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Robert Pollard

Known as Grandpa Ruh to my two grand-daughters. and more widely as Robert Pollard, I coordinate a Rainwater Harvest Beautification Project at La Perla Garden - a GreenThumb community garden in New... read more Known as Grandpa Ruh to my two grand-daughters. and more widely as Robert Pollard, I coordinate a Rainwater Harvest Beautification Project at La Perla Garden - a GreenThumb community garden in New York's Manhattan Valley, and serve as Information Ecologst, <b>Information Habitat: Where Information Lives</b>, an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic & Social Council that I had founded in 1990. My current focus is on <b>Climate Change 3.0</b> - <a href="http://www.climatechane3.net/">www.climatechane3.net</a> the design and development of a network of web sites, on a common open source platform incorporating interoperable modules such as wiki, wordpress, etc, on behalf of the <b>NGO Committee on Education</b> of <b>CONGO</b> - the Conference of NonGovernmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations - with a focus on the <b>United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development</b>, the <b>International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World</b>, the <b>Decade of Action: Water for Life</b> and the <b>Millennium Development Goals</b>. See <b><a href="http://www.un-documents.net">www.un-documents.net</a></b> for an initial compilation of an evolving hyperlinked body of relevant UN documents and global agreements. Grandpa Ruh has been actively involved in pioneering and promoting the use of ICT in support of broad-based access to and exchange of information and participation in decision-making - for almost 25 years, from his role as Co-Founder - in 1981 - of the <b>Baltimore Information Cooperative</b>, and since 1989 in connection with participation in the series of global conferences organized by the United Nations - beginning with the <b>1992 Earth Summit</b>. A passionate organic gardener, for whom compost piles have been a lifelong focus of his appreciation of the regenerative and healing powers of nature, Ruh had been without a garden for all but a brief period since moving to New York in 1993, he has been celebrating his return to the garden since July 4, 2005, when he created an Independence Day Worm Feast for <b>La Perla Garden</b> in New York's Upper West Side in the Garden's compost pile that he has continued to feed with kitchen compost; Ruh launched <a href="http://www.worms-first.net">Worms First Cooperation Circles</a> - to mark the quiet July 4 ceremony. Now that spring has arrived, he is spending more and more time in the wonderful garden, with visions of it evolving as a prototype learning center for peaceful and regenerative development, grounded in appreciation of the healing and regenerative properties of nature. Perhaps not surprisingly, he is nurturing a vision of an interactive community web site for the garden, including a prototype for a biodiversity map of the garden and neighbourhood. In recent years, Grandpa Ruh's focus has been on the development of information ecology as a holistic life science, and as a foundation for an operating system for sustainability, justice and peace, and launched <b><a href="http://www.seasons-of-peace.net">Seasons of Peace Cooperation Circles</a></b> - an open space for interfaith cooperation and dialogue to be developed on an information ecology platform - on September 21, 2004, the International Day of Peace. One of Ruh's more recent TakingItGlobal projects - <b>Inner Gardens</b> - based on a vision of creating a natural space in which to connect the many projects that have grown in the fertile fields, valley, mountains and rivers of Information Ecology has been merging with a experiencing Grandpa Ruh adopted his current name in March 2005, to celebrate the upcoming birth of his first grandchild - Isabella Sophia - his approaching 60th birthday in April and the name Ruh Nabil that he had been given when he 'took hand' as a dervish in the <b>Nur Ashki-Jerrahi Sufi Order</b> on Thanksgiving Day 2004. Ruh grew up in Croydon, England, South of London, and has lived in the U.S. since 1966, after receiving a B.A. in Mathematics and Political Economy at Cambridge University and accepting the offer of a position as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Human Sciences in Boston College, to work on a <b>Quantitative Analysis of the French Revolution</b>. On the basis of high S.A.T. scores, he was offered a Graduate Fellowship at the Social Relations Department of <b>The Johns Hopkins University</b>, with a focus in mathematical sociology and quantitative research for which he was well-suited. However, he became increasingly active in the Vietnam Peace movement and in the alternative culture of the 1960s - through which he developed a lifelong interest in meditative spiritual traditions - especially Lao Tsu's <b>Tao Te Ching</b> - The Way of Nature - and in holistic approaches, organic gardening, whole foods, etc. Ruh left the "promise" of an academic career as a social scientist / mathematical sociologist in 1972 just short of his Ph.D., having chosen to submit a report of his doctoral research as a Master's thesis, and to forego an ambitious mathematical model of behaviour he had been developing. However, he continues as an independent scientist, researcher and practitioner, combining his professional training as a mathematician, economist, social scientist, methodologist, researcher with skills and experience as a community activist, organic gardener, jail librarian and administrative analyst, database developer and electronic publisher in support of participatory organizations and networks active on issues of peace, justice, and a restoration of the earth. Since 1980 much of this path has focused on the cultivation of an appreciation of the value of information technology for non-profit, community-based and non-governmental organizations and the development of information ecology as a holistic life science. More recently this has evolved into a broader concern with the global transformation to digital knowledge-based society, economies and environments. As Founder & Information Ecologist of Information Habitat: Where Information Lives Grandpa Ruh has played a leadership role in many NGO Committees and Network, frequently establishing and managing electronic mailing lists, directories of members, and a web presence. While his primary focus is with the NGO Committee on Education, the committee wplans to seek the involvment of all the NGO committees, given the scope of education for sustainable development and a culture of peace. When Grandpa Ruh is not immersed in the wonders of <b>La Perla Garden</b>, he spends lmost all of his time in a hermit-like existence in his tiny study that serves him as a nursery for the many information ecology projects, developing complex <b>DataPerfect</b> relational databases that he uses, inter alia, to generate sets of web pages for the various domains he manages, exploring and documenting the evolution of information species, and witnessing what he understands as a set of cascading processes towards the profound new <b>Nash Equilibrium</b> of a virtually-free market that enables enjoyment of a virtually infinite knowledge-based universe.

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