Sarvodaya is a Sanskrit term meaning "the welfare of all." The volunteers (and staff) work with people in villages to improve village conditions and to help the village become self-sustaining with a sense of community and mutuality. The movement works from a combined idea base of Buddhism and Gandhian principles of self-sufficiency, simple living, emphasis on the village, and spiritual liberation.

The professor, a man named Ariyaratne, wrote that the only means to peace is 'the dispelling of the view of 'I and mine' or the shedding of 'self' and the realization of the true doctrines of the interconnection between all animal species and the unity of all humanity'" (42). The Sarvodaya Movement "teaches that the causes [of suffering] lie in factors such as egoism, competition, ignorance, and disunity" (15). This is a reference to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, which I had to look up because it's been about 30 years since I originally learned about them. These factors expressed this way made me think of Weinberger's 100 lb backpack, and led me back to Henry's post on this, which now makes more sense to me, because of this case study.

Weinberger's backpack is filled with the elements of what he calls our "default philosophy," where by "we" he presumably means contemporary western culture - or more specifically - US culture, which Henry summarized as "realism" and "modernism". He says:

The Web is a return to the values that have been with us from the beginning. It is even a return to our basic self-understanding-a return from the distraction of modernism and the antihuman untruths emobided in the default philosophy we call carry with us like a hundred-pound backpack. When you set it down, you feel like you can fly. (180-81)

Summarized, these are the things in Weinberger's backpack:

• Individualism, the idea that we are first and foremost isolated human beings, that group activity is secondary.
  
• Realism. the idea that the real world is fully independent of our awareness of it.
  
• Relativism. The idea that all concepts and values depend on accidents of history and culture.
  
• Solipsism, the idea that all we can really know is what’s inside our own heads.
  

We've talked in this course about how the web only exists because people are willing to share. Weinberger said the Web is about public rights and public ownership, which is how the Sarvodaya Movement attempts to build the consciousness of the villages where it works. Their goal is to create a non-materialist focus on "following the basic premise of Gandhian economics, which states that 'civilization in the real sense of the word consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary restriction of wants'" (49).

At the core of both this movement and the shared knowledge features of the web is the shift away from "I and mine." There's much more to this idea running around my brain, but for now I can pin it to this: I have wondered many times this semester how to reconcile the open knowledge sharing afforded by the web with the individualized publication requirements and the politics of publishing (i.e., intellectual property rights, plagiarism hyperventilation, etc.) that are so foundational to the academy. Can there be a ground up movement to change the way the academy rewards knowledge production so that it is more communal? It seems so possible, and at the same time so hard to map.