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World's Biggest Problems
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
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.
Supporting organization:
The Arlington Institute
URL:
http://www.worldsbiggestproblems.com, http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org
City:
Arlington
State/Region:
Virginia
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
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.
Sustainability (financial) model:
Startup costs: $6,000 (already underway)
Beta - v.1.0 costs: $16,000
Annual maintainance v.1.0: $30,000
Annual analysis v.1.0: $50,000
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v.1.0 to v.2.0:
Technology acquisition and integration: $3.5M
Development of Gaming space: $200,000
Analysis: $150,000
Grant/Funder matching: $20,000
Competitions space development:$ 10,000
Competition prize money: ?
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Revenue: Donations, community support, advertising, in-kind donation
Potential obstacles:
The only real obstacle to WBP is a potential lack of community participation. This obstacle will be overcome by implementing numerous fun features for users and by sorting content more efficiently than anywhere else on the web. Our site will also allow contributors to effectively publish and bring attention to their work and distribute it virally to anyone with a computer.
A minor obstacle is determing the exact structure of a solution space. The complex nature of these problems require a sophisticated approach to solution generating that has yet to be fully realized anywhere in the world. Maintaining an effective solution space will demand vigilance, hard work, and solid analysis.
Resource Needs:
Hosting services
Salaries for developers
Salaries for analysts and analyst training
Community participation by adding content and distribution
Marketing
Third Party software
Travel
Key Milestones:
1. May 1st, 2007: beta site deployed
2. August 1st, 2007: 1.0 launch
3. Late fall 2007: 2.0 launch
Add features as funding becomes available
Project Summary:
Human beings are presently facing a number of global, systemic, intractable problems. All of these issues are planetary in scope and highly entrenched, making them unsolvable under the current paradigm of thinking. For problems that are going over the cliff in a hurry, solutions must be identified as soon as possible. For this reason, The Arlington Institute is launching a new initiative entitled The World’s Biggest Problems (WBP).
The overarching WBP project seeks to aggregate, organize, and disseminate information pertinent to these major problems, namely - Rapid Climate Change, Water Crisis, Peak Oil, Species Extinction and Economic Collapse. WBP's goals will be twofold; firstly, supporting a wider public understanding of these five global problems. Secondly, providing the space for the community to organically generate solutions. This is particularly important because none of these issues can be solved through a top down, hierarchical approach; they require the wisdom and determination of every person on the planet.
The Arlington Institute, a 501 c-3 non-profit, has for the last 18 years provided expert analysis to non-profits, governments and businesses. Our latest effort is to tackle some of the planet’s largest and most intractable problems, and to do this we need a radically new approach. Instead of the more isolated individual analysis of our past, TAI recognizes that these problems can only be managed by engaging and enabling the community’s own intelligence and innovation. Our established reputation in the futures community as well as with technology experts give us a platform of experience, momentum and sustainability to be able to execute a project of this magnitude.
Comments
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