Building communities

Building communities

Imagine a service designed to help you acquire knowledge in the most efficient way possible. It goes straight to the source and organizes information in a clear, concise fashion that serves you key ideas from the titans of knowledge, bedrock concepts from various disciplines, as well as highly specialized interests, on a silver platter.

In short, that is Knowledge Buffet (KB). But the promise and potential of what you could find on www.knowledge-buffet.com in the future is even more exciting. Not only a platform for creating a customized program for your personal learning, but a more effective approach to constructing university courses or setting up multidisciplinary research.

We live in an age of informational overload. There is...

Read more: Brain Food?

Building communities

We quite spontaneously equate “teambuilding” with “leadership.”  This might be a misperception. In the teambuilding process each team member is a team builder, and nothing can be achieved without the active participation of all people involved.  Both team spirit and the fruits of the project on which the team works belong to all those who participated in it.  You may say that in every collective project there are two things created at the same time: the work that is accomplished (a rocket, a magazine, a building, a new medication…) and the team that has produced the work.

However, it is true that, in every team, there are people whose specific service is to ensure the cohesion and wellbeing of the team as a human group...

Read more: Teambuilding

Building communities

Before going travelling to Indonesia in September 2009, I had felt that I was loosing a lot of faith in the world of art which I was beginning to perceive as lofty, rhetorical, but generally detached from the masses. In a twist of fate, in Yogyakarta, Central Java, I stumbled across a treasure chest, and within it I discovered a group of socially conscious and politically concerned performance artists, called ’Performance Klub’. When hearing about their international Perfurbance#3 festival I was reinvigorated with enthusiasm for art. Inspired by the explosive activism I met in this country relatively new to political freedoms, I returned to Taipei in search of what similar manifestations I could find.

So what makes a socially engaged...

Read more: Socially Engaged Artists in Yogyakarta and Taipei

Building communities

One thing that makes you desperate about the world is that problems, big and small, seem to remain around without ever being solved. Afghanistan makes Obama sleepless; the Middle East changes only for the worse; negotiations on climate change are protracted; bankers have gone back to their indecent bonuses; corruption and short-term interests are still hindering the shift towards sustainable development in most countries; Taiwan politics remains… well… Taiwan politics… and the list could go on indefinitely.

Of course, when you look more carefully at the picture you might feel a little less desperate. People easily forget the progresses already accomplished, the breakthrough having occurred in the past, and we all naturally focus on...

Read more: Hope against all hopes

Building communities

Shanghai World Fair comes with a surprise: The Tushanwan Museum, to be opened in May next year, celebrates the Tushanwan Training Studio and Orphanage established in 1852 by Jesuit missionaries. A project managed by the Xuhui District Cultural Bureau.

The founder of the workshop was the Jesuit Spanish Brother Juan Ferrer born near Valencia in 1817. His father had been a distinguished sculptor who had worked on the decoration of the Escorial Palace. He entered the Jesuit order in Naples where he was completing his artistic education and, on his request, was sent to China in 1847. He drew the blueprint of several churches of Shanghai and contributed in their decoration. With the approval of his superiors he founded a training workshop in...

Read more: A Museum for Tushanwan

Building communities

The Homi public housing development (“Danchi” in Japanese) in the Homigaoka area of Toyota City, in Aichi Prefecture, is now home to a large population of Brazilian immigrants. They mainly came to the area to work at Toyota and related manufacturing jobs, but are now often the first to lose those jobs due to the worsening recession. The Homi Danchi (population over 11,000) is decades old and was originally inhabited entirely (or almost entirely) by Japanese, but due to its affordable prices and location now has a majority of Brazilians, and the stores in the area reflect that ethnic shift.

Tensions between the Japanese and Brazilian residents of the Danchi over such issues as garbage disposal and communication difficulties have...

Read more: Brazilian community in the Homi Danchi, Toyota City