Clinton Global Initiative call

Campfire
1

Hello

I haven’t been here for a while and intend to remedy that. I saw this call from the Clinton Foundation on Open IDEO and thought it might interest some Edgeryders. I don’t know if there is (eventually) money for winners but there is an event in September to share ideas.

The Clinton Global Initiative – an initiative of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation – and OpenIDEO are asking the global community to help design solutions to improve opportunities and pathways to employment that will unleash young people’s potential around the world. More on:

https://openideo.com/challenge/youth-employment-pathways/brief.html

Hope it’s of interest

Bridget

2

Good to see you!

Wow, @Bridget McKenzie, it’s really good to read you again! How have you been? How’s Meg?

I checked out the call, thank you for flagging it. It seems that there is not much on the table:

A handful of winning ideas will be highlighted and one participant will be selected to attend CGI’s 10th Annual Meeting in September 2014, where their idea will be recognized. 

Also, I am personally uninspired by the way the question is asked. How might we build better employment opportunities and pathways for young people around the world? I feel like the original Edgeryders exercise had a compelling answer:

  1. We can't do that. If democratic institutions had a way to do it, they would have done already. The real question is: how do we thrive in a post-employment "robots stole my job" economy?
  2. And anyway, who's "we"? Complexity theory teaches it that a great many things are emergent; experimental psychology teaches us that humans tend to overestimate human agency and underestimate other factors, like randomness and path dependencies. Combining these two, we get a picture that says "we" (as in "we the people") is a delusional concept: "we" don't really have much of a say in what happens. Conversely, we (no quote-unquote: we as in the emergent social dynamics resulting from our interactions with each other) are collectively and blindly bringing about mass unemployment (and worse: climate change, feral finance, globalization etc.) on each other. In this scenario, making a collective decision to solve some problem, even a "right" decision, is probably not going to help, because such decisions are unenforceable. What happens at the macro level, happens: it is only at the micro- (individual) and mesoscale (community) that we get our hands on the steering wheel. But we need to take the macro scenario as a given, including high and rising unemployment in the West. 

It’s a little grim, but liberating. Once I took it onboard, I could finally get on with the work.