Here is a strawman summary for the About sections in the US Resilience Systems and their Resilience Network subsystems.

Many Americans are feeling a decline in their quality of life and funcitonal life capacity if they do not actively engage in more resilient and sustainable community.  Increasing numbers are committed to making sure that the food they are eating is healthy, and the water they are drinking is pure, sufficient in quanity for their consumption and food production, and will not be contaminated.  They want to live and work within communities in which economic deline and high energy spikes will not compromise their abiiity to travel to work, or heat and cool their homes.  They want to live within a social ecology in which they are not at risk of going without essential health care or of losing their homes.  Resilience Systems and their Resilience Networks provide essential infrastructures to ensuring these basic needs as the U.S. faces more challenging times ahead.

Information Technology (IT) and Information Sharing Environments (ISEs) are crucial to the evolution of community health resilience.  Most people working to improve community health resilience do not understand the nuances of Information Sharing Environments, and how the rapid shifts in IT, mobile devices, social media, cloud computing, peer to peer parallel processing, smart grids, and the linking of millions of people, mobile devices, computers, and sensors are creating a societal mind, which is transforming community health resilience and the health and human security of Americans.

If you have thoughts on these topics, please comment within this collaboratory thread.

Venice, California has long been a center of innovation within Los Angeles.  Its boardwalk is a spectacle of creativity and entrepreneurship in an open community setting, where the LA megalopolis meets the beach and the Pacific Ocean.  This combination attracts millions of visitors a year in a very small area.

As a result, Venice -- in addition to its opportunities, also struggles with significant and growing challenges with homelessness, drugs, and crowd control, amongst the other problems that all communities face in an economic downturn within a time of energy descent. 

The result?  Both the opportunities and the problems now require creative energy from the Venice community itself to shape what Venice wants to be in the early 21st century. 

Please place your comments on how Venice community members might think about shaping their community to enhance it during the challenging years ahead.