The Future of Village Innovation Talks and the Global Villages Network

We invite all friends to join us in a physical and virtual meeting in the Austrian Village of Polling, which has a small beautiful groups of farms on a hill called Aigelsberg (see picture). The Date is August 10th.

Here in Aigelsberg is a farm with a truly global-minded owner, Rajah Guptar-Öllinger, originating from India. Rajah has agreed to make Aigelsberg a center for global encounter of Village Innovators. Already there is a conference room for 200 + people, several suites, rooms for groups.We want to grow this with more accomodations and installations (libarary, coworkiing office, rooms and more on neighboring farms) into a truly global village study and information center. In a first meeting end of June we also had a business manager from China as guest and we also tested the concept with local village decision makers.

The villagers first were a little bit overwhelmed by the idea that we seek to create a "book and study village" in this area but soon they found the idea attractive and very suitable to their own aspirations. We are close to the German-Austrian Border and easy to reach for people from all German speaking countries, so we have a core community, and secondly we are in the heart of Europe with the most developed and advanced rural inrastructure in the world, so we might well target an international audience to develop together and find solutions for villages in all walks of life and on the whole globe.

So we scheduled a first, preliminary Network meeting on the 10th of August, to create a coming together of the manifold aspects of the Global Villages Network and get the process going. We will have live online contributions from many parts of the world by live videoconferencing and very intersting local contributors.

Videobridging and Village Innovation Talks will of course be one of the hot subjects. We think that a good base for VIT will be that Communities declare themselves Future Communities, Learning Communities, Open Communities. The bottomline is that they should value cooperation much higher than competition, that they understand that the whole world will thrive on cooperation and communication and it wil break apart if we continue the competition path.

Luckily, we found that several Austrian communities and local governments just created independently of us an association just for that purpose - "Initiative Futurespaces" / "Initiative Zukunftsorte". So we will seek to join forces in Aigelsberg. We want to base our activities in strong local support, but we also will seek funding and sponsorship from all sides that have begun to understand that the health of society at large is bease on healthy communities - and that most of their functions are not replaceable by larger entities in the long run. But locals need to learn a lot to provide an equivalent for urban living standards in rural areas.

Village Innovation Talk calls for cooperative sharing of knowledge between rural and urban communities around the globe - using the best in Broadband Communication and Visual Interaction to enable people to talk to each other in a "v2v - village to village" style. It is all about learning and the foundation of a learning system that supports and augments local life everywhere on this planet. Its about a Virtual University of the Villages.