The French street artist JR has just been awarded the $100,000 TED prize. The prize gives money to one person each year to enable their “wish” to be fulfilled. JR’s wish is for us all “to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we’ll turn the world…INSIDE OUT.” The Inside Out Project involves people submitting black and white portraits which are then turned into over-sized posters and sent back to the submitter for display in their community.

JR’s work has been essentially this: displaying portraits writ large of community members within the community. He has captured the faces of the banlieues of Paris, both sides of the wall dividing the Israelis and Palestinians, and the slums of Kenya Sierra Leone and Brazil. The video below gives a good history to his work and shows some stunning examples of it in situ.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/20543283]

The Oakland Tribune has an editorial on the inequitable fees charged for commercial solar installation permits by city governments in Contra Costa and Alameda counties. The differences can be an order of magnitude between cities. The Sierra Club, which studied the different fees, found a range of $1,500 to $2,500 would cover the costs of the the permitting process. Yet, some cities in the Bay Area are charging up to ten times as much.

Commercial buildings are a huge source of electricity demand. It makes no sense to penalize their owners for trying to find renewable alternatives. The article points out that these fees were probably levied as some sort of income generating scheme for the cities involved, but this is short-sighted. On a local level, they are inhibiting the creation of jobs and the diversification of the power grid. On a global level, of course, they are effectively encouraging increased resource consumption and carbon emissions.

I just came across the site for Games for Change, an advocacy group for making games with social impacts. The amount of games with social messages made for online audiences, on social networks and for download is impressive – and growing. Games for Change is tapping into the ever-increasing popularity of video games,and taking advantage of social media connections, to raise awareness about issues in a way that hasn’t been possible before. Their website has links to dozens of games categorized around the issues that they touch upon.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/17001067]

From a communications standpoint, the market for online, casual gamers – the top 3 games on Facebook have over 100 million users – is a goldmine. Having played and discussed games like SPENT and Free Rice, I can understand the instant appeal that games can have as social messages. The player is engaged in an interactive experience that demands more of their attention than just watching a video or reading text, no matter how compelling they might be. Add to that the ability to spread the message and the game from within the game and you have a nearly perfect formula for a self-propagating communications campaign.

Personally, I don’t play any Facebook games that require recruiting more players. I’m just too adverse to running a multi-level marketing scheme among my friends. I think it’s a different story, though, when one receives a message from a friend about a game for social change. It’s easy to understand that the game is more than just getting higher numbers for Zynga to take to their IPO. I think social gaming for social good has a lot of potential to change players – knowingly or not – into do-gooders.

Jon Stewart once again proves that he is the only mainstream TV journalist with the integrity, chutzpah and intellect to actually do the job of asking hard questions to people that matter. Watch the 30 minutes of his extended interview with former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. My favorite moment was Jon’s question at the 1:55 mark of the third video. At times, I did actually want see Jon give Rumsfeld more chances to answer on a few of his questions.

Stewart-Rumsfeld interview Pt. 1

Stewart-Rumsfeld interview Pt. 2

Stewart-Rumsfeld interview Pt. 3

Freedom from Hunger, the pioneering microfinance institution where I once worked, is in a competition to win $23,000 from a local management company. If you feel like helping out, you can go here to vote for them (up to once per day). The voting form is at the bottom of the page. Please feel free to send this link, or the Facebook counterpart, out to your network.