Despite their ominously Orwellian name, the Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab is doing a very happy thing. Their Peace Dot Initiative uses new media technology as a tool for building peace, aggregating resources that facilitate friendship, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing across cultures. And while this seems a bit vague and blue-skied at first, their idea for how to do it is kind of neat:
The Peace Dot idea is simple: Orgs set up a subdomain at http://peace.[DomainName].com. At that page orgs share their work. At Stanford, we gather Peace Dot pages into a directory. -Peace Dot Initiative
This is a pleasantly decentralized way of doing things, particularly because it frees up participating organizations to tailor their contributions to the work they do best (plus allows them to design from their existing page and aesthetics). Thus, social networks like Facebook can highlight, graph, and encourage connections between people from seemingly oppositional backgrounds; non-profits like Khan Academy can distribute free educational videos to the kids who need them; and communities like SourceForge can collaborate on design and software solutions for a more livable world. All Stanford has to do is put them in one place and apply some useful filtration features.
A cool idea, and good to see. Whether it's crowdsourced diplomacy, geolocation apps, augmented reality, or location-based games, it's increasingly clear that digital media has crossed that last, long bridge back to the real world.
