The Vine

Vine alum Doug Makaroff recently wrote to me about his latest endeavor, one that I’m pleased to share with the rest of you.

Living Forest Communities is a conservation model that acquires privately held forestland and preserves 85% of forest by building on just 15% of the land. The short video below tells their story.

The sale of the building sites pays for the initial acquisition of the land, and saves a majority of the privately owned forest in perpetuity. The developed communities are described as “light-on-the-land residential hamlets modeled after traditional European towns,” featuring clustered home sites with emphasis on green building technologies. The group then places protective covenants on the most ecologically sensitive areas of the forest to reduce the environmental impact of development and human activities.

Doug describes it as “Putting real estate to the service of conservation…not the other way around.”

“I’ve had to unlearn an awful lot of what I know about development and urban planning,” he says, “so as to be thinking very much from the perspective of ‘What is the highest conservation value here?’ and not ‘What is the highest real estate value here?’”

Imagine that.

Great to hear from you, Doug. Keep up the important work.

http://blip.tv/file/1578999/

Ann Oliveri has previously blogged about get2human.com, a web service that provides shortcuts for reaching a live person at hundreds of different customer support call centers. (Sometimes it’s dialing 0, sometimes it’s saying “support,” sometimes it’s saying nothing at all.)

If I may tag on, what I love most about this story is that the shortcuts are provided from within. The organizers of get2human don’t spend all their time hacking phone systems trying to find the magic code at each one. Instead, call center employees—whistleblowers, if you will—voluntarily offer it up. If the company switches its system (”please listen closely, as our menu options have changed”), the new shortcut will be posted within a day or two.

A business builds a fortress to keep people out; its citizenry lowers the drawbridge to let them in.

There’s an interesting parallel to community development. It has nothing to do with your phone system, and everything to do with the places you make.

Your communities are full of whistleblowers. When you create (or better yet, co-create) delightful places that make it easier for people to “get human,” they will tell others about it. Conversely, if you build this, someone will take a picture, post it online and condemn it. And they’re doing you a favor (hear me out).

Why do call center employees post their shortcuts on the web? Well, I’m sure there’s some satisfaction in undercutting convoluted corporate systems. But the larger motivation, I believe, is the same as people who rave about (or rail against) their community—we enjoy helping one another. We want to share with others the pleasurable things of this world, and steer them clear of the painful.

The mission of get2human is not to stick it to The Man. They simply—and genuinely—want to help businesses provide better service. And so it is with your constituency, fans and detractors alike. They want to make your communities better (read: more human). In the process, they’re helping you become better (read: more human).

[Disclaimer: I realize there will always be unreasonable hotheads, serial complainers who cannot be placated. They are miserable curs. I'm not talking about them.]

Yes, empowered consumers and citizen journalists can be a pain. Business was much easier when we made stuff and they purchased it.

But this is a different time. A (hopefully) more human one.

If you want to glimpse the soul of America’s cities, study our sports teams. Or, rather, our relationship to those teams, which are (for better or worse) inextricably linked to our civic identity.

These days, nowhere is that more true than Detroit, where it’s hard to say who had a worse year—the automakers or the Lions, the first 0-16 team in NFL history.

But to cast Detroit strictly as a tale of woe would be incomplete and unfair. In a wonderfully written article for Sports Illustrated, author/sportswriter Mitch Albom shows us a city defined as much by hope as despair, a city of “the most downtrodden optimists you will ever meet.”

It’s easy to denounce the Big Three, link Detroit’s fate to theirs, and conclude they made their own destiny. But as Albom points out…You think this couldn’t happen to your city?

Sports fan or not, the article is well worth reading.

Photo by mashget

There is an easier way to peel a banana.

There is a faster way to tie your shoelaces.

There is a more nuanced way of creating spaghetti sauce and many other types of products that people don’t even know they want yet.

There is always a better, smarter, more elegant way of doing things, whether it’s writing code or organizing your socks or designing towns and neighborhoods. Finding it can be difficult and messy—after all, there’s already an established, familiar way that works, even if clunkily.

Sometimes it’s deceptively simple (shoelaces). Sometimes it takes seeing an “outsider” doing it differently, then unlearning the way you’ve always done it  (bananas). Sometimes it requires years of careful observation and a willingness to think fundamentally differently about what you’re trying to solve (spaghetti sauce).

Almost always it’s more work, and you’ll be tempted to give up.

Always it’s worthwhile—both in the pursuit and the results.

Nancy Gibbs has written a wonderful essay in this week’s issue of Time, assessing our nation’s collective pain and offering a hopeful perspective that it will bring out the best, not the worst in us.

She notes that unlike past recessions, this one affects everyone. “To suffer alone is a tragedy,” she writes. “To struggle together is an opportunity, when we find out what we really care about.”

Gibbs concludes:

“Maybe as times get worse, we get better. Our pain makes us feel other people’s too; our fear lets us practice valor; we are tense, and tender as well. And among the things we can no longer afford are things we never really wanted anyway, like the solitude of snobbery, and the luxury of denial.”

Far too often the media prey on our fear and our morbid fascination with negativity (and yet we still consume it…hmmm…). When they get it right, it’s worth sharing.