I don’t usually publicize events here (mostly because I hate reading other peoples’ posts about the wonderful events I will never get to) but there are a few social design-related events coming up in the next few months. Perhaps something near you?

• Compostmodern, San Francisco, January 22-23
  
  
• World Social Forum 2011, Dakar, February 6-11, 2011
  
  
• Poster for Tomorrow: The Right to Education, global. Call for entries posted in March.
  
  
• World Non-Profit and Social Marketing Conference, Dublin, April 11-12, 2011

Know of others?

• Noted previously, with every pair of shoes you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. As of September 2010, TOMS has given over one million pairs of shoes.
  
  
• In 2007 and 2008, under its Give 1 Get 1 program the One Laptop per Child program donated a laptop to a child in the developing world for every computer sold. 83,500 laptops were donated in 2007 and 12,500 in 2008.
  
  
• FIGS, a necktie retailer in Santa Monica donates one school uniform to a child in Africa for every tie it sells.
  
  
• For each pair of eyeglasses sold, Warby Parker donates a pair of eyeglasses to someone in need through Restoring Vision. To date, that’s almost 10,000 pairs.
  
  
• Out of Print in Brooklyn, donates one book to Books for Africa every time it sells one of its T-shirts, which feature the covers of mostly out-out-of print books.
  
  
• For every condom it sells, Sir Richard’s plans to give another condom away for free in a developing nation through Partners in Health.
  
  
• For every nutrition bar you buy from Two Degrees, they give a nutrition pack to a hungry child..
  
  
• Every time you buy a book, Better World Books will donate one to someone in need.

On the War of the Poppies:

Myles Ambrose, one of President Nixon’s closest advisers in the War on Drugs, was scathing in his judgement of some of his fellow drug-warriors:

“The basic fact that eluded these great geniuses was that it takes only ten square miles of poppy to feed the entire American heroin market.

And they grow everywhere.”

David Biello on the daunting physical logistics of scaling up green energy:

“It’s not just a matter of making the necessary equipment, it’s also a question of finding the space for it. A coal-fired power plant produces 100 to 1,000 watts per square meter, depending on the type of coal it burns and how that coal is mined. A typical photovoltaic system for turning sunlight into electricity produces just 9 watts per square meter, and wind provides only 1.5 watts per square meter.

The challenge is worse for smaller countries: the United Kingdom would have to cover its entire landmass with wind turbines to provide enough electricity for the current Briton’s average consumption — roughly 200 kilowatt-hours per day, according to MacKay, the Cambridge expert.”

A protester breaks down the algorithm: “Mubarak leaves. Yes: Parliament dissolves. No: Protests, disobedience. strikes.”

One of the Creative Commons photos posted to the Flickr stream of Al Jazeera English.

Few visuals capture the spirit of regime change as much as toppling the monuments of the previous regime. In the case of Libya, revolutionary protesters on YouTube topple a monument to Muammar al-Qaddafi’s revolutionary Green Book.

The future is unwritten!

From an article on Brenda Brathwaite and her game design:

“[Train] unfolds atop a shattered window. Three model train tracks run diagonally across the broken glass. Game pieces include two stacks of cards, a black typewriter holding the rules, 60 yellow wooden pawns, and six gray model boxcars.

Each turn, players can roll a die and choose to advance their boxcar or load it with pawns; alternatively, they can use a card to speed or slow a boxcar’s progress. Brathwaite’s goal, she says, was to make a game about complicity.…

At that point, Train had not formally revealed its subject, and Jon and the others played as though it were a normal board game, trying to outrace each other. When Rob was the first to move a boxcar to the end of the line, he followed the rules and drew a Terminus card. Train’s theme was no longer hidden. The card said ‘Dachau.’

…

Train is the third title in a series of six non-digital games she calls ‘The Mechanic Is The Message.’ The series was sprung one afternoon in 2007, when her daughter Maezza followed a thoughtless rehash of the day’s school lesson about the Middle Passage by asking to play a game. Brathwaite invented a game on the spot. She had Maezza spend half an hour painting wooden pawns and grouping them into families. Brathwaite then scooped the pawns at random, placed them on an index card, and explained the rules: You have 10 turns to cross the ocean and 30 units of food; each turn you must roll the die and use that much food. After a series of high rolls, Maezza looked to her mother: ‘Mommy, we’re not going to make it.’

…

[Brathwaite] decided to make games about five more ‘difficult’ subjects: Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland, the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, illegal immigration, and Haitian poverty. Her goal was more than ‘blast-the-Nazis fun.’ ‘I wanted to do a design exercise to see if you could use game mechanics to express difficult subjects,’ Braithwaite says. ‘Every single atrocity, every single migration of people—there was a system behind it. If you can find that system, you can make a game about it. All games are, is systems.’”

Ogle Earth runs down a brief list of ways Google Earth and the availability of satellite imagery in recent years have fueled class resentment and conflict in Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.

Leading the list are dramatic visualizations comparing the overcrowded living conditions of the Shiite majority in Bahrain with the palaces, estates, and private islands of the ruling families. After the country’s ISPs were ordered to block access to Google Earth’s imagery in 2006, this PDF of annotated screencaps illustrating the spatial inequities circulated widely by email.