On Sunday, November 16, I had the pleasure to attend and participate in the first ever Sustainability Camp. It was hosted inside the offices of the Centre for Social Innovation, a beautiful brick and beam building right in the heart of Chinatown. Inside an intimate board room, a small group of socially minded individuals gathered around to listen to Tom Williams (CEO of Givemeaning.com) deliver an engaging and thought provoking keynote.

The primary theme of his keynote was the idea of the power of plenty. As individuals, we have difficulty feeling the impact of our generosity. Businesses are able to measure their Return on investment (ROI) but for individuals, what’s the return on generosity? It’s only when we mobilize to work as a group, does the power of plenty become evident.

Elaborating further on this point, he mentions the importance of new media and it’s impact on the industry in bringing knowledge and awareness to everyone. He cites The Meatrix and the PETA campaigns targetting KFC which have been successful because of their emotional impact. We need to get out of the mindset that dollars and cents trump the importance of our earth. As a society we need to start caring get out of the I know it’s important, but it’s not important enough for me to get out of bed mindset.

So what needs to change? He proposes that the movement needs to distance itself from the perception that it is elitist and just a culturally refined taste. Specifically, it needs to move away from the unnecessary environmental arrogance in which everyone thinks that their cause is more important than others.

Furthermore, he believes that the next level of informatics, led by the Internet, will allow the movement to be more granular about the way food is sourced. As an example, he believes that eventually menus at restaurants will read like 30 page wine menus. This will empower and educate the consumer to make correct choices. While he praises the Internet for casting a wide net, he’s also quick to point out that the Internet is not without it’s limitations. The need to effect change in our local communities involves connecting with people. We need to look at our blocks and make changes at the ground level. Afterall, as Tom said, information without ability to act is dead.

For more coverage of SustainabilityCamp 08, please be sure to check out the event coverage page on the wiki.

Sir Ken Robinson addresses the issue in his humorous, and thought provoking talk at TED.

In the talk, Ken makes 8 excellent points:

1. Kids entering the school system today will be retiring 65 years from now. Even as adults, we don’t know what the world will look like in five years yet we are teaching our kids to prepare them for that world.
2. Creativity is the process of creating original ideas of value. This happens through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of observing things.
3. Creativity is as important as literacy.
4. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. If you’re afraid to be wrong, you will not come up with anything original.
5. All kids are born artists, the challenge is to remain one.
6. Creativity is not something you grow into. It’s something we grow out of. Specifically we are EDUCATED out of it.
7. Public schooling was built to meet industrial growth needs. As such, science and maths are at the top of the ladder, while arts are at the bottom.
8. The current University system defines intelligence based on academic ability

In Seth Godin’s “The Dip”, he makes the argument that being well rounded is overrated. At first glance this sounds odd. At a young age, we’re conditioned to be good at everything.

At least I was.

Learn to run faster.
Study your times tables over and over.
Practice your piano to become the best.
Stop playing so many video games. You’ll never get a job doing that.

Basically it’s about diversifying our talents. But is this really a good thing? Do you really care if your optometrist sucks at bowling? Or that your web designer can’t make sense of a balance sheet?

Now don’t get me wrong. I certainly don’t fault my parents for all the opportunities they provided for me. In fact, I am very grateful that they sacrificed so much for their children. The thing is, while it’s good to have a variety of skills, you need to establish which skills are your strongest and make them shine. Be remarkable with those ones. It’s good to have skills in other areas (after all we’re human and we do have a variety of interests) there’s no reason why all of them have to be at the same top level.

Up until recently a lot of the annual mutual fund reports I was getting were on an opt-out basis. Meaning, if I no longer wished to receive any of the clunky 50+ page annual reports, I’d need to contact the company directly and explicitly choose to opt-out. That’s why it was so refreshing today when I received a tiny mailer asking if I’d like to opt-in instead. No reply? Easy you’ll be automatically opting out.

The thing is, this is the way it should have always been. Aside from the obvious environmental benefit of wasting less paper, the company also saves money by not having to print a whole bunch of reports which would have mostly been skimmed (at best) and recycled anyway.

It’s a no brainer that when you given a choice of whether to receive an electronic version or physical version of mailings, you should, in most cases, choose the latter. Now if only we had some sort of solution to get rid of paper/physical coupons completely, now then that would be gravy.

Until then, sites like Save.ca will undoubtedly continue to entertain us with their Bathroom Tissue coupons.

This morning I received a message from one of my Facebook groups alerting me that they’ll be deleting their group that they’ve had for a year and a half. Not a big deal right? What if this group used Facebook as their exclusive platform for alerting members of upcoming events and information sessions? What if there were over 100 people registered for this group?

To replace the soon to be deleted Facebook group, they proposed that everyone switch to another social networking platform. Isn’t this kind of inconvenient for well, everyone?

Not only will I have to go through the motions of registering with the new platform but what about the process of having to reconnect with members? Isn’t this a whole lot of work just for the convenience of the company?

I can’t help but feel this is really horrible customer service. Why should the customer have to go out of their way to continue their membership with the group. Didn’t they opt in once already? What if instead of forcing people to sign up for another social network, they included a one click email list subscription process. One click. Done. Keep your customers in the loop without forcing them to jump through a million hoops.

If something as simple as that was done, I would have subscribed. For me, the hassle of having to sign up the other social network definitely outweighs the benefits that I get out of the group. It’s too bad really.