Tuesday 28th September 2010, Bristol UK, 10am - 5pm

In this mini-conference, we will explore the concept of global equity in the light of Earth’s biophysical limits. Participants bring experience and knowledge of community engagement, policy and politics, economics, environmental science, systems analysis, and more, promising broad and deep discussions.

We're pleased to present the final thesis paper from Master's Students; Simon Evitts, Brendan Seale and Dylan Skybrook of the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden: Developing an Interconnected Worldview: a guiding process for learning.

The team says: We wrote this thesis paper in order to explore how to develop an interconnected worldview. We chose this as a focus because we felt that the root cause of unsustainability is a reductionist, mechanistic worldview that doesn’t see the connections between actions and outcomes, especially if the action and the outcome are separated by time or distance. Concepts like Contraction and Convergence depend on understanding the world as an interconnected whole. And in fact people do understand the concept when thinking about it abstractly.

We are inviting you to join our Collaborative Learning Network (CLN) – where you can engage in rich dialogue with us and with each other in an intentional, generative collaboration towards innovation. We would like you to support us by sharing your expertise, insights, comments, feedback and ideas without which this project is a mere shadow of is true potential.

The Collaborative Learning network has the role of bringing together individuals and organisations with different viewpoints from different sectors and disciplines to find solutions that rise above our individually limiting perspectives. It is a network of stakeholders from different fields, bringing with them the various resources necessary for co-generating solutions and to undertake our research together in novel ways.

The CONVERGE team is together once again except this time we are on the shore of Lake Apavatn Iceland. Thick slabs of ice rack up on the beach welcoming the recent arrival of a pair of white swans. No swanky hotels for us, we decided as a team to keep our ecological footprint low where we can. We will be staying in a wooden cottage, kindly loaned to us by Vala’s family where we will hold our meetings for the 3 days and share meals predominantly from locally sourced foods.

Students studying towards an Msc in Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden) will be joining with the CONVERGE project to write their thesis. Simon Evitts, Dylan Skybrook and Brendan Seale want to research how to enable "sustainable development through perceptual awareness of interconnectedness", and hope to "build an educational tool that supports transition towards a sustainable society by encouraging a systems understanding of the world".

The Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) is ranked by the EESD Observatory as the best among Swedish technical universities and third among the 56 evaluated European universities for Engineering Education for Sustainable Development. BTH has a long standing relationship with project partner The Natural Step, so earlier this year a call was sent out to BTH requesting students submit proposals to the CONVERGE project for research that would be cover an area of interest to the CONVERGE project.

Last Summer before CONVERGE's official launch, Dr. Cletus Babu was interviewed for The Tablet. 2009 was the 25th Anniversary of Social Change and Development (SCAD) the organisation Cletus founded. In those 25 years SCAD has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the poorest circumstances. CONVERGE would like to take this opportunity to talk about Cletus and SCAD and express our deep gratitude for having SCAD involved in the CONVERGE project. The interview is attached as a pdf.

Happy New Year from the CONVERGE Team!

2009 was a fabulous year for the CONVERGE project. The CONVERGE project was awarded a grant from the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme in September and after many months of evolving the project proposal, research was finally underway. Now 4 months into the project, things are hotting up. CONVERGE has a website and will shortly be commmunicating progress via many other means including Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, and more local publication outlets around the world. The administrative backbone of the project is in place, we're using googledocs and googlesites to manage our research internally and are highly appreciative of tools such as Skype, Mind Manager, Xmind and  Stella.

The CONVERGE team is sitting at a large table in an old farmhouse in Skanor, southern Sweden. peals of laughter fill the air aswell as serious challenges, the atmosphere is one of fun, learning and respect. We are face-to-face for the second time following the official start of the project this September to learn together about Systems thinking including how we can use causal loop diagrams to further our work.

With a keen eye on project sustainability, the location for the workshop, a large farmhouse owned by the University of Malmo, has the team kipping together in bunk rooms, cooking together and pooling our resources. This it turns out is far more fun, great for team building and far more efficient (from an ecological footprint perspective) then descending on a swanky hotel in Lund.