WE magazine has launched. Ulrike Reinhard and their team (Markus Beckedahl, Bea Gschwend and Steffen Büffel too) have put on a first issue with a set of articles by people like Joi Ito, Stephen Downes, Dan Gillmor, Sugata Mitra and Ethan Zuckerman.

Ulrike explains how she came up with the idea for WE magazine, the motives and plans for the future:

[...] it gradually dawned on me what enormous power the Internet has for shaping our understanding of “we” and of just what “we” are capable of moving and shaking in the age of the World Wide Web – a range of huge opportunities comes into sight only matched in scale by the challenges they bring with them!

[...] we-magazine is international. Even if the authors in this issue are mainly from Europe and America, this obviously doesn’t mean that Asia and Africa will be out of our focus. As you’ll see in the next issues.

We’re very much moving on the “cutting edge” with the topics we deal with and we warmly welcome the highly controversial viewpoints put forward by our authors which are first and foremost intended to stimulate discussion and debate. All this territory is so new and unexplored that we’ve very little experience to fall back on. As Stuart Kauffman puts it so well in the opening sentence of his article, “We are at a hinge of global history and need all we can muster to manage safe passage.”

The magazine is also a business model experiment – it’s available as (free) online texts under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike, Germany licence but you can (and should) also buy an actual copy (pdf or print) at lulu.com.

So I will be checking out the interviews … a most welcome addition to my pile of stuff marked “toread“.