craigslist worldwide each month in 2022, 27 years after the site was launched in 1995—and many of those Craigslist users are posting and sharing goods under the site’s popular “free stuff” section. About eight years after Craigslist was launched, Freecycle Network came online in 2003. More than 9 million Americans were still using Freecycle as of 2020, which I detailed in an article that year. And then there’s the relatively young Buy Nothing Project, which turned 10 years old in July of 2023. In addition to providing a digital space where people can request things they need, post things they’re giving away, and share gratitude, one of the B corp’s social benefit model goals is to encourage people to organize community and local events around buying nothing. Over the years, Buy Nothing has been gaining popularity—not through any marketing on the part of the organization but through word-of-mouth and organic growth. The Buy Nothing app, which has only been around for about two years, is ... zeroing in on 1 million users. Buy Nothing’s model varies from that of Craigslist’s “free stuff” and Freecycle in that it is focused on community groups, gatherings, and events organized by and for local communities. The idea is that a global reuse economy will emerge community by community. Buy Nothing exists ... “to build resilient communities where our true wealth is the connections forged between neighbors.”

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

A 215-metre-long banquet table, lined with 648 chairs and laden with a home cooked produce, was set up along the Rue de l'Aude and those in attendance were urged to openly utter the most subversive of words: bonjour. For some, that greeting led to the first meaningful exchange between neighbours. "I'd never seen anything like it before," says Benjamin Zhong who runs a cafe in the area. "It felt like the street belonged to me, to all of us." The revolutionaries pledged their allegiance that September day in 2017 to the self-styled R©publique des Hyper Voisins, or Republic of Super Neighbours, a stretch of the 14th arrondissement on the Left Bank, encompassing roughly 50 streets and 15,000 residents. In the five years since, the republic – a "laboratory for social experimentation" – has attempted to address the shortcomings of modern city living, which can be transactional, fast-paced, and lonely. The experiment encourages people ... to interact daily through mutual aid schemes, voluntary skills-sharing and organised meet ups. A recent event at the Place des Droits de l'Enfant allowed neighbours to celebrate reclaiming the public space. A lifeless road junction ... no longer performed its role as an "urban square" – a place for life, interaction and meetings. But after residents were consulted about what they thought the square should become, it was cleaned, pedestrianised, planted and had street clutter removed with a grant of nearly 200,000 euros from the City of Paris.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

Around the world, people have been turning to swapping, trading and bartering during the coronavirus pandemic, whether to do their bit for the local community, save money or simply source hard-to-find baking ingredients. With economic uncertainty looming and anxiety levels soaring, barter is becoming an emerging alternative solution to getting by – and staying busy. The increase in bartering is nowhere better exemplified than in Fiji. The country has a long tradition of barter, known as ‘veisa’ ... and Fijians have harnessed modern technology to connect even more people. “I knew that money would be tight to stretch out and even harder to come by. I asked myself what happens when there’s no more money? Barter was a natural solution to that,” says Marlene Dutta, who started the Barter for a Better Fiji group on 21 April. Its membership is just under 190,000 – more than 20% of Fiji’s population. Items changing hands have run the gamut – pigs for kayaks, a violin for a leather satchel and doughnuts for building bricks – but the most commonly requested items have been groceries and food. Bartering isn’t just for individuals looking for baking items or help with grocery shopping, however. Businesses are increasingly interested in joining barter exchanges, which have “doctors, lawyers, service companies, retailers – you name it”, says Ron Whitney, President of the US-based International Reciprocal Trade Association, a non-profit organisation founded in 1979 that promotes and advances modern trade and barter systems.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

Co-Op City is amazing. A massive housing development on the eastern edge of the Bronx, it has its own schools, power plant, newspaper, even a planetarium. It was built by a clothing workers union and the United Housing Federation in the 1960s to provide affordable middle-class housing in New York City. From the beginning, it embraced a social justice mandate that included participatory self-government, ethnic diversity and a sharing of resources. Just 49 percent of New York City households have responded to the 2020 Census so far — well behind the national average of nearly 60 percent. At stake are potentially billions of dollars in desperately needed federal funds as well as seats in the House of Representatives. But not all Census tracts are created equal. In Co-Op City, the world’s largest co-operative housing complex, with more than 15,000 apartments, residents are not only well ahead of the rest of the Bronx and of New York City — they also outpace much of the nation. Among Co-Op City’s seven tracts, five exceed 70 percent in participating, and the others are not far behind — making “the city in a city” an outlier in the Bronx, where fewer than 40 percent in many tracts have responded to Census Bureau mailings. Noel Ellison, 67, general manager for Co-Op City’s property management company, Riverbay Corporation, said the coronavirus crisis has galvanized residents, bringing an already tight community even closer. So did Co-Op City’s unusual inclusiveness, he suggested.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

It came to be known as the Sunflower movement, a sudden three-week stand-off in 2014 between the government and Taiwanese protesters. Months later, government officials arrived at a ... university campus to ask for the help of a group that few knew even existed: the civic hackers. Taiwan's civic hackers were organized around a leaderless collective called g0v (pronounced "gov zero.") Many believed in radical transparency ... and in the idea that everyone who is affected by a decision should have a say in it. They preferred establishing consensus to running lots of majority-rule votes. These were all principles, incidentally, that parallel thinking about how software should be designed – a philosophy that g0v had begun to apply to the arena of domestic politics. As g0v saw it, the problem of politics was essentially one of information. They needed a way not to measure division, but construct consensus. The hackers' answer was called vTaiwan. The platform invites citizens into an online space for debate that politicians listen to and take into account when casting their votes. As people expressed their views, rather than serving up the comments that were the most divisive, it gave the most visibility to those finding consensus. Soon, vTaiwan was being rolled out on issue after issue, especially those related to technology, and each time a hidden consensus was revealed. "Invariably, within three weeks or four, we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements.” Most valuable of all, by clearing away the noise and divisiveness, vTaiwan created outcomes that the government could actually act on. It has formed the core of around a dozen pieces of laws and regulations now implemented in Taiwan, on everything from revenge porn to fintech regulation. More are waiting to be passed. The system's potential to heal divisions, to reconnect people to politics, is a solution made for the problems of our age.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

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