Sky’s Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation — Spreading the word in a networked world

I don’t know where they came up with the title Dropping Knowledge but here’s an interesting project - getting together 112 world “experts” to sit around a giant table and give their answers to the pressing-questions-facing-our-world submitted by people.

Hard for me to tell whether this is primarily a media event, or is it a serious investigation? Maybe it’s also an “artistic” event in the same sense as The Missing Peace?

I first became aware of it thru YouTube, where Professor Robert Thurman was promoting it. (It’s worth clicking the link and viewing the videos!)

But the site of the Dropping Knowledge project itself is pretty interesting. There’s also a meta-layer here that I’d like you to pay attention to — the increasing use of technology, and particularly networked technology (the Internet) to make this kind of examination of questions and concepts available broadly around the world.

We see this in One, in Belief Net, in the infrastructure-promoting AirJaldi Summit, and hopefully we will also see it in our own online presence (some day soon) at The Dalai Lama Foundation. But, meanwhile, I will keep pointing out examples elsewhere, and hope that they’ll be of interest to you.

The Missing Peace is a major project that The Dalai Lama Foundation is co-sponsoring with the Committee of 100 for Tibet. It’s an art exhibition, composed of works by 88 artists from 30 countries. It opened at the UCLA Fowler Museum in June, 2006, and will tour the world.

The idea is to explore the Dalai Lama’s conception of peace, as seen thru the eyes of these artists.

I thought it might be fun for those who are unable to physically get to the exhibit to be able to explore it online. So, I toured the exhibit with a digital camera and built a “virtual tour” that anyone with a computer can explore online.

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Xeni Jardin has written a nice wrap-up article on the Dharamsala wireless mesh in Wired online. This nicely complements the four-part NPR series she did earlier this month (series which includes audio, of course, plus online components at the NPR web site).

Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing et al - also see her entry in Wikipedia) has created a four-part series entitled Hacking the Himalayas that includes lots of coverage of the TibTec wireless network (sponsoring the upcoming AirJali Summit) in Dharamsala. You can find an online version of the series at the NPR web site.

The four segments are:

• The Gaddi People of Dharamsala
• Connecting Tibet’s Exile Community
• A Wireless Network for ‘Little Lhasa’
• Tradition vs. Change in ‘Lhasa Vegas’

It’s well worth catching!