Throughout my life and my travels, I regularly would visit the offices of the Union of International Associations, and have conversations with Anthony Judge and his wonderful staff.
A Cultural Gem and Global Resource for Humankind
Apart from producing useful but traditional directories on international associations, they also produced an absolutely remarkable collection of information which defined:
1) all kinds of human problems, and how they are related to one another (what they are thought to be caused by, what they in themselves are reinforcing, etc…)
2) the strategies and solutions that have been brought to bear on them
3) the solutions and practices generally practiced to make life happier across all civilizational traditions
The whole body of work, marvelously executed by an enthusiastic staff whose names I have now unfortunately forgotten (but I do remember Nadia McLaren). They should be declared international human treasures of mankind, as some countries do with their great artists and artisans. The whole project is of an incredible value to any researcher concerned with helping to solve the world’s global problems.
Here is an overview of the scope of the project, with some figures about the number of entries:
World Problems – Issues: 56,564 profiles, 276,791 links
Global Strategies – Solutions: 32,547 profiles, 284,382 links
Human Values: 3,257 profiles, 119,255 links
Human Development: 4,817 profiles, 19,757 links
Patterns and Metaphors: 1,275 profiles, 4,535 links
Bibliography (issues): 16,579 profiles, 24,236 links
Integrative Concepts: 633 profiles, 0 links
Potential Questions: 1,058,278 profiles, 0 links
All databases together contain an astounding 1,516,366 records with 1,915,828 links
The Problems with the project
It was in some senses, born to early to profit from the participatory technologies of today.
There are therefore some problems associated with its use:
1) the database is not openly searchable on the web, which means you cannot access it if you don’t know the address of the resource
2) the database style used is outdated
3) it is not participative and collective intelligence cannot be added to it.
The business model of the UIA seems no longer to be working. Revenues from printed sources is dwindling, most of the old staff members have disappeared.
There seems to be an inability either
1) to fully understand and embrace the new participatory modes of knowledge work,
2) or internal institutional issues which prevent the solutions from being acted upon.
3) external constraints that prevent a solution to be carried out
(please not that I’m not privy to the internal situation at the UIA, this action alert is based only on reading some emails of concerned sympathizers)
Simply put, apart from not realizing the potential of this extraordinary gem for mankind, the UIA itself may go bankrupt at some point, and all of this extraordinary effort may come to naught.
What Needs to be Done
1. Cultural communities, civil society, librarians, should take up the cause of this Cultural Gem, in order to increase global awareness of its existence and motivate policy makers to create resources to insure its perennity.
2. The whole gamut of material should be made totally open and searchable, directly from the search engines such as Google. It should probably become an editable resource such as the Wikipedia, but could avoid some of it problems by keeping a protected version as a reference and mirror.
3. The project needs financial resources. Entities such as Google should seriously consider adding it to their global resource base. UNESCO should declare it a cultural treasure of humanity.
Background
Anthony Judge, Nadia McLaren, Joel Fischer and Tomas Fulopp. Simulating a Global Brain using networks of international organizations, world problems, strategies, and values. 2001.
Thanks for spreading the word about this.