Your browser (Internet Explorer 7 or lower) is out of date. It has known security flaws and may not display all features of this and other websites. Learn how to update your browser.
Oslo is a beautiful city. We have already commented on the Noble Peace Centre and the opportunity to learn about ways to make peace – or to or to dismiss it as of less value than going out to dinner (see our last blog). But Oslo also impressed us with another unique idea – the Oslo Business for Peace Award. Read more
“I can’t believe we paid money for this.” They were two American tourists, and we were standing in the Nobel Peace Museum in Oslo. We were surrounded by stories of awe-inspiring individuals who had changed the course of history through their commitment to justice at whatever cost (and many paid a very high price for their convictions and activism), and apparently (for some) the experience wasn’t worth the $20 entry fee. Read more
You can read about it, see a documentary about it, make a donation to it, buy a cow at Christmas to put in it, but until you experience it, it is really hard to fully understand. Read more
Professor Nico Stehr, the Karl Mannheim Professor of Cultural Studies at the Zeppelin University in Germany remarked on the first day of the Masters of Social Innovation program that “most of our lives are spent half-asleep”. It jolted me awake given the fog of jetlag that was floating around in the corners of my brain.
The focus of our discussion was ‘knowledge’ and how knowledge differed from ‘information’. It is well acknowledged that those living in the Western world have more access to information than at any other time in history. But does this information give us knowledge? Or does this information keep us half-asleep? Read more
One the second day of the Masters in Social Innovation program, two questions were asked – how much is enough, and what makes for a ‘good life’?
The questions are analysed in a book by Robert and Edward Skidelsky called How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life. The authors ask, within a world of ever diminishing resources, how much ongoing consumption is really necessary to achieve a ‘good life’?
That got us thinking about the Western world we live in, why it operates the way it does, and what we might do about it. Read more