Sebastian Pauer's Blog (13)

Experience with Evoke

Evoke was the first serious online game that I have played, and as such I made many new experiences while doing so. The first challenge was to learn what the game is actually about and how to use the website to accept and complete missions and quests. Thanks to the introductory videos and the intuitive navigation it did not take a lot of time to get things up and running.

The comics used to introduce each…

After reading the five articles on crisis communication from the Neiman Foundation for Journalism, the one I want to talk about is number two, covering risk. There, Peter Sandman explains that the risk of an emergency event can be divided into two parts: the hazard, meaning how likely it is to hurt or kill people, and the outrage, which describes how people experience the crisis. Either they are emotional, mostly fearful or angry, or they are apathetic and dont care about the potential…

The year is 2086. Much has happened in the past years. The earth is now on average 3 °C hotter then it 2011, leading to melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Oil has become almost unaffordable for most, which resulted in fast adoptment of electric cars. Still, with the weather getting more extreme every year, people choose to stay at home anyway.



Instead leaving home to meet friends, people now rely on their social networking sites to stay in touch. Instead of going out…

Here is my vision of Braunschweig with improvements to urban resilience in 2020:

See the complete map …

Here in Braunschweig we are not as much in danger of natural desasters or other catastrophes as elsewhere in the world. Nonetheless even here there are situations where tools like Ushahidi can be helpful. One of the possible threats are floods from the rivers that pass through Braunschweig, Oker, Schunter and Wabe. The last flood happened in 2002.…

From the UN gender equality newsfeed, I chose the article called "Women’s participation crucial for democracies", which talks about how establishing democracy and gender equality are mutually reinforcing movements. Women participating in political matters leads to more democracy, but democracy also serves to strengthen women's rights. Therefore empowering women must me an explicit…

I believe that in the wake of the recent financial crisis, many people have lost all trust in banks. The complex financial products have made the work of banks non-transparent to the majority of people, to whom it often looks like bankers are actually working against their customers. With this background, I think that in the future there will be a much greater emphasis on social and community banking.



Social banking, a movement that is also known as ethical or sustainable banking,…

The year is 2020. The combined effort NGOs, government projects, social innovators and a mysterious organisation have provided many communities in third world countries with access to clean drinking water. Wells, filtration and rain catching systems have improved many lifes substantialy.

But now, the wealthy western nations are facing problems of their own. From the USA to Europe, nations are struggling with rapidly dwindling fresh water supplies. A series of extremely hot…

There are quite a few promising clean water projects, with the bigger ones operating internationaly, drillig wells to provide villages with drinking water. But the one that caught my attention is the smaller Life & Water Development Group - Cameroon (LWDGC). They are using simple but innovative bio sand filters to provide villages with clean water. It uses layers of sand, dirt and gravel as well as an organic layer of the natural occuring bacteria and microorganisms to purify the water.…

After some research, the power player I want to tell you about is Gyanesh Pandey. He is from Bihar, India, but moved to the United States to study electrical engineering. He then returned to India and spend years trying to find a way to provide poor people in rural areas with sustainable electricity. Since most technology like solar panels was too expensive, he finally resorted to building a power plant that transforms rice husks into energy.…

Trying to find issues with food security here in Germany is certainly harder then seeing the apparent problems in the developing nations. Personally, I have never had to worry about not having enough to eat, if anything, it is hard to decide what to choose from all the colors and flavors food companies are offering nowadays.



Having all those products available anywhere and anytime does have some ugly side effects though. In order to ensure constant availability of food in face of…

From the many useful tips and secrets on the page, there was one that really stood out to me as something that is necessary to achieve lasting change and innovation:



"Provide skills, not just finished technologies." by Amy Smith.



I strongly believe that this is something that needs to be adhered to whenever lending aid or trying to socially innovate. Taking the many countries of Africa that still suffer from extensive social and economical problems as an example, we can…