Global projects for libraries – global open collaborations on global issues and opportunities

It would make a good “100 year project” for lifetime learners in the world, of all ages.  Green the deserts, first time learners could share models on the Internet. NOT billions of individual ones all disconnected, but one model or many where parts are fitted into useful tools.

It is very very difficult to balance. If you use current methods now to do global projects, they are dominated by humans wanting for themselves. So you get broad support for an idea, and then rather than working it out, people all start shouting and running in different directions. I know there are many people who take longer views, but sometimes they never actually do anything.

I am very tired.  It is just about 6 am and I have been working since before midnight.  The Library of Congress is tasked to only work for Congress. Not the American people, or the world. But things are changing so no country can stand alone, and no organization can operate effectively without a global awareness in near real time. When Covid started, I spent that year seeing why the global response was so slow. (My first job after college was with the Communicable Disease section of the Texas States Department of Health and I mapped cities and regions for all things including health services). The bureaucracies in all the countries are out of date and painfully slow and inadequate.  It is not hard to make a global open node for “covid project” or “green the deserts” or “stop global conflicts”. From the Famine Early Warning System, I know those all can be handled by small groups, or large groups with many people, and good information systems.  I am just about getting the AI groups to work together (maybe).

When I was a kid, the young people would work on larger things.  But never did they get anywhere near sustainable projects that actually work. I could do things in grade school that could have evolved into working systems — if all the schools in the world used social media technologies (fair, open, carefully recorded, monitored, many mentors to help, audited, — a LONG list of best practices. But we could perhaps challenge the youngest to work at global and heliospheric scale.  Not just talk about “plastics in the ocean” but see it in a digital twin of all knowledge, in context and living. The AI companies and Internet billionaires, countries and rich computer industries and others could help

Not build more administrators or bureaucracies, but real knowledge shared and accessible to all humans.

I apologize. I can only share a tiny bit of what is going on in the world. Some days I think good things ill happen, then another greedy organization does something really stupid and hurtful.

There are a lot of STEMC efforts, but they do not see how hurtful it is to teach everyone that only “special people” are rewarded lavishly.  My poor brain can only hold a tiny bit, and I won’t last many more years. I am not “on the front lines” and there is a lot of planning and changes to do. I cannot prove it will work, but I strongly feel that the human species ought to try really hard right now to make the world fair for all humans in all countries.  Find all the tens of thousands of global issues, and NOT cast them with one shot solutions that benefit a few, but place them in a global context that all humans can see all parts of it. And change, merge, compare, share, test, evaluate, propose, create — and every tiny contribution by any human or AI carefully recorded and also fit into the whole.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation