Open source Christmas
2008 has seen international economic crisis, transformational political change and several new verbs including ‘to facebook’ [with circa 130 million active users]. But how have these incidents influenced our psyche’s and how will this Christmas season change Americans?
Today, Americans are seeing retail stores slashing already low priced—from 50, 60 to even 70 percent. Many consumers continue to wait for even deeper discounts. According to a new survey from the National Retail Federation as of 14 December 2008, 40 million people hadn’t even started shopping.
According to one shopper on National Public Radio [21 December 2008, All Things Considered], “I’m nowhere near done… [but] if I can get a sale, I think that’s prudent. And I’m enjoying it.” As for me, Erica Grigg, I haven’t even started and expect I’ll be cooking, knitting and e-mailing Christmas presents.
Without the money to purchase presents, I feel personal and professional relationships strengthening. Most importantly, I’ll be telling people how very important they are to me. Friends and acquaintances from across the world have influenced my life deeply and make me more engaged in international change.
Indeed, enhancing relationships and better-connected communities is much like having open source emotions; where our minds are like applications exposed for input.
This doesn’t mean we’re all open to change ourselves, but with less money—consumers have no choice but to feel less consumerist. For me, that means better relationships and more time to reconsider how I can unite my family against the normal struggles of teetering dysfunction.
Congruently, if we can improve our relationships and understand how best to open source our emotions offline, we might better solve our problems in the parallel universe of online.
And what a better way to step up to January 2009 then open source problem solving for our biggest problems our universe has ever seen; climate crisis, famine, HIV/AIDS and global poverty. Maybe this Christmas you could have more emotional ‘open source’?
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
~ by Erica Grigg on 22/12/2008.
Posted in Social entrepreneur overload, Uncategorized
Tags: environment, open source, second life
Could you please explain a little bit more about emotional ‘open source’? And how to approach it?
The ‘open source’ emotion I was speaking of in the last sentence describes how we might enable ourselves to have emotion and be humble and selfless enough to share our emotion with others in a community atmosphere.
So how will you create a circle of trust in the world full of hate. Why will I share if I have fear of getting hurt because of no reasons.