Games for Civic Participation
Meeting for the week of September 19, 2022 - September 25, 2022
This Meeting at a Glance:
Program: Games for Civic Participation
Speaker: Abeer Kapoor
Is this your first time to visit us? If so, welcome to our weekly online meeting! To complete our meeting, please continue reading from here to the bottom of this page. Each Monday our week’s meeting is posted early in the morning, U.S. Pacific Time. These meetings are designed so that you can read and watch what we post anytime during the week. The entire meeting takes about 60 minutes to complete, with the video conference recording of the program being the bulk of the time. Note that you can easily read this meeting with your favorite device, so feel free to take our meeting on the go with you. Please also make sure to complete the attendance form at the bottom and leave a comment. Enjoy!
To properly attend this meeting, please:
Read and watch the content below in its entirety.
Complete the attendance survey.
Everyone is also encouraged to leave a comment in the Disqus section at the bottom of the page.
Welcome to the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley!
Here’s a message from our Club President
Hello members!
As you know, September is Basic Education and Literacy Month for Rotary. This is one of Rotary's six priority areas. Promoting Basic Education and Literacy is critical for fighting poverty, improving health, boosting community and economic growth, and supporting peace.
So, what can we do?
As Rotarians, our job is to encourage initiatives, such as teacher training, student mentorship, and literacy support; however, it is equally important to remember that education has a broad range of applications. We may find education opportunities through various avenues, and we should constantly strive for continuous development and learning.
An example? You!
We can learn a lot from our members' guidance, leadership, passion, and friendship. We are the greatest learning opportunities we can give each other because of the common bond we share, but also because of the variety of our individual professions, vocations, and experiences. Starting this month, consider how you can serve through education and become a mentor to our members and communities. Focus on empowering others by using your unique skills and expertise to address community needs and help others discover new professional opportunities and interests. You can also share this value with friends and professionals in your life - by inviting them to attend our programs and social or service events to learn more about what we do and the difference we can make working together.
Finally, many thanks to those who have worked hard to make these initial months of transition easier. It is your ideas, help, thoughts, and feedback that are essential to our success.
Yours in service,
Angelica Marotta, PhD
President 2022-2023 Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley, Rotary International District 5170
Guests, we are happy to have you join us this week!
As we see it, our flexibility as an online, asynchronous club allows a special type of service to Rotarians around the world: we make it easier for anyone to strive for and maintain 100% attendance. That keeps you engaged with Rotary's events and ideas, and provides a moment of inspiration for devoting your creativity, talents, and resources to good causes.
You are certainly not required to pay anything in order to attend our meetings. However, if you would like to make a small contribution to our service efforts, you are welcome to do so in our secure Happy Dollars section down the page. This could be what you normally pay at your own club's meetings for lunch, for example. Any amount is welcome, but first and foremost, we're happy you've joined us, and hope you will share with others who we are and what we do to help inspire Service Above Self.
And don't forget to fill out our attendance form so you get an email you can pass on to your club's secretary!
The Four Way Test
The Four-Way Test is a nonpartisan and nonsectarian ethical guide for Rotarians to use for their personal and professional relationships.
Of the things we think, say or do
Is it the TRUTH?
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
Weekly Funny with Shags.
We believe laughter is an important part of life, and we should all make time to laugh a little. This segment of our meeting is meant to tickle you just enough. These funnies are curated by member Steven "Shags" Shagrin !
Digitized Music
A senior citizen was showing off a new car he had bought to his grandson.
"Let's go for a spin," he told the youngster.
The old man pulled out of his driveway and placed his fingers above the top of the steering wheel, controlling it only with his thumbs pressed against the lower edge of the wheel.
"That's weird," the grandpa said, "I still don't hear anything."
"What are you talking about?" the grandson asked.
"The car salesman said I could hear lots of different kinds of music if I used a thumb drive."
Weekly Inspiration
Every week we share a short video highlighting innovation, education, entrepreneurship, or whatever we think might inspire you to see the world in new ways.
This entrepreneur, Monika Jha of Cydee Technologies, sees a barrier as an opportunity to make a business and make a difference. What barriers do you see in your community?
Through a Rotarian's Lens
Sometimes a photo can capture an amazing moment. In this section Member Keith Marsh shares his incredible photography!
If you'd like to submit a photo for this section please contact Keith.
Courtesy of Shags, here is a photo by Jack Zhi from the Audubon Photography Awards. It is two white tailed Kites in Costa Mesa, CA. The young one below has a vole in its talons that was dropped by its father above. Jack used a Sony a9ii camera with a 600mm lens for 1/3200 sec at f/8 and ISO 800.
Learn Something New
Now Some Painting Tips!
Here are 7 painting tips that will make you a master, according to the video's description.
Connect with ReCSV on Facebook
Service Report
Tell us about service you’ve done recently in your community.
Click here to fill out The Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley Service Survey
Our Events & Projects
We hold our meetings online, but we do regular service projects and social events in the Silicon Valley! The section is updated every week with our upcoming events. We welcome guests to all of the events and service projects listed here.
Upcoming Events:
All times are Pacific Time! (San Francisco time)
District 5170 Events
All times are Pacific Time! (San Francisco time)
More events coming soon! All events are open to guests, unless otherwise mentioned. Feel free to join us! If you ever have questions, please email inquiries@siliconvalleyrotary.com
Happy Dollars: Do Good by Sharing Something Good
Each week we ask our members to share stories with the club and toss in a few dollars to support our efforts. The primary goal of this section is to provide a fun way of getting to know each fellow members and guests, while giving back to a good cause.
Happy dollars is an opportunity to share something positive that has happened in your life whether it is personal or business. Think of it as your opportunity to brag a little, but also put a little bit into a karma jar. The money donated through happy dollars is put to charitable use, and the message that you leave for happy dollars will be posted in our online meeting the following week for the entire week for folks to see! (Pending that it’s appropriate!)
Here are the happy dollars contributions from last week!
This section is usually updated in the early hours of Saturday, so contributions made over the weekend may not be listed here.
Program: Games for Civic Participation
Speaker: Abeer Kapoor
Every week we bring to you a new program on innovation, entrepreneurship, and education, and how those contribute to service to others.
The Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley seeks to explore perspectives on service from across the world. The views of the speakers in our programs are their own, and unless stated otherwise, are not necessarily reflective of the views of our eClub nor Rotary International.
If you have an idea for a cool speaker, please feel free to reach out to them directly or submit THIS FORM so our Program Committee can contact them!
Can games help bring meaningful social change? We at the Civic Games Lab believe that they can. We are building games that help raise awareness on core issues of civic import such as democracy, nutrition and diet diversity, human rights, digital rights, and climate change, to name a few. We believe that games help bridge an important challenge that developmental work faces, that of unidirectionality. Games put people at the center of decision making and problem solving, help them understand the real-world impact of their actions, and also build a vocabulary of solutions to large-scale wicked problems.
At the Civic Games Lab, we have built games to strengthen democracy, improve nutrition knowledge to fight malnourishment, build a vocabulary of digital rights, and help make people aware of climate change and pollution, of gender sensitization, to name a few.
In the talk, Mr Kapoor will delve into the power of games as a method of bringing meaningful social change in India and how games are an articulation of culture and societal metaphors. The verbs and language of each society is different and any cultural production should focus on their own internal references and knowledge systems. Finally, he will discuss how this methodology, if harnessed to its full potential, can fundamentally change the way active citizenship can be spurred, not only in India, but in the rest of the world too.
Abeer Kapoor is the founder of Civic Games Lab—a games for social change studio based in New Delhi. In 2019, he released The Poll, India's first board game based on the Indian electoral system, which was widely recognised as a one-of-a-kind innovation by both international and national press. In 2020, he developed four digital games under the title 'Stories of Antarjaal Nagar', which explore human rights issues online. He has built card games on Maternal Health and Nutrition, and on city-building and air pollution.
Kapoor is the author of 'The Most Notorious Jailbreakers' (Rupa, 2020), a book that chronicles the daring escapes of sixteen hardened criminals from Indian prisons. The screen rights for the book have been acquired by T-Series. He is the creator and author of 'Zoraver and the Lost Gods', a graphic novel set in the early twentieth century, which is set to be published by Bloomsbury India in 2022.
As a journalist with over five years of experience, Kapoor's bylines have appeared in several leading publications such as Hardnews, Scroll, Quartz, The Wire, and the Mint. In early 2020, he was featured in India Today Magazine's coffee table book, 'India Tomorrow', as one of the several young Indians who will shape the India of tomorrow.
Members and guests, please welcome Abeer Kapoor!
Upcoming Program Recording Schedule
All of our guest speakers and programs are recorded live online over Zoom video conference. We welcome members and guests to join us in one of these upcoming recordings. Recordings are approximately 30 minutes long and are subject to change without notice.
Our online video conference room link for these recordings is always http://zoom.siliconvalleyrotary.com/. You are welcome to join us! Please note the timezone listed for all recordings is US Pacific Time (San Francisco, California, USA).
If you can’t join the live recording, please send your questions for an upcoming speaker to programs@siliconvalleyrotary.com.
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Thanks for reading and watching this week’s meeting. You have two last things to do before you’re done.
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