bloggy sentiments 4 remixin'--subtractin'/addin' and linkin' to follow...

I was both delighted and slightly disappointed when I just recently discovered a timely call for papers to be published in the Fall 2009 Community Literacy Journal--a special issue on Sustainability, the Environment, and Community Literacy. Delighted because, as our increasingly informatic biosphere labors under ecosystemic distress and the rhetoric of green computing finally begins to catch the attention of rear-guard IT in academia, I cannot imagine a more exigent nexus of concerns. Disappointed (only slightly) because, well, the deadline has come and gone. This disappointment dissipates as I type, because I know this special issue will be a valuable resource for Mt,. Zion Human Services and USFSP as we grow our partnership

I won an internal New Investigators Grant this year, and although it took me 9 months to find a community partner (I was originally trying to put thinclient clusters in public schools), I have recently gone into the most fruitful collaboration with a large human services center here in St. Pete. While USF seems wary of migrating to linux and exploring sustainable computing alternatives, Mt. Zion Human Services has nothing to lose and everything to gain so our plans have quickly meshed and we are moving forward, and quick. Our collaboration has already impacted USF's 5 year strategic plan--the discourses of sustainability, civic engagement, and the community literacy dimensions of the open source movement finally seem to be converging here right now.

Forming partnerships between university and communities: learning sustainable practices. In our case, communities with less resources for maintaining site licenses offer less resistance to migrating to sustainable computing models. Although Linux is hard to grok at first, a novelty that seems to good to be true (free operating systems and no site licensing fees? yes), the social costs of migration are less daunting to Mt. Zion than they are to USF IT. And while USF has an entrenched campus computing monoculture, many of the younger potential users of technology in the Mt. Zion community have yet to even engage, much less become addicted to, the Microsoft GUI. While USFSP is willing to consider long-term and limited pilots, Mt. Zion Human Services can move now, and quick, and will certainly teach ecocomposition strategies to USFSP. This "biospheric community literacy" will emerge in response to immediate, local conditions, of course--with special consideration for the bottom line. At the same time, in recognition of our increasingly integrated (intertwingled!) condition as a planetary commons, new technological designs can address the "triple bottom line" emphasized in the green computing ethic. The triple bottom line understands the need for businesses to turn a profit, but insists that profit cannot come at the expensive of people and the planet that sustains us--this "people, planet, profit" mantra expands evaluation criteria to include social, economic, and environmental considerations. This sets the scene for organizations supporting mindfulness on many levels--conservation psychology and ecological education, in an interconnected and informatic biosphere, emerge in the moment, in local contexts that resonate globally.