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

Video Links

Video 1: TED Talk: The Birth of Wikipedia

Description: 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. The focus is on worldwide empowerment by sharing knowledge.

Video 2: Social Movements and Getting Participatory Economics

Description: Michael Albert, American activist and political theorist, talks about building social movements to forward Parecon (participatory economics), which promotes participatory decision-making as an economic mechanism to guide the production, consumption, and allocation of resources in a given society. Parecon is proposed as an alternative to contemporary capitalist market economies and also an alternative to centrally planned socialism or coordinatorism.

Video 3: MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech

Description: MLK’s most famous speech, which called for a future free of discrimination, inequality, and oppression.

Video 4: Social Movements: Power from Above and Below

Description: 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 grassroots 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.

Web Link

Web 1: A 21st Century Social Movement

Description: One of the most widely-known and visible social movements of recent years has been Black Lives Matter. Here on their website, they explain their mission, state their vision for the future, and provide links for like-minded people to find ways to get involved.