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About Us
At a time when humanity faces extraordinary challenges – the litany of them is all too familiar – innovations in information technology offer seeds of hope. The influence of information technology on fields as diverse as environmental science, biology, ecological design, alternative economics, distributed democracy, social network theory, and interactive forms of art has transformed the landscape of the possible. Vibrant new ideas are emerging from this radical cross-pollination. When viewed in relationship to one another, they cohere into a vision of a more just, sustainable, and equitable world. They present a picture of the global citizen of the 21st century, actively engaged in the governance of her community. You might call this the Digital/Green/Commons perspective. It has powerful implications for the way we organize ourselves in society, how we collaborate to make decisions in groups, and our very understanding of what it means to be human. Another world is possible, and the tools for building it are increasingly at hand.
Over the past four years, PlaNetwork conferences – founded and organized by Elizabeth Thompson and Jim Fournier – have been a meeting place for researchers, software designers, entrepreneurs, independent scholars, artists, and activists working at this intersection between technology and societal transformation. Anyone who has been to a PlaNetwork conference can testify to the excitement generated when people from diverse disciplines uncover a shared perspective and purpose. For more background on the Planetwork conferences, click here: http://www.planetwork.net/background.html.
A new world view is coalescing around the way technology can and should be applied to benefit civil society. PlaNetwork conferences have provided a much-needed forum for those engaged in this cutting-edge work. But while many journals are available to experts in their respective fields, where they can publish for a narrow readership, no publication now offers a home to the kind of interdisciplinary approach that has made PlaNetwork conferences so exciting, and influential.
PlaNetwork Journal will fill that gap.
PlaNetwork Journal is a quarterly online publication for in-depth articles by those engaged in this cross-disciplinary approach, applying new technology to benefit the public interest. It is a place where researchers, independent scholars, software designers, artists, and activists can present their work and ideas to those outside their own field who share their concern about the challenges facing the ecosystem and democracy.
Topics to be covered in future issues will include:
• Social Networking Software – digital tools for communication, collaboration, and the support of democracy;
• New Economic Models – complimentary currencies, barter, and alternative flows of exchange and their increasing reliance on information technology;
• Horizontal Democracy – chaordics and other innovative approaches to distributed decision making and governance;
• Global Systems Analysis – knowledge tools that support in-depth understanding of the Earth as an integrated system;
• Ecological Design – technologies that heal the earth by replicating and accelerating natural processes;
• Independent Media – emerging technologies for the publishing and distribution of news, art, and entertainment;
• Global Citizenship – new notions of the global "Self", and the rights and responsibilities associated with being a citizen in an increasingly wired, network society;
• Social Sculpture – interactive art forms that focus on relationships between participants, as a way to explore the possibilities of enlightened community.
Free to all readers, PlaNetwork Journal is supported by grants and donations. We would like to thank our founding donor, the Aronovitz Family Foundation, Inc. You too can help. Please make a contribution by clicking here. Planetwork Journal is a program of Planetwork Inc., a California 501c3.
Thank you for your support – we hope you enjoy Planetwork Journal!
Planetwork Journal Team
Ken Jordan, Editor
Ken Jordan is a writer, theorist, and information technology consultant living in New York City. He is co-author of "The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into The Next-Generation Internet" (2003), an influential white paper about developing online community tools to better encourage citizen engagement in democratic governance. Ken is also co-editor of Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (W.W. Norton, 2001), an anthology of seminal articles that trace the development of the computer as an expressive, interactive medium; the book is widely taught at colleges and universities around the world. He has written for Wired, Index, Paris Review, and other publications.
A pioneer of independent, commercial, Web-based publishing, in 1995 Ken led the development and served as founding editorial director of SonicNet.com, the first multimedia music webzine and digital music store. SonicNet was named best website of 1995 by Entertainment Weekly and won the first Webby award for music site before becoming a property of MTV. He later became creative director of Icon New Media, publisher of two seminal, award-winning online magazines: the general interest zine Word.com, and the action sports site Charged.com. In 1999 he co-founded the public interest portal MediaChannel.org, in partnership with Globalvision and the international civil society network OneWorld.net; it was OneWorld's first U.S.-based project. In 2002-2003 he was director of the Art and Culture Network, a non-profit initiative to create an online infrastructure to support artists and contemporary art institutions.
Highlight experiences outside the digital realm include: collaboration with the legendary playwright and director Richard Foreman on the book Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater (Pantheon, 1992); co-founding Universal Hobo, Stephan Smith's indie music label; board chairmanship of the theory and literature publisher Semiotext(e); traveling with Allen Ginsberg to poetry and theater festivals in Yugoslavia during the Cold War; and gophering for Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly at Raw Books and Graphics during the preparation of Maus I.
Elizabeth Thompson, Publisher
Elizabeth Thompson has been a pioneer in the New York and San Francisco art and culture scenes for over 15 years. Her work has centered on the creation, dissemination and synthesis of leading edge ideas, people, and networks of communities across disciplinary boundaries and media platforms including the worlds of information technology, sustainability, global change activism, digital media, art, architecture and design.
Prior to founding PlaNetwork in 1998, Elizabeth survived a prolonged immersive experience in conceptual art as Director of the internationally acclaimed John Gibson Gallery in New York (1986-1993), and as a founding member of the Obie Award-winning experimental theater company: Cucaracha Warehouse Theatre, where she worked as both a performing artist and creator/producer of their renowned Summer Cabaret Performance Art series (1987-1995). While with John Gibson Gallery, she designed and produced exhibitions in New York and throughout Europe including Basel, Frankfurt, Cologne, Zurich, Geneva and Paris. Immediately prior to fleeing the hyper post-modern New York art world for California's utopian highways, she managed the studio of the renowned political artists, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. (1994-1996).
Elizabeth currently serves as acting Executive Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, having recently re-located BFI's central operations hub to New York. She sits on the Advisory boards of several art & culture organizations including, Guggenheim Public at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Camino De Paz, New York; Link Tank, San Francisco; the Venture Collective, San Francisco and Fourth Door Review a U.K. based ecology and culture journal. Elizabeth writes and lectures about the intersection of art/ecology/digital culture & planetary citizenship.
Marc Stein, Technology Director
Marc Stein has created many websites devoted to arts, literature and public discourse. He is the technology director of LitKicks.com, a popular community site devoted to alternative fiction and poetry, and has worked on WordsWithoutBorders.org, BobDylan.com, BruceSpringsteen.net, ArtAndCulture.com, iVillage.com and Pathfinder.com. Marc also teaches courses in website programming and design.
Peggy Nelson, Designer
Peggy Nelson is a visual artist and web designer whose work encompasses painting, photography and writing; with a focus on the intersection of art and science. She has an M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts, and writes a column for Otherzine, an online journal of experimental film. She designed the original PlaNetwork website in 1999, and is responsible for the graphics and front-end design of the PlaNetwork Journal. Her portfolio can be seen at www.peggynelson.com.
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