Patterns

People have always traded with each other, using various ways to represent and store value. In complex capitalist societies, money encourages growth, accumulation, and new forms of wealth and power concentration. Community Currencies can offer a solution for local markets deprived of or unserved by national financial policy. If successful, it can promote local projects and put them on the road to a hopeful and fruitful future.

Everybody has information, activities, thoughts, and events that they'd rather keep private. But marketeers, security forces, and criminals are uncovering and exploiting these secrets, leading, sometimes to harassment or even torture or death. We need to be aware of the importance of Privacy and work to protect privacy rights and resist privacy invaders.

Community informatics combines information and communication technologies, community development, and community-based research to help improve community life, especially in excluded communities. A Community Informatics Ethics that ensures that community members can find, use, and control information tools while building relationships among themselves can result in stronger, more self-sufficient, and engaged communities.

The principle of full and equal access to the justice system faces opportunities and challenges from new technologies. While technology can provide new pathways it can also exacerbate existing barriers or create new ones. Technology can allow people to use their home, library, or community center to find out about, initiate or respond to law related requirements, and communicate and exchange documents less expensively, using less time and effort.

Budget development is often thought of as a dry, technical task, best left to "experts." But budgets are critical tools through which social values are expressed. Developing a budget, with its criteria and categories, is a "political" act. Participatory Budgeting helps to bring in people who generally don't participate in the process. There are now many successful examples in which whole communities play substantial roles in the budgeting process.

People leave poor countries in search of jobs. Village cultures and families have adapted to this and to the significant sums of money sent home. Information technology innovation can reduce remittance transfer costs and improve transparency. Financial institutions could offer matching funds for investments while non-profit foundations working with migrant groups could set up alternative transfer networks.

Digital "divides" are based on economics, gender, race, class, ability, or other factors. We can view these divides in two ways — accessibility to, and accessibility of, information and communication technologies. Accessibility means being able to connect to the network society. It also means that these technologies are accessible to those with disabilities. We must find ways to design for accessibility at the onset. Accessibility affects us all: Some of us directly; all of us indirectly.

In many countries, the lack of access to Information and Communication Technology is an acute problem. Just as the mobile library brings books to those who lack access, traveling computer laboratories with computer literacy educators as drivers can play similar roles. In South Africa, the Discovery Mobile bus travels to communities and gives people the opportunity to interact with science and technology exhibits.

Is it possible to shift conflict creatively to achieve real change? Recently people have begun to imagine solutions to conflicts in which constructive win/win solutions replace the win/lose model. To generate lasting change, use an imaginative array of strategies and skills including negotiation, multi-party processes, and cross cultural dialogue.