In the past 20 years, technological advances have radically altered our lives, writes Kurt Andersen, but “popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.”

After a successful DIY project mapping the destruction from the BP oil spill, Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) chapters are developing new open source tools for “a more participatory civic science which is directed and owned by communities.”

For the first time the prestigious TED Prize goes to an idea instead of a person: City 2.0. It’s “the city of the future… a future in which more than ten billion people on planet Earth must somehow live sustainably.”