Ever wished that your cello's bow was bluetooth-enabled? Wondering why your guitar doesn't have a USB out port? Barry Threw and Gil Carnal have been working on issues like these for years and, along with guitarist Mesut Ösgen, will be presenting—and performing—on their modified instruments at an event hosted by Swissnex, "the Swiss knowledge network," next Friday, 10/20 in San Francisco.

Stories of Health is making the country's current debate around healthcare reform personal. The website features dozens of video interviews with people from all over California who have personally experienced the consequences of our nation's healthcare system.

Building on the momentum of a series of high profile movies confronting the often appalling practices of food production in the US including Food, Inc. and Fast Food Nation, a new team of filmmakers is in the process of bringing audiences a fresh and much more optimistic take on the topic.

Registration is still open for the first Open Video Conference (6/19-21, NYU Law School), the first major public event of the Open Video Alliance—an impressive collaboration of the Yale Law School's Information Society Project, Kaltura, the Participatory Culture Foundation, iCommons, and sponsored by open source software giants Mozilla and Red Hat as well as more than a dozen other major corporate, foundation, nonprofit and academic players in the open video ecosystem. What is open video, you might ask? Have a watch (in 12 languages!):

Check out this amazing panoramic (cycloramic?) & 3D video work being produced all on open source software from the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montréal. Would love to bring these technologies & technologists together with the Global Lives Project collaborator network and try to produce some interesting content around the globe. Seems like cameras need to be stationary though, which would preclude us from following individuals around, but could allow for interesting still videos.

This piece was originally published on BBC.com in a series of four pieces on the World Social Forum, held last week in the Brazilian Amazon.

A popular slogan at the Forums in the past has been "another world is possible". This year, at a moment of deepening global financial crisis, a global reconsideration and reshaping of economy and society seems to have moved squarely into mainstream debate. So the slogan may have to be altered to "another world is probable".