From TMB Bank, Thailand:

In 1986, in a floating village in the middle of the sea that has not an inch of soil, the kids loved to watch football but had nowhere to play or practice. But they didn’t let that stop them.

This film is based on a true story about a little island in the south of Thailand called “Koh Panyee.”

• From YouTube

This video launched a campaign for Thailand’s TMB Bank, hoping to inspire people to start small, think differently, and create positive change. The video is based on a true story. Full credits are here.

Thank you for sharing this, Charlotte Agell!

From the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities:

America needs “informed communities,” places where the information ecology meets people’s personal and civic information needs.

This means people have the news and information they need to take advantage of life’s opportunities for themselves and their families. They need information to participate fully in our system of self-government, to stand up and be heard.

Driving this vision are the critical democratic values of openness, inclusion, participation, empowerment, and the common pursuit of truth and the public interest…

To achieve this, the Commission urges that the nation and its local communities pursue three ambitious objectives:

• Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all Americans and their communities;

• Strengthen the capacity of individuals to engage with information; and

• Promote individual engagement with information and the public life of the community.

• Excerpts from: Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age
  

“On Quora you can subscribe to topics, specific answers or people.  You’re alerted when people follow you, when the create new questions in your topic area and when new people have answered the questions you’re following.

And the system is really quite smart.  First, it has DIGG like voting mechanism where you can vote up or down the quality of an answer.  If your objective is to be near the top of an answer stack (e.g. and thus be read by everybody following the topic) then you need a great quality answer.  You also need to answer the question reasonably early because when a question has been around for a while the important people aren’t likely to be going back and reading it again (thus they will neither see your answer or vote your up).

So in a way it has built in game mechanics.  And they are trying to bake in user adoption into the design of the product.  Obviously it is build on a social network “follow people” model that is asymmetric like Twitter.  When somebody is new to Quora and is following you it encourages you to “give them topics” to follow, which is clever because if they accept the topics they get more alerts, more emails – more bacn – and thus they come back to the site more frequently.

• Excerpts from Both Sides of the Table.