Late 2009 = About YESSS

Throughout the remainder of 2009, Young Ecosystems=Scholars Support Services (or YESSS) is aiming to make a difference that makes a difference.

Generally, YESSS is all about helping Students enrich their own learning experiences by combining these themes:

1) designing gifts for future generations

and

2) enjoying the study of ecosystems.

Currently, during these final few months of 2009, our focus through this site is to support activities that enable Teachers and Students to help one another with their current, creative writing assignments.

Specifically, all and any Students of creative writing are invited to get sufficiently familiar (if you're not already) with such current events as 350.org's celebration on 10.24.09 and also with our UNFCCC's gathering in Copenhegen in early December, 2009. If there's any value in the old adage "strike while the iron's hot", then let's be encouraged to take full advantage of current opportunities to learn how to manage our emergent global crises.

Although it's certainly not the only creative writing genre useful here, a fun science fiction short story seems like a pretty obvious fit with these emergent current events. To further this example, imagine getting a phone a call from someone seven generations in the future (or about 150 years from now). This future member of our human species is calling you to convey heart felt gratitude for the courageous efforts you're about to make over the next 100 days. The clear insights you and your friends help to implement actually enable humanity to manage our global climate, energy and economic crises much more ethically and much more effectively than we otherwise would have.

In addition to science fiction, well informed opinion pieces or call to action essays, or poetry or songs or plays or story boarding Public Service Announcements or T-shirt design efforts are all good avenues for the kind of collective creative writing expressions YESSS is now encouraging. To serve as a simple and specific reminder of the general themes YESSS aims to prompt, here's a haiku-like effort, I trust you may find as an enjoyably useful gift:

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Imagine you're an

ecosystem, nurtured by

"THANKS!!!" from the future ...
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Ciao for now,

paul

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(The following was first posted as "Approaching Open=Contests" sometime in late Spring or Early Summer '09)

YESSS & YESGood (aka paul & justin) are currently collaborating on an exciting exploration of an image/idea that emerged from within one of our conversations several months ago.

'Let's enjoy producing (and participating in some radically cool) open=contests!'

Since we're still in the process of discovering the meanings of this intriguing notion we're calling "open=contests", kindly bear with us and please feel free to jump in and enjoy collaborating with us on this exploration. Let's share our discoveries.

My name is paul t. horan and I founded YESSS a few years ago to help produce contests as fun human activities for generating and circulating best-in-class, ecosystem-sensible know-how. If the basic human activity of scientific research is designed to generate and circulate best-in-class knowledge as a public resource, I feel passionately that we need to celebrate this public service activity just in order to boost our collective confidence in our species' capabilities to manage and prevent the global ecosystemic crises we now confront.

So let's celebrate learning and evolving, individually and societally through seriously fun contests. Global energy, climate and economic crises are so serious that we need to have fun = in the course of consciously and compassionately confronting them = simply in order to bring our best games and perform at our maximum capabilities.

Open is so clearly the only way to go when confronting such extraordinary complexity ... I simply feel quite confident in our emergent, collaborative, self-selecting, self-organizing, complex-adaptive, human activity systems; since I know I must team-up with other good folks to share my wealth, to offer my gifts, to help enrich our public trust, because I simply can't do that on my own. Openness is a prerequisite.

Besides, it's kind of difficult to have much fun or learn much if we're not very open.

Allow me the honor of sharing this haiku that helps me make sense of this "open=contests" notion that we've begun exploring:

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"Thanks gained" for good work

is good currency's "prime source".

Let's pay it forward ...
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Ciao for now,

paul