The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Elephant Scribe

Stephanie Crowley sends word of this up-and-coming graphic facilitator. (She adds that travel may be difficult.)

This video speaks of the power of visual language to communicate across cultures... and species! In it, an elephant paints a self-portrait (no joke).

It is absolutely incredible to watch the accuracy and finesse of this beautiful artist. And, watching the images emerge is no less engaging than watching Picasso draw.

The Point: Web 2.0 tool for creating your own change

The Point brings together problems, people, and the pressure of collective action. The site allows users to create campaigns and encourage other people to join anonymously.

Using the principles of Gladwell's Tipping Point, once the number of members reaches a certain critical mass (10, 50, 2000) and action is triggered: a sale, a press release, a protest.

Campaigns are tools for people to organize a group action that occurs only when enough people join to make participation worthwhile. Campaigns can be used for any situation where people want safety in numbers, from planning a party to boycotting a corporation to saving chickens.

Check out the simple, clever animations used to demonstrate the types of people, the problems they want to tackle, and the resulting campaigns--that can use The Point to catalyze change.

Consensus on Colors

Extremely useful when shopping for ties, or arguing with your spouse about what color to paint the kitchen.

clipped from www.kk.org The folks at Dolores Blog "showed thousands of random colors to people on Mechanical Turk and asked what they would call them. Here’s what they said:"  In short the experiment goes like this. They generated random color samples and then paid the anonymous workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to give a name to these random colors. Dolores then mapped that name in the appropriate color place on the standard color wheel. The result is this color wheel of names. But the really cool part is that you can search for color names via this Color Label Wheel. Type in a name and see all the colors that random folks think belong to that color name.

Governing Sovereign Wealth Flows

From Kevin Kelly's Lifestream.

clipped from www.kk.org A wonderful New York Times graphic showing the global flows of sovereign wealth. see large view   A sovereign wealth fund is a huge heap of money that is controlled by a nation -- say Singapore or Saudi Arabia -- rather than by a private transnational company. The latter is called private equity funds and their investments have been prime movers in global finance for decades. Some of the largest banks and finance companies that are in the current news cycle, like Bear Stearns, or UBS, are good examples of private money. They buy and sell business across national borders. According to the New York Times in their article The Leveraged Planet, the amount of sovereign controlled wealth is expected to rise to $12 trillion by 2015.  These funds also buy and sell businesses across borders but since their owners are other nations, or nation-state organizations, the implications of their scale and intent are proving enormous.