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World's Biggest Problems
Challenges Entered:
The WBP web portal aggregates, sorts, and classifies information about Climate Change, Water Crisis, Peak Oil, Species Extinction, and Economic Collapse. It also creates a space where people can collectively generate solutions to these issues.
In a world where people recognize large problems, yet feel completely powerless to change their course...
In a world where people want everyone to "stop bitching and start a revolution"...
The Arlington Institute, a Washington, D.C. based think tank with an 18 years history, has decided to do just that. Our latest project, World’s Biggest Problems, is an attempt to tackle the planet’s largest and most systemic problems - Rapid Climate Change, Water Crisis, Peak Oil, Species Extinction, and Economic Collapse. These problems are issues that clearly cannot be solved using current thinking; rather they require the collective wisdom of the entire global community to produce innovation. Through WBP we hope to provide high level analysis in concert with the public, and make our results and technology architecture freely available to everyone.
The first version of WBP, launched on May 1st, will act as an information clearinghouse, aggregating and sorting data. Using a Drupal content management platform, we will allow the community to contribute links and articles, then tag and sort them organically. The code written and developed for v.1 will be made freely available to the public.
The second version, to be launched in the fall of 2007, will focus on designing a collaborative solution space. This solution space would allow the users to take the information collected in v.1 and leverage a suite of innovation discovery tools, which are a collection of software search engines able to search through the world-wide patent database and locate/discover open source inventions complementary to the identified local problem. Identifying these innovations will help humans engage their environment more sustainably. This space will also be used to match funders to projects, allow gaming situations between groups and promote competitions for the best solutions at many different levels - personal, family/household, community, government, global.
WHAT WE NEED:
Hosting services
Salaries for developers
Salaries for analysts and analyst training
Community participation by adding content and distribution
Marketing
Third Party software
Travel
Location
Arlington , VA
United States
See map: Google Maps
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Children crave time with
Children crave time with parents. It makes them feel special. Spending thime with them may also need you to spend some cash and this is the time that you may consider getting an emergency cash. If you have kids, the need for emergency cash will occur more often. You might have to get a payday loan to take them out to Sesame Street on Ice or Chuck E Cheese, or pay for the damage their abundant plastic army men that are strewn all over your house caused clogging the vacuum, drains, and toilets. Perhaps in dealing with all of this, you may need to take them to the grandparents' house so you and the significant other can get away for a much-deserved weekend alone, another good use for emergency cash.
These five "systemic
These five "systemic problems" are actually symtoms of a much larger problem called population growth.
You might be interested in....
You might be interested in www.thetenproject.org
Interesting project
This sounds like a great idea - there is a lot of activity out on the net looking at the these problems and the solutions to them - hopefully you can leverage this during your content aggregation phase.
Some sites that would provide some insights and ideas that are worth checking out include:
<a href="http://www.worldchanging.com/">WorldChanging</a>
<a href="http://www.treehugger.com/">TreeHugger</a>
<a href="http://www.openthefuture.com/">Open The Future</a>
<a href="http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy">The Energy Blog</a>
<a href="http://www.energybulletin.net/">Energy Bulletin</a>
<a href="http://www.theoildrum.com/">The Oil Drum</a>
<a href="http://tyler.blogware.com/blog">Clean Break</a>
<a href="http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/">Peak Energy</a> (the content varies wildly from day to day here)
Thanks
I checked out those links you posted and the vision for WBP is reasonably close to Energy Bulletin, which by the way is an excellent resource that I used in my original research.
Where we differ from most of those sites is that we allow users to add content, we sort and classify that content very efficiently, and we provide high level analysis free of charge. We will also roll out a solution space for each problem in version 2 later this year.
http://www.worldsbiggestproblems.com
Dear Sirs,
While reviewing proposals and clicking on various links to view sites, I stumbled upon something you should be aware of - The URL, www.worldsbiggestproblems.com, is currently directed to the Drupal Install page rather than an Index page. This is not good.
Please install Drupal. Then log in, Administor > System Settings > System Maintenance and take your site "offline" until it is ready to launch.
I am the designer / developer of Buttonsofhope.com, another project on net squared.
Best Regards,
16toads.com
Thanks for the heads up, we
Thanks for the heads up, we are pointing the url to an old host while we build the site architecture. We will fix that ASAP.
Clooaborative Problem-Solving
Sandra Dickinson
How exciting to discover your project! Your vision of using tech tools to engage the community in collaboratively generating solutions to big problems is so very similar to the vision of my own project. And you have identified some of the same obstacles that also face my project. (i.e., community engagement/participation and actual structure of the solution space) Plus - you are also aiming to make it "fun"!
I don't know if you are familiar with Jane McGonigal's work -- but she has some fabulous things to say in this arena -- both conceptual and practical. She discusses alternative reality games as processes that enlist massively multi-player communities in collaborative problem-solving, and are capable of closing the gap between what happens in the game and what happens in the real world.
My project, Selearninggames, is about nonprofit social entrepreneurs making an elearning game together that solves the problem of earned income venture profitability. My theory is that social entrepreneurs ourselves are the only ones who know the answers to our common questions -- we just don't yet know that we know it. Making a learning game together is a way for us to harness our collective intelligence grounded in our collective experience.
Because Selearninggames is intended to be player/learner-made -- you can see why I know just exactly what you mean that community engagement/participation is the key "obstacle." And the structure of the engagement space is the key to enabling participation.
Since our projects have so much in common, I hope you will pop over and take a look at Selearninggames. I'd be very interested in figuring out a way that you and I can collaborate to figure out ways to make our respective projects more likely to materialize our visions.
Would you say more about how you are addressing your obstacle of community engagement/participation? Would you say more about how are structuring the solution space to make it more "fun"?
Response
Dear Mrs. Dickinson, Thank you for your interest in TAI. I'd be happy to talk to you a bit about our v1 launch and what we're including by May 1st. Our beta site will basically function as a collection, archiving, data sorting/monitoring, and data clearinghouse. The tools we are using are derivative of the open source content management system Drupal which include Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, tag clouds, bookmarks, cms databasing, digg, delicious, etc. Version two would require more fundraising than we propose above, however v2 will be where the next level of change takes place. Our hope is to significantly fundraise enough to enable a technology we have identified and integrate it into the solution space. Our basic idea is that if we can get people to the place where they can understand the scope of the problems (ideas), we can then use this other tool to identify innovation, technology and tools and when you place those tools in a collaborative space surrounded by a clan of folks that think about the problem in a more holistic way, we anticipate being able to foster connections, networks and logistics not presently available. If you want to get ahold of me to talk about collaboration possibilities, please feel free to call The Arlington Institute @ 703-812-7900 x24. Thanks!