Wow!

I expected some sort of typical whatnot saying that we should help with some specific issue, but this goes beyond any single issue.

This is a platform that can help with ALL issues.

And that's why I'm proud to support it.

Disclaimer: I am a friend of Mr. Wyne.  However, I wouldn't up-vote this idea unless I found it satisfactory myself.

Interesting to think that Web2.0 tools and processes might aid in alleviating classic "collective action" problems (cf M. Olson). Good luck!

My thoughts go with you

Good idea!

Ali, I think this is an awesome idea!

there is already a website that sounds very similar to your idea http://www.worldchanging.com/

Hi, Chris.

Thanks for your note.  I've long been a fan of http://www.worldchanging.com/.  The people there are doing phenomenal – not to mention, critically important – work.  I see our goals as complementary.  Worldchanging.com focuses on reporting ideas for building a greener future.  What I envision is constructing a new paradigm that could be applied to any and all global challenges, including those that relate to sustainability.  Kudos to you on your great idea!

Best,

Ali

I want to ensure that the comments on this thread are germane to the topic at hand.  On that note, a recent essay in Foreign Policy speaks to the dangers of poorly coordinated efforts to do good, arguing that "the thin line that separates weak states from truly failed ones is manned by a hodgepodge of international charities, aid agencies, philanthropists, and foreign advisors...as a consequence [of these entities’ work], many of these states are failing to develop the skills necessary to run their countries effectively, while others fall back on a global safety net to escape their own accountability." [1]

[1] Michael A. Cohen, Maria Figueroa Küpçü, and Parag Khanna, "The New Colonialists," Foreign Policy (July/August 2008): p. 74.

Hello,
Your idea sounds good, but like the
many security attacks faced by wikipedia
this new site you proposed may also be breeched.
I was just wondering what you may be willing to
do to raise the reliability level of such a website.

Hi, Thribhu and Randy.

Thanks for your comments and encouragement. 

The character limit for idea submissions prevented me from discussing some of the nuances of my proposal.  I use the phrase "global challenges Wikipedia" not as a potential title for the framework that I envision, but rather, as an analogy to illuminate its intended purpose and desired outcomes.  I've thought of several titles (for example, the "Global Challenges Portal") but have yet to settle on any of them.

Additions to the database would be monitored.  Proposed factual additions would be monitored for their accuracy.  Other proposed contributions -- for example, those that aim to offer solutions to global challenges or evaluate past and / or present responses to them -- would be monitored for their relevance and for their tone.  Thus, proposed contributions that do not contribute to the discussion at hand and / or are abusive will not be accepted.    

Please let me know if you have further questions or comments.

Best,

Ali

Randy,

Hello. Thought I just heard someone call me. I am an Indian and am 17 years old. I and Ali share some ideas and we walk on the same path which ultimately leads to something 'amazing'. Glad to meet you.

Good luck,
Pranav

Pranav and Ali,

It is very disappointing to see you cheating in order to try to win. There is no reason to cheat in a good-hearted competition.

I've been watching this category with much personal interest. Along the way, I really started to take notice of your idea due to its very quick rise in the category. However, it seems to be that the rise was due to suspicious voting practices. Pranav made a comment "We fly...", which was followed by three identical comments made by three famous scientists that are dead.
Comment by Pranav Dave on 12/22/2008 @ 04:38AM PST
Comment by Enrico Fermi on 12/22/2008 @ 04:39AM PST*
Comment by Albert Einstein  on 12/22/2008 @ 04:45AM PST
Comment by Hendrik Lorentz  on 12/22/2008 @ 04:52AM PST

It is easy to cheat due to being so easy to register under a different email address. However, that is incredibly dishonest and is a shame to see happening with so many individuals that are here with good intentions. Since you will probably make it to the next round due to cheating, I hope you reconsider cheating during the next round, and let the best ideas for change win fairly.

Sincerely,
Bill


*Now erased - I'm guessing to circumvent obvious charges of cheating.

Note:
I will also speculate that the following posting that marks the relationship between Pranav and Ali will be deleted now that I bring this point up. It in its entirety below for the record:
Randy,

Hello. Thought I just heard someone call me. I am an Indian and am 17 years old. I and Ali share some ideas and we walk on the same path which ultimately leads to something 'amazing'. Glad to meet you.

Good luck,
Pranav

Posted by Pranav Dave on 12/24/2008 @ 08:26AM PST

Hi, Bill.

It's very disappointing to see you make unsubstantiated charges without consulting the individual whom you're accusing.  Here's a message that I sent to Pranav on December 22, 2008:

/////

12/22/08 @ 07:10AM

Hi, Pranav.

Thanks again for your support.

Did you by any chance set up the accounts of the three physicists (Feynman, Einstein, and Lorentz)?  I noticed that they all wrote the same comment as you, "We fly."  If you did, please deactive those accounts as soon as possible since the people at Change.org will quickly recognize that you've voted multiple times, thereby potentially disqualifying me. 

Please do, however, reach out to your friends and ask them to support my cause. 

Thank you so much!

Best,

Ali

/////

I immediately contacted the administrators at Change.org and had them *REMOVE* the three votes corresponding to the three physicists.  So, far from trying to cheat to win, I took away three votes from myself and took the initiative to ensure that there was no dishonesty involved in the vote tally.  Pranav deactivated the accounts, which were supposed to be for his mother, his father, and his sister; they now have their own accounts and have cast legitimate votes.

My idea is on the rise because I've worked extremely hard to generate interest in and awareness of it.  I've sent out hundreds of e-mails to friends to generate a grassroots campaign.

Feel free to contact the Change.org administrators if you want confirmation that I've acted with fairness and integrity.  Furthermore, make sure to have your facts in order before you make such a serious allegation in the future.

Best,

Ali

Dear Ali,

I'm glad to see that you already resolved the situations. I am sorry for jumping to a true conclusion of cheating. It appears now that your part of it was limited from what you've said, and you have resolved the issue in part. I would recommend that you report the three remaining comments and have them removed clear up any further confusion by anyone else.  I apologize if posting was not the proper approach, but that way my way to address the issue of cheating that was apparent. If there is something that I can do to help resolve the issue of cheating or any improper posting issues, please help me by telling me the actions I can take.

Bill

William,

Haha! Its just so easy to add 1+1 and say the answer is 2. A black hole for example is nothing at all in space-time. You cannot see it. You can just feel its gravity only if you know exactly where to look. Only if you know what mass is and what it's effects on space-time are. What if we never knew what mass is and what it's effects on space-time are? We would never have discovered the most beautiful thing nature has produced-a black hole. Mr. William, I appreciate your addition skills but I think you should have searched for the unseen -2 which was just hidden behind 1+1 before accusing us. Yes, 1+1 can be equal to 0. For your kind information, the accounts of the 3 famous scientists were made by my father, my mother and my sister. I insisted on using their names as I love physics. They didn't even have an e-mail id for god's sake. They had to make one. They find it difficult to read English and took a lot of time (2 days to be precise, which is the difference between my 1st comment and 2nd). I translated Ali's idea to them in my mother tongue (Gujarati) and they liked it and voted for it. I didnot even touch the mouse. They always told me "pankhi ni jem udo" which in english means "fly like a bird". So, that's what I commented and so did they tell me to. Luckily, Ali enlightened me that some 'clever' people might think I made fake accounts. I realized most of the people would BE that 'clever'. So, I removed the 3 votes and am on my way to deactivation of other accounts. As I removed the '*' account, the '*'comment also got removed. It seems your guessing is also really 'clever'. As for Ali and my relationship, we have never seen each other. I am applying to MIT this year and love checking the MIT website from where I found Mr. Ali's idea. I think the very sudden increase in votes is due to other students like me who found this >
Go to www.mit.edu
Click undergrad on left side
See the Mr. Ali's post "Please vote........."

I liked it. I signed up at change.org (I never knew a site like this existed) on 20th Dec. I respect Mr. Ali's ideas and his 4 years at MIT. I respect others who are here too. As for the comments, I would obviously not comment and publicize if I made fake accounts. If there is a way of checking who has voted, you might just do it; cause you won't find the 3 scientists there. I respect science and I respect my family. As for my previous comment, I answered Randy's question for Ali -> "By the way, do you know who Pranav Dave is?" If your clever brain tells you I'm lying, you are more than welcome to my house and meet me and my family:
7, New Vaishali Society,
Opp. Rajpath Club,
Satellite,
Ahmedabad-380015
Gujarat,
India,
Asia,
Earth.

PS:As for your "watching this category with much personal interest" I'd like to kindly tell you that you mistook the first physicist's name as Enrico Fermi for Richard Feynman. Looks like photons delivered you wrong information. I respect Feynman for his exceptional humor, Einstein for relativity and Lorentz for sharing the same birth-date as mine-18th July.

I just hope this answers all other 'clever' people out there. If you still feel like acting 'clever', you are welcome to message me or comment right here.

Mr. William Drayton please never commit the mistake of insulting MIT in front of me.

Good Day...     

Ali,

   Haha!!! You never told me you contacted the authorities. I removed the votes myself as soon as I got your e-mail. Maybe we did it at the same time. Only probability knows!!! I appreciate your hard work and efforts. Awesomely done. We DO fly...

William,

   Hahahaha.....please don't take the above comment as an invitation for a wrestling match. I simply wanted to be honest and my firefox didnot load Ali's and Yours comment while I was writing the long truth. Ali got there before me, that's it. Glad to meet you. We, (change.org)ers, are united.

Pranav    

I'm glad that we're all on the same page now. =)  I hope that everyone has a safe and happy holiday!

Same here !!!Happy Christmas Everyone!!! Always remember:

"There will always be a child, younger than you, poorer than you, on the streets. He'll be watching people like us going into shops and purchasing bundles of gifts. Feel his heartbeat. Feel his look on your back as you walk away"

That would be what God would want if he existed (well, i donot believe god exists.....everyone has his/her own viewpoint and i respect it). He would want you to do something for the child.....not yourself. He would want us to be "A HUMAN"

-Pranav

This is a great idea, Ali!
What a feasible, much-needed systematic way to approach the issue of collaboration and cooperation to resolve global issues.

I really hope this wins!

-Sila

hey ali, good luck and that was amazing what you did about the three votes, even to the extent of taking them off.  such integrity is rare and exemplary. 

Hey Ali!
Great idea yet again. Keep them coming and making the impact that you do!!

-Zahir

Ali,

It's always nice to see a fellow Stafford alum stepping back from the excitement of the campaign and its successes to view the bigger picture goals we need to achieve for true change. Nice to hear from you again and best of luck. You have my vote.

Best,
Christine Haines
Membership Coordinator for Students for Barack Obama
Richmond, Va

This is a great idea, and I think it is very necessary. But couldn't a wiki like this be started right now, without government aid and months of waiting?

Hi, Jensen.

Thanks very much for your encouragement.

I'd love to start the wiki now, but establishing, maintaining, and updating it will require extraordinary manpower and resources.  My hope is that we can obtain them more readily if this idea gains the attention of President Obama and, accordingly, of activists here and abroad. 

I'd love to hear more of your thoughts!

Best,

Ali

There's a growing recognition of the difficulties that redundant efforts pose to the resolution of global challenges.  Take, for example, the abstract of a paper, "Addressing the Global Governance Deficit," that was published in November 2004:

"There is mounting concern about a global governance deficit for managing international environmental problems and sustainable development.  This article reviews the proposals and justifications for reform, and suggests an alternative model of global governance based on diffuse networks of diverse actors performing multiple and overlapping functions.  Some reform proposals are offered to improve the prospects of network-based global governance."

we got your back bro - I love this idea

This sort of idea is key to ensuring that the information is available to allow a diverse group of people to mobilize towards a common cause.  This global wikipedia would allow people to learn from the history and past experiences from others, and to work with them to develop even more innovative solutions for social change.

Great idea!

Hi, Anne.

Thanks for your support. 

I envision this framework as "helping the helpers," so to speak, by placing a particular emphasis on streamlining their efforts.   Right now, if the path to global solutions was a highway, there'd be car crashes piling up on top of car crashes, and the highway would be cracking under their weight.  My idealized "solutions highway" would be a straight, peaceful road in Arizona rather than what it is now, a winding, chaotic stretch on I-95.

Yours,

Ali

While I think some of the details need to be ironed out, it is clear that if we are to encourage as much cooperative effort as possible to accomplish real change, we will need technology platforms that can facilitate significant collaboration.

Having worked inside the competitive systems currently in place in the Community Benefit Sector, it is clear we need systems that make collaboration easy and that encourage everyone who cares about an issue to be at the table. 

We already have plenty of systems that encourage competition between organizations. In my experience, organizations do not compete because they want to, but because we just keep creating more and more systems that force them to compete - competitive funding, ranking of the “best” or “most deserving” organizations, and etc.  While we say we want collaboration, we seem to want to create a spirit of cooperation from inside the belly of a competitive system - an oxymoron if ever there were one.

Instead, we need to be focusing on building infrastructure that facilitates true cooperation.  And a big part of that infrastructure is technology.

Two cautions: First, be careful to encourage participation by anyone who cares about an issue, rather than pre-determining who should be in the room.  Take caution not to make this a competition for who is most qualified or whose passion is greater or who a particular group of experts believe should be present.  Let folks self-select and self-inspire to be there.

Secondly, I would encourage that this approach take all care to aim its end results at what is possible for the world - the positive change we want to make - rather than aiming at what we do not like about today (i.e. problem-solving.)  If we aim at something positive, we will solve the problems on the way to creating that positive.

Best of luck!

Hildy Gottlieb
Author, "The Pollyanna Principles:
Reinventing “Nonprofit Organizations” to Create the Future of Our World"

Hi, Hildy.

Thank you so much for your detailed feedback.  You articulated four of my most important concerns:

[1] How can we leverage technology to facilitate collaboration?  Attending MIT made me uniquely interested in and aware of technology's potential.

[2] How can we promote earnest collaboration in a fundamentally competitive system that often compels players to place their self-interest above the common good?  The oxymoron that you suggest poses a fundamental challenge to those who wish to address global challenges.

[3] How can we make this framework a veritably global framework that allows the full continuum of voices to be heard?  It's routine to hear self-anointed experts speak of what a given country or community wants, but it strains credulity to think that all of these individuals truly do know that information.  The unfortunate truth is that far too many initiatives that purport to promote "global" dialogue devolve into conversations between elites across borders.  A dialogue that excludes the individuals who're suffering will achieve little, if anything.

[4] How can we inspire the global community to participate in establishing, maintaining, and updating this framework?  I'm convinced that it's impossible to achieve this mobilization on the basis of citing problems -- at least not in the long-term.  We must come together on the basis of conceiving solutions.

I greatly appreciate your feedback, and hope that we continue our conversation!

Yours,

Ali

Ali, Wikia.com has created a number of mediawiki websites that might serve the purpose your are describing.  Check them out here:

http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia

There are dozens of sites that have been created from someone's idea, then left alone because the person was working alone or the group was too small.  The latest one that caught my attention was http://change.wikia.com, which seeks to keep track of what gets posted on change.gov.

Ali,

this is a fantastic idea that leverages much of what has been learned about open source innovation. Please look into Karim Lakhani's work and read more about Innocentive. They may be prove useful for you.

Best,

Rodrigo

Ali,

I think I have pestered you enough on the MIT blog. Good luck and best wishes.

In case you are undecided (and is scrolling along the comments), the idea is really great. There are a great number of "thinkers" with ideas and innovations, in the globalized world (that we have today), the problem is to bring these ideas to a national level.  After all, 2 minds are always better than 1!


Ben Zheng

Leave it to MIT.. Brilliant.

Hi Ali,
I've read and listened to your idea description and it sounds very feasible and interesting. However, right now in addition to global issues President-Elect Obama will have to deal with serious domestic problems as well, specifically regarding economic policy. Have you thought about expanding your portal to address those types of challenges as well?
Best of Luck with your proposal.
Sushama Dasari

@ Chad:

Thanks very much for sending me the Wikia.com link.  Although the wiki could be launched without government involvement, I suspect that establishing, maintaining, and updating it will require extraordinary manpower and resources.  My sense (my hope, anyways) is that I'd be able to obtain these much more readily if this proposal gains the attention of President Obama and, accordingly, of problem solvers here and abroad, via the Change.org competition.  The myriad wikis that you mention probably didn't go as far as they could've not because their driving ideas weren't sound, but rather, because they ran out of stamina, so to speak. 

What're your thoughts?

@ Rodrigo:

I'll be sure to look into Professor Lakhani's work – thanks for the tip!

@ Ben:

Please keep pestering me!  The more we discuss this proposal, the more feasible and meaningful it'll become.

@ Zsuzsa:

High five for MIT!

@ Sushama:

Thanks very much for reading the blurb and watching the video.  You're absolutely right that this type of framework can and should be applied to domestic issues.  I'd make three comments:

[1] Globalization has virtually ensured that the domestic is global and vice versa, so much so that it's likely that the next administration would end up addressing many "domestic" issues even if they adopted my framework with the aim of addressing "global" challenges.

[2] Although global challenges certainly arouse heated passions and debates, they don't elicit (at least not to the same extent) the emotionalism that domestic ones do.  Take climate change, for example.  There are some individuals who argue that it's exaggerated or that it's an invention of anti-business conspiracists, but the vast majority of people accept that it's real and terrifyingly serious.  Most people, furthermore, converge on the steps that need to be taken for us to make serious progress: established powers and emerging powers need to sign a carbon emissions protocol.  Getting there will be (and has certainly been) messy, but the outline of what needs to be done is reasonably clear.  By contrast, take an issue like abortion.  The mere mention of the word "abortion" incites a frenzied debate (more accurately, a boxing match) between those who supposedly oppose women's rights and those who supposedly sanction the murder of children.  The utility of the framework that I mention does, admittedly, scales with the objectivity of the issue whose treatment it's attempting to facilitate.

[3] Notwithstanding (or perhaps in light of) what I've just said, a parallel framework could certainly accrue great gains if it's applied to domestic issues over which a sensible dialogue can be had.  Children's education is one such issue that comes to mind. 

What're your thoughts?

Could you provide some _specific_ examples of how you see this working?

You will probably find that once the initial webpages you suggest are created, there will be very little updating to do. I also feel like the venues for information sharing already exist. They are not centralized because the people that are actually working on, say, curing AIDS don't really need to be aware of the minor details of what the climate-change people are doing.

Something like weapons proliferation needs to be solved by governments working together; there are already many proposals and plans that exist. Whatever gets written into the webpage you suggest won't add anything to the conversation. Peer-reviewed journals and conventions already serve the role of databases for science and tech-related problems. Non-profit organizations working on social issues already have experts in their ranks that know what has or hasn't worked before and are aware of other players in that area.

While what you are proposing would indeed be very inspiring for people outside of the fields, I don't really see how this can translate to actual results.

Sorry if this sounds rude, but I'm just trying to look at this pragmatically.

Re: Wikia

It shouldn't matter who puts it up, just the promotion that it gets.  You're right that the existing projects floundered because of lack of participation.  I actually disagree with Wikia's policy to create ANY wikia project that anybody can think of, instead of concentrating efforts into more general sites that can easily handle different purposes at the same time.  But that's their business model.

It doesn't take much to maintain Wikipedia, compared to what it is and what it does.  A site like you are describing wouldn't take much more than Wikipedia does.  What it would require is for everyone to be on the same page, and willing to work together.  Right now, "to your scattered websites and organizations go" is the best way imaginable to destroy the effective grassroots movement that we have been building for two years.

If barackobama.com, or even change.org, would install Mediawiki on changewiki.barackobama.com or wiki.change.gov, you would see everything that this idea is about happening automatically.  It's just that easy.

Oh, and one specific site that I want to promote here:  http://change.wikia.com.  This takes feeds from change.gov and tracks changes automatically for each of the pages.  They need help, just like all the others do, but this one is lead by Silona from the League of Technical Voters. 

A recent CNN article by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and Andrea Weckerle, an entrepreneur, strongly suggests that the next administration would favor a global challenges Wikipedia, or, at a minimum, be sympathetic to its aim: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/01/07/wales.obama.cto/index.html.

Excellent idea. As others have pointed out, there already are web sites that are doing something like this. Even I have a website set up based on wikimedia where I could start such a thing. The problem is garnering public support to fuel the Wiki and an interest on the part of politicians to read the Wiki.

As far as the public support is concerned, Mr. Wales could just go ahead on his own and set aside some wiki-real estate on Wikipedia. It already is quite famous and heavily trafficked. However, then the even bigger challenge would be to get those world leaders to actually pay attention to the solutions suggested....

Emily Gertz kindly invited me to write a short post for the Stop Global Warming Blog on why my proposal would help address climate change.  Here's the forthcoming post:

//////////

It has proven difficult to address climate change because the efforts to address it are so disjointed.  Cities are setting CO2 emissions reductions targets (ERTs) and related objectives, as are states and countries; it's a daunting, if not impossible task to keep track of them all.  There are countless op-eds, essays, and books prescribing what the global community needs to do to make progress.   World leaders convene every now and then and issue bold calls to action; there's no repository of that information.  Although the scientific underpinnings of climate change are beyond reproach, there's little to no consensus on the concrete steps that need to be taken to reverse its course.  Sure, something resembling a consensus exists at an abstract level: developed countries and developing countries need to converge on ERTs in a manner that reconciles their competing concerns.  That conclusion, however, belies the fragmented character of global efforts to stem climate change.

The global community must have at its disposal an easily accessible, continuously updated database that lists all of the players – ranging from individuals like Al Gore to international institutions like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that're involved in the fight against global warming.  It should describe what they've done in the past, what they're doing now, and what they intend to do.  It should highlight areas of consensus between them that could serve as a foundation for making progress and areas of dispute between them that'll have to be resolved for that progress to continue or even begin.  We need to have a central forum where academics and policymakers throughout the world converse with one another.  Only that continuous dialogue – where concerns can be addressed thoughtfully and policy recommendations can be vetted efficiently; and where the relevant decision makers can come together – will provide a basis for enduring progress in the fight against climate change.  My proposed global challenges Wikipedia would go a long way towards achieving that objective.  The Obama administration would almost certainly support a solution of this nature given that it's deploying an analogous one to streamline government functions.

This sounds like a gov't bureaucracy that adds very little value to what is already being done by the UN.  I fail to see why countries would care about a GCW that is funded by the USA and staffed by "experts" appointed by the USA.

An excellent idea that is being developed in some ways by wiserearth.org

IEEE discussed contributing resources to this idea, at the 2008 "Technology For Humanity" workshop in Boston, MA.  IEEE is the global professional society for electrical and computer engineers, and they already have the technology (needing a little adaptation), but they took over $250K developing it....so if y'all are excited about the idea, there's support from IEEE!  (Look up conference organizers to start e-mail chains).

The fundamental idea of a challenges wiki to organize goals, or issues, or challenges etc., and facilitate communications between millions of minds who can look into any cell, entry or account, etc., and cooperate together on improving the cell itself and the structure into which it fits (and can be moved to fit better, including existing as a redundant cell that may fit in many arrays within the wiki, sounds right to me. I would think the initial structure would have not 20 but hundreds of challenges and as many countries as showed up, perhaps few to start with. The logistical and financial networks may need at least another network to suggest flows of things, money and purposes (ideologies, objectives, policies, categorical imperatives, etc.)  The big idea here is the wiki. Wikis have potentially an infinite number of cells. Condensing the cells to a finite number to be addressed by many minds determined to solve the money, material, martial and policy, etc., constraints that prevent rapid sollution to challenges has got to be addressable itself from the beginning. If condensing the cellular structure of the wiki is a major concern, financing it and the challenges it addresses may be the second major concern. Many people who try to see the world and its problems as an incomplete wiki, are also interested in the general financing of a full employment agenda that connects all idle hands with money enough to engage their potential to produce all needs.

Great Idea.  High leverage, low cost, build off winners. Its attractiveness iis its multiplier effect.

First. allow me to state clearly - I favor this idea ... at Catalytic Communities (CatComm.org) where I serve as Strategic Director, this is something we're working on as we retool our platform.  As the need to retool became clear, so too did it become obvious that we were not the only ones working on this idea.

With this latter point in mind we resolved that we needed to attend to the field of solution generation and sharing ... the solutions information ecology.  Which is to say we are committed to increasing the flow of discourse on solutions and communication between different efforts that are attempting the same concept.

This is an important dialogue, an important project.

It's something that we should think of in global terms as well ... as at CatComm - we presently have volunteers translating content between Spanish, English and Portuguese for our Community Solutions Database.   With our new platform we'll be able to expand rapidly the number of languages we serve.

This is one of many new features we're getting set to introduce, but this post is not really an advertisement for CatComm ... it's a vote of support for the concept, and a word of advie that this should be thought of as a multi-platform multi-site effort.

For CatComm we'll soon be ready to allow groups focused on specific causes or issues or others focused on the regional documentation of solutions implemented to use our database as a back end.   We think that multiple channels for people to find solutions across many sites and multiple channels for solutions to be collected and shared across a network of sites - an analogue to non profit and community solutions sector of the open social model - would allow for a new level of coordination, colaboration and sharing of experience.

We can do this together.   There are folks on GlobalSwadeshi.net exploring these topics.  CatComm is one of Many groups committed already.

This idea wins because I think that it will cost the least out of the three selections. We need to stop the government from insane spending and a $1 trillion a year overseas empire first.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com

A pertinent side note .... Recent Changes Camp - a truly wiki spirited gathering of the wiki community willl take place in Portland Oregon in February.  http://2009rcc.org/Invitation

A great place to advance this idea and foster collaboration around it, respecting what is already being done.  In the perspective of sustainability (or thrivability) it's important to work with those who are already invested and committed in a particular area.