I was looking through my 'top pages' report on this site today, and a post about Arcosanti is by far the most visited page. It's pretty interesting because when you search 'arcosanti' on any of the major engines, it's no where near the first page(I actually stopped looking for it, so I don't know what pages it's on), so I'm not sure where 1300+ people have landed on that page from. Anyway, it prompted me to write some more about it. I have been in loose contact with a bunch of Alumni from Arcosanti who want to create a community website for alumni activities and groundswell. We are trying to get back on track with it in time for Paolo Soleri's 90th b-day celebration at Arcosanti this summer.

Check out the Arcosanti Alumni Network site progress and let us know what you think!

The values and movement that is Arcosanti have never been more relevant. Arcosanti aims to implode the urban landscape and current sprawling mindset into a dense urban setting. Density brings many things; proximity to vital life activities, community and strong social bonds, preservation of the surrounding ecosystem. Might it be a bad thing to live contained within a limited human city structure like an ant colony? That has yet to be seen. But if we ever do willfully decide to live within the confines of our structures for the most part(that's not to say we never leave them), I imagine humans, somewhere along the way will have cultivated a healthy "reverence for life"(to quote my good friend Chad) that we seem to lack as a mass. We will have discovered that we are a powerful force on this earth and that we need to be very conscious about what our footprint looks like, acts like, and how it effects that which is in relation to us.

Groundswell: social media

When I imagine a peaceful and just society, I work my way from the 'now' and think of what it will take for people to come to terms with consumerism/globalism/capitalism and rework their worldview around ecological principles, inclusiveness, peace, and a realistic economy. I said above that if Arcologies come to pass that humans will have cultivated a healthy reverence for life. This isn't something that we can enact in the people through laws and enforcement. It is a very personal experience and realization to begin viewing the world beyond the 'always-on' oil driven economy that we have been wallowing in for some time now. The individual has to see that they are a small being living in the confines and limits of the earth; living with the earth, and not something above it's rules. This realization I believe, will raise the masses in the form of a groundswell. And further I think this will be the first great use of the internet as people around the world continue to stop paying attention to the special interest, profit driven mass media of TV/radio/newspapers, and start to organize and use new media for progress beyond business as usual.
As people become more and more empowered by social media that the internet enables, the traditional media will further slip into dinosaur status as a much more useful, empowering, and inclusive system flourishes. Projects like Arcosanti and the people who care about them are now able to organize and communicate from anywhere, and then make things happen in the real world more effectively. The Alumni of Arcosanti want to make a tool that will help themselves bring their collective thoughts, money and action together to make Arcosanti work better and grow. It will be interesting to see how the next 40 years of Arcosanti develop as these tools come online. The first 40 have produced a really nice development, and it was only working through the traditional lines of communication to get people there and then collaborate to build Arcosanti. New lines of communication allow for a lot more coordination, idea storming, and resource pooling.
For me it is really important that the tools that we found a new world development on must be open source. It simply makes sense that foundational communications tools be collectively owned. We are going to be building the alumni site with Drupal; a content management system/framework/app framework. Call it what you will, Drupal is making huge waves on the web and is an extremely exciting tool for building your part of the internet. (Check out a list of sites that are running Drupal on Drupal's founders site) The best part of Drupal is the community of people who build and maintain it around the world. Most everyone I have met at various local meet-ups and some larger gatherings have been socially engaged and working on very interesting projects, at least. Some I have met are doing down right important work. To me it seems a perfect fit for Arcosanti and it's alumni. My hope too is that the IT team at Arcosanti will one day consider using it. As far as I can tell the main site is not running a CMS of any kind, but their Arcosanti Today blog is running an open source blogging platform called Pebble. Bravo!