James Samuel

After watching this video, I followed the link to the Natural Homes site, and discovered this beautiful gallery of photos (below), which led me in turn to the Facebook gallery with explanations of each photo according to that most inspiring book “A Pattern Language“. I was given this book by my wife when I was [...]

Here’s the Prezi I created to guide the five hour Social Media session with Otago Polytechnic’s heads of department. I’m posting it here as a resource for the people who attended that event, as there are a number of videos and links we didn’t have time to explore fully on the day. View this on [...]

I’ve been thinking and talking with friends about the implications of Facebook and Google’s filtering processes, and how they pander to our interests and tend to reinforce our personal world view. So it was great to find this TED video posted by a Facebook friend the other night. Eli Pariser articulately points out the limiting tendency of Google and Facebook’s sophisticated algorithms, which ‘feed’ us with content and information that match up with what they have notice have previously attracted our attention.

Software is being developed to facilitate vegetable box schemes, offering practical community benefits where ever it is used, and being software it can be used everywhere. The idea is to make is easy to coordinate the collection (gathering) of local food, and then the redistribution of it, in a consistent and predicatable manner. It will create opportunities to entrepreneurial types to quickly begin a local business that benefits eaters (all of us) and growers alike.

Implementing GTD, a personal management system, has been an enlivening and even liberating experience, one that’s freed up my attention. Now when I focus on a particular project the next steps become quickly obvious, and I process tasks, undistracted, at a fantastic rate.

Earlier this year, Loo was awarded the Prime Minister’s Science Media Communication prize. This enabled her the time and resources to invest in a exploration of New Zealand – the people, their visions, their needs, their sense of identity. It is my [Jaime's] job to help Loo, uncover the ways to make it possible. To unravel the ecosystem of amazing people and abundant opportunities.

Yesterday was momentous. If you have been following Ooooby news, you’ll know that a number of people have been beavering away on this one for the last three months. Well yesterday we delivered.

Nothing beats an organic, nutrient dense beet grown in your very own backyard. But what if you can’t grow everything you eat?

How do you decide which is the next best?

There is an abundance of websites offering information on the environmental impacts of materials used in our day to day clothing and the methods by which they are manufactured and traded. Watch a video of Bee speaking about hekedesigns where she makes beautiful clothes from what would otherwise have been tossed out on the garbage heap.

This presentation came as a bonus to the work I was doing for the Waiheke Community Supported Agriculture project. As I attempted to find an effective way to communicate the “How” of that project, I found myself describing a model that could be applied to projects in general. Ever since coming across the Transition Towns [...]