Better Living through Creating Communities

Among my guilty pleasures is to celebrate Sunday morning with the New York Times. No, not the online version -- I read that most mornings. No, Sunday morning is for the behemouth, the real deal, the newspaper. Nearly every Sunday, a visitor to my house on a Sunday morning will find me in a bathrobe, huge mug of coffee at hand, and the Times spread across my dining room table.

I don't claim to read every word. Who'd want to do that? But I do scan nearly evey page, and savor every minute of it. What I don't usually finish on Sunday, though, is the Times Magazine. There's nearly always something worth enjoying throughout the week, not to mention the famous crossword puzzle.

Among my favorite issues of the Magazine each year is "Year In Ideas". This issue, which usually comes out in December, is packed with inventions, developing social trends, and miscellaneous ideas -- some quite odd, and nearly all quite interesting. This issue is so good I often hold onto it long after the recyclers have removed the rest of the 5-pound stack of paper.

The last few days, probably out of anticipation for the mid-December release of the 6th Annual edition, I have been perusing the 5th Annual edition, from December 11, 2005. What a year in ideas was 2005! But I'm not going to summarize them, but highlight those few that seem bound by a common theme:

Do-It-Yourself Cartography -- Google has empowered Web users to make their own maps, allowing for geographic display of crime statistics, real-estate listing, chat partners and family members.

Fair Employment Mark -- Under this plan, companies can seek accreditation, of sorts, for voluntarily complying with a law the Congress has yet to pass to make it illegal for companies to fire or demote on the basis of sexual orientation. You can imagine how this accreditation geek loved this idea!

Folksonomy -- Information architects are noticing that more traditional methods of categorizing information, such as the Dewey Decimal System, are being replaced by grass-roots categorization created by such Web notions as "tags" and keywords on websites.

Laptop That Will Save The World -- An MIT thought-leader has designed a durable, no-frills laptop they are trying to get into the hands of children around the world. His goal is -- through the democratization of access to information that wide distribution of such a device could bring -- to save the world.

Open-Source Reporting -- Joshua Marshal, editor of talkingpointsmemo.com, has unleashed his hundreds of thousands of readers on the world as volunteer journalists. Tapping into the expertise and, apparently, spare time of his fans, he assembled a huge information-gathering source.

Self-Fulfilling Trade Rumor -- This is merely an account of a trade of NBA players that was inspired by a blog read by one of the team owners that ultimately executed the deal. Now, it would seem, owners are checking blogs for ideas about how to make their teams better.

What links these ideas together? What stands out for me is that they all seem to reflect the notion that access to, distribution of, and manipulation of information is increasingly bottom-up, rather than top-down. They paint a picture of a world in which we would do well to keep our ears open for advice from children in Thailand using $100 laptops, or a renegade cartographer plotting important demographic trends on his homemade map, or uncovering a pattern of government corruption to grand and subtle for ordinary news organizations to detect.

It's not just that barriers to entry into the information world have lowered, as is the case with self-publishing authors. The promise of the emerging age is that it is our collaborations that will inform us, our reaching out to communities across the globe, or even creating communities on the fly.

This, then, may be our most important creative opportunity in the next few years -- the creation of community.