Invisible Children + La Blogotheque + You

What child soldiers in Uganda have to do with good music and your hands.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who helped, Invisible Children met their goal and are now bringing three fantastic artists to Uganda. They’ve just revealed the third, another epic favorite of ours: Lykke Li. You can follow the project’s progress here.

It’s a special occasion when three things we love are coming together for a world-changing cause. Case in point: Invisible Children, the fantastic social and political global movement using storytelling to empower and change lives, is partnering with La Blogotheque to take The Polyphonic Spree and Yeasayer (two of our favorite bands, so that technically takes it up to five favorites) to Uganda.

And they’re using the brilliant Kickstarter platform to crowdsource funds for it.

The project will only be funded if it raises $20,000 by 11:59PM EST on March 11. Right now, it’s at a little over halfway. Please — and we say this with our biggest, most hopeful optimism — help this absolutely life-changing cause by pledging a donation. Even if it’s as little as $10.

You know what they say, many hands make light work. And it’s a heavy burden Invisible Children is fighting. Lend a hand today.

via BOOOOOOOM

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Kopernik: Crowdfunding World-Changing Design

Humanitarian three-ways, or what Polish astronomy has to with the future of civilization.

We fully endorsed Emily Pilloton’s vision that design can empower people and change the world. But there’s often a disonnect between the world-changing products and technologies that get dreamt up, and the actual ability to fund them and get them in the hands of those who need them the most.

No more. At least not if it’s up to Kopernik, a revolutionary new social platform that connects breakthrough technologies with the people and communities whose lives they will better the most, harnessing the power of crowdsourced microfunding.

The name, of course, comes from Copernicus, the Polish Renaissance astronomer who busted the geocentric model of the universe and completely changed the way people perceived the way around them — an aspirational metaphor for Kopernik‘s ambition to revolutionize how people see and understand the biggest challenges the world faces today.

From a rollable water container for women in East Timor, to self-adjustable glasses (remember those?) for refugees without access to eye clinics, to computer training for Sierra Leonean youth, Kopernik lets development groups write short proposals and submit them to the public for crowdfunding. Sort of like a humanitarian Kickstarter, which then does a three-way connect with individual supporters, technology provider companies, and the local organizations who seek those technologies.

Founded by a team of United Nations and World Bank expats, Kopernik is planning to expand beyond crowdfunding proposals and into developing their own products with DIY and open-source instructions that local communities can use to build technologies.

Because the only kind of design revolution that’s going to stick is one where grassroots empowerment lets people take ownership of the very solutions that are changing their lives.

via TBD

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Phylomon: The Game of Life

Pokemon meets Mother Earth, or what preschoolers have to do with the life of life.

The UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. And while we’ve seen a number of smart, ambitious scientific and creative efforts inspired by and advocating nature’s bounty, the fact remains that preserving the incredible natural variety of species is in the hands of the future generations. So raising children with a biological sensibility and getting them excited about biodiversity is at the root of any viable effort.

Which is why we love the understatedly brilliant Phylomon project by The Science Creative Quarterly, a wonderful repository for well-written, unconventional scientific literature.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. ~ E. O. Wilson.

Phylomon is a web-based initiative for creating Pokemon-like cards, using real creatures and nature’s own “character design” genius. The project was inspired by a recent study that found young children have the remarkable ability to identify and characterize more than 120 different Pokemon characters, but fail to name more than half of common wildlife species. So Phylomon has set out to broaden children’s natural characters vocabulary, drawing inspiration from the clearly successful model used by “synthetic characters” like Pokemon.

Submissions will be crowdsourced from a variety of creatives, with the scientific community weighing in on the content, game designers invited to brainstorm innovative ways of using the cards, and teachers participating to evaluate the educational merit of the cards.

Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.

Because Phylomon depends so heavily on the creative community’s contributions, we urge you to submit yours. Use this Flickr pool if you’re a designer or illustrator, this one if you’re a photographer, or this one if you come from the education community.

And if you still have doubts about the momentous importance of biodiversity, take it from Ban Ki-moon, the UNSYG himself — it’s important, alright.

Read up on Phylomon and contribute — why not?

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Charting The Beatles

Some Beatles are more equal than others, or why there’s no yellow in Yellow Submarine.

We love data visualization. And we love The Beatles. Naturally, we’re all over New-York-based designer Michael Deal‘s Charting The Beatles project — an infographic exploration of the life and music of the iconic rockers, from sales statistics to personal biographies to songwriting contributions within the band.

Deal envisioned the project as a collaborative one, so there’s a Flickr pool where others can contribute their Beatles-charting exploits. There, you can find gems like Kristen E. Long’s rather convincing visual argument for The Beatles’ superior popularity over Jesus.

Besides the incredibly detailed and scholarly data revealing anything from common Beatles wisdom to little-known factoids (Did you know Ringo Starr only ever collaborated on two songs, “Dig It” and “Flying,” and “Octopus’s Garden” was the only track he wrote entirely by himself?), the project bespeaks the very richness and expanse of The Beatles’ music-turned-movement.

Charting The Beatles is the hipster answer to Christian Swinehart’s wonderfully geeky infographic dissection of Choose Your Own Adventure books. And between the richness of factual detail and the universal cultural resonance of the subject matter, it’s among the most delightful visualization projects we’ve come across in quite some time.

via Information is Beautiful

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.