Image courtesy of the Wakarusa Music Festival

More and more buzz is being generated in the music industry about artists greening up concerts and venues greening their practices. I was able to see some of this first hand while spending four days at the Wakarusa Music and Camping Festival in Lawrence, KS, this past weekend.

Lured by the temptation of such acts as Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, Son Volt, Yonder Mountain String Band, Widespread Panic, and my personal favorite, the John Butler Trio, my husband and I set out for an extended weekend of camping and concerts approximately 45 minutes west of Kansas City at Clinton Lake State Park. We were pleased to find multiple efforts at sustainability from the moment we got to the venue.

When driving into the park, after receiving our wristbands from festival organizers, volunteers handed us two plastic bags: a clear bag for trash and a green bag for recyclables. Dubbed "Recycalusa" Wakarusa's recycling efforts extended to glass, aluminum, cardboard, and plastic. Wakarusa even urged festival-goers to bring canned beverages, not bottled, because the market for glass recycling was far smaller in Lawrence than for aluminum. There was a Recycalusa booth where festival-goers could take their green bags, sort their recycling, and win prizes such as band merch.

This story is rife with Web 2.0 geek buzzwords. Open Source, crowdsourcing, citizen media, peer production, information commons, swarming…It’s a tale of an online project called AssignmentZero, the first collaborative journalism project from NewAssignment.net, which we wrote about last year when it was announced by its founder, NYU professor Jay Rosen, who wanted to create a platform for professional journalists to collaborate with “the people formerly known as the audience.” Rosen describes NewAssignment as: a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust. In April, AssignmentZero went public with its first assignment, a piece (tentatively slated for publication in Wired or at Wired.com) about crowdsourcing, created through crowdsourcing. Rosen calls it “pro-am” journalism, in which professionals and amateurs pool their intelligence to develop a story. At the AssignmentZero site, participants can create a login and find an assignment at the Assignment Desk. The editors have marked assignments that can be taken up by any number of people, and those (such as interviews) that can only be assigned… (more)

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Media at 12:08 PM)

Editor's note: I had hoped to actually complete this series last week, but my administrative duties got the best of me. So, here's part two on my trip to Bentonville, Arkansas, for Wal-Mart's media day and shareholders' meeting. You can find part one here.

After finishing up at Sam's Club, our next stop was the Bentonville Supercenter. Like the Sam's Club we visited, the Supercenter was fairly new: it had opened in May, 2005. Like the store we'd just come from, this one also sported ample skylights and bright white walls, and had a definite "upscale" feel. One of the executives who met us on the tour confirmed this was intentional for the particular store… a part of the company's "store of the community" concept.

That idea perked my ears up, of course — wouldn't a "store of the community" be carrying local foods and produce in the grocery section? That question was answered before I got to ask it: yes, a handful of produce items were purchased from local farmers. We also saw plenty of evidence of Wal-Mart's organics push as we walked through other areas of the store's grocery section.

Saturday I went to a discussion entitled Sustaining Change as part of the Creators Series hosted by Tomorrow Unlimited. The talk featured Jennifer Leonard, designer/journalist and co-author of Massive Change, and Sarah Rich, journalist and editor at Worldchanging.

In refreshing presentations that conventional power point users should take notes from (using simple slides, single quotes and vibrant images), both Leonard and Rich told of their own personal histories and what influenced them in their work. Leonard began in journalism as a music and arts critic, then moved into design. Rich has a fashion background and moved into the green sphere through exploring the world's relationship with food. Today both are focused on solutions based journalism, and strive to tell success stories and innovations rather than focusing on the problems people face.

On the topic of Sustaining Change – or keeping the enthusiasm for green going after the buzz wears off – a large part of making that possible, Rich explained, is to educate people. Not just in a conventional sense of expanding K-12 education around the globe, but also creating an awareness of the relationships between people and their environments or surroundings.

Contributed by guest writer, Augusta Dwyer It is difficult not to be daunted by Dharavi. Mumbai’s largest slum – indeed the largest slum in all of Asia – many taxi drivers outside the train station at Mahim junction don’t even want to go there. Finally one agrees, negotiating the narrow streets around the station then onto a highway crossing the noisome mangrove swamp lining the Mithi River, its name, sweet, an insult to its present state. When he was a boy, Santosh Sabat could see the train station from his family’s shanty house, and there was open space all around. People would put down stones or lengths of lumber to cross its streams and wetlands. By now, however, 600,000 people live in Dharavi. It is packed with all kinds of shops and small businesses, 62 pongal houses, where legions of young men pay a few rupees a month to sleep, Mumbai’s largest recycling industry, which employs 5000 workers, leatherworks, potteries, and the infernal little place I see when I first emerge at T Junction, a murky room filled with a huge mound of discarded shoes and sandals, where three women toil in the suffocating heat, franticly rubbing and cleaning… (more)

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Guests at 9:53 AM)

I first learned about MAPLight.org at the recent NetSquared Conference. As I wrote last week, the conference attendees chose MAPLight as the winner of the first prize NetSquared Innovation Award. In a crowd of extremely well-deserving projects, MAPLight stood out as an organization applying the best of Web 2.0 technology and standards to create a vital tool for transparency in democracy. MAPLight.org brings together campaign contributions and how legislators vote, providing an unprecedented window into the connections between money and politics. We currently cover the California Legislature and U.S. Congress. Maplight has been receiving a fair amount of attention lately and the $25k prize will help them take their project to the next level, providing the funds for them to create customized widgets for bloggers and nonprofit organizations to share up to date information on their websites automatically. MAPLight is also working to expand their service to other states, with New York next on the list. I chatted with Sean Tanner, Maplight’s Research Manager via email to get a little more insight into Maplight’s mission and future particularly as America turns its attention to the next Presidential election. As Research Manager, Sean coordinates the MAPLight.org database and research internship program… (more)

(Posted by Micki Krimmel in Transparency and Human Rights at 9:50 PM)

Whole Foods LondonThe Brits have never been known for their culinary instincts, but Whole Foods is putting this to the test. The mega retailer opened its doors last week to lots of eager consumers and a flood of press. Everyone has a point of view of Whole Foods’ impact on the ethical consumer, true level of sustainability and “Whole Paycheck” pricing. The big question is how Whole Foods will fare in a country where the standard dietary guidelines of meat and two veg translate to potatoes with potatoes on the side.

In March, I wrote Whole Foods would usher in “trickle-down organics”. By emphasizing the luxury in eco luxury, Whole Foods would only encourage growth in the growing organics sections of Marks and Spenser, Tesco and Sainsbury. Within public dialog, we are seeing this. However, it’s not necessarily being seen as an elevation of non-ethical supermarkets. As one reporter from the Times pointed out, it’s more about the downfall of Whole Foods and other social entrepreneurs:

But however socially responsible these entrepreneurs remain as individuals, we can’t pretend that, once a critical mass has been reached, and they go public, that their companies are that different from say, Wal-Mart or Tesco (especially now that Sir Terry (Leahy) is so competitive, I mean so green, that he is carbon-labelling and has copyrighted the Tesco Wholefoods brand).

Don't let mosquitos get in the way of your summer outdoor fun. Here are a few tips on keeping you bite free.

Remove standing water sources. This is prime mosquito breeding ground. Dump water from anything in your yard or outdoor area that is collecting it. For things you'd like to keep water in (birdbaths, wading pools, pet water bowls) change it often.

Turn on a fan. Mosquitos prefer still air. A nice breeze will deter them and keep you cool.

Terrence Williams from UC-Davis (Team Fate) plug-in hybridI had the opportunity last week to visit General Motors' headquarters in downtown Detroit for an event with the ChallengeX program. ChallengeX is a program co-sponsored by GM and the US Department of Energy. Teams from universities across the US (and one from Canada) were given a stock Chevrolet Equinox to use as the base vehicle platform and were challenged to improve its efficiency and reduce its fuel use. "Seventeen teams have been challenged to re-engineer a GM Equinox, a crossover sport utility vehicle to minimize energy consumption, emissions, and greenhouse gases while maintaining or exceeding the vehicle's utility and performance."

This is a multi-year program, which has already gone through two years of evaluations and awards. And, while the initial information I had about the program was that this was the conclusion of the challenge, I learned that there is going to be a fourth year to the program, which will focus on consumer acceptability issues.

The top three programs for this year's competition were Mississipi State (1st place), University of Wisconsin (2nd place), and Virginia Tech (3rd place). The vehicles went through a multi-day testing at GM's proving grounds, and were judged on numerous criteria. More information about the ChallengeX results can be found on GM's FYI blog.