In a nice piece of unplanned synergy, this is our 5,000th post, and tomorrow is our three-year anniversary.
It's quite odd, actually, to think that it's only been three years since we put up our first post (about Jim Moore's essay, The Second Superpower). That seems an age ago.
Looking back, though, it's amazing how well the stories we wrote that first month have anticipated the work we've done in the three years since, with pieces on Corruption and Transparency International, the Thai Bio-Solar House, the Earth Simulator, Organic Photovoltaics, Open Source and the Developing World. the Public Library of Science, Open Source Biology, Car-Free Cities, Creative Commons and Copyleft, Biomimicry, "Soft Paths" for Water, Solar Power in the Developing World, Knowing Nature Through Technology, Reducing Poverty and Greening Mega-Cities, The Ethics of Nanotechnology, Sustainable Business, MySociety, WiFi in the Himalayas and Ecological Economics.
It's also amazing to see how quickly many ideas we once thought fringe have moved so quickly into the mainstream. Sustainability, social change, collaborative innovation and emerging technologies are all popular concerns now. The Worldchanging community has had at least some small part in helping create that change.
That's terrific, and presents us here with both with amazing opportunities and some real challenges.
On the one hand, the upsurge in people working on innovative solutions (while an excellent thing in itself) is going to make it harder to continue to cover the expanding frontier of tools, models and ideas for building a better future. Approaches are shifting; new models emerging, and new and old tools converging: we're all in a process of rapid discovery. In times like these, good horizon-scanning and innovation diffusion become almost as difficult and important as solution creation itself.
On the other hand, we're moving as quickly as we can to create amore powerful infrastructure for finding and sharing good solutions. Our book will be out in a matter of weeks, and available in North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand immediately, with wider distribution and a French translation to follow shortly after. Our book tour launches in November. We're also getting ready to roll out our newly redesigned look, including some features which'll make it easy to get and track the information you most want. And we're about to announce a couple major new editorial efforts and partnerships. The next three months are going to be phenomenal ones. Stay tuned.
We're in a headlong race here on our planet, as we've long remarked. Difficult social trends are accelerating and ecological damage accumulating: we're moving quickly in the wrong direction. But many more people are paying attention to the world's interlocking serious problems, and working to solve them: we're getting better at changing directions. Whether we will can change direction fast enough is still an open question.
But we plan to do our bit, helping to spread good new thinking as quickly and widely as we can. Hopefully our work is making a difference.
Finally, we'd like to thank you. The group of people who've come together around Worldchanging -- readers, allies, the extended network of sources and occasional collaborators, volunteers, contributors, and supporters -- is the most amazing group of people we've ever known, and a source of constant inspiration and optimism. Thank you.
