Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window

• The Birth of Wikipedia

A TED talks video that presents Wikipedia as a social movement.  Jimmy Wales recalls how he assembled "a ragtag band of volunteers," gave them tools for collaborating and created Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished online encyclopedia.  Focus is on worldwide empowerment by sharing knowledge 

• Social Movements and Getting Participatory Economics

Michael Albert, American activist and political theorist, talks about building social movements to forward Parecon (participatory economics). Parecon promotes participatory decision making as an economic mechanism to guide the production, consumption and allocation of resources in a given society. Proposed as an alternative to contemporary capitalist market economies and also an alternative to centrally planned socialism or coordinatorism (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics)

• I Have a Dream

Martin Luther King’s last speech.  Prophetic words, he was assassinated the next day.

• Social Movements: Power from Above and Below

Using the U.S. civil rights movement as the principal example, Dr. Doug McAdam talks about the typical mix of top down environmental facilitation and bottom up grass roots activism that fuel successful social movements. Appropriately, FSI puts the emphasis on the latter, but a full understanding of the prospects for significant social change requires that activists understand the critical reciprocal relationship between people power and the shifting environmental circumstances they confront.