I am a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Reuters Digital Visions Program, asking myself the question, "What is the simplest thing that I can do which will have the greatest humanitarian uplift." Some of my reflections on this topic are in my blog at www.munnecke.com 
. In my day job before this conversion to humanitarian applications of the Internet, I was a vice president of SAIC in San Diego, with 30 years experience in the design of large scale hospital information systems (I was one of the original software architects of both the VA and DoD hospital information systems).
I've been formulating these ideas within the context of www.givingspace.org and have recently been funded for a seed prototype from the Omidyar foundation www.munnecke.com . I have the greatest respect for Pierre Omidyar - check out some of his quotations at www.givingspace.org . I am very interested in complexity theory and adaptive systems, see the Giving Space meeting at Santa Fe Institute with Murray Gell-Mann givingspace.org
I am interested in designing a pattern language for uplift. This is different from most patterns I have seen, which are based on the basic notion of a problem. This is a symptom of Mal Gnosis - a way of understanding based on what is wrong. I seek to create an Autocatalytic Space which is based on the notion of Bene Gnosis - a way of understanding based on what is strong or correct. A Martian seeking to understand a television set by taking out the tubes and seein what fails illustrates the malgnostic perspective. A Martian discovering the schematic diagram of the TV and learning the operation by understanding the symbols is displaying the benegnostic perspective.
My thesis is that we happen to live in an era which has tilted remarkably towards the malgnostic... doctors have 1.2 million terms to describe how to be sick (UMLS), but virtually none to describe health. The encyclopedia of world problems lists over 30,000 problems (and growing rapidly). News media typically carry 6-8 negative articles for every positive one. So, I am trying to work up Uplift Pattern Language, Uplift Intelligence, and Uplift Academy.
Tom Munnecke munnecke@stanford.edu
Welcome to wiki! Sounds interesting. Beware the Walled Garden, though -- on wiki, they just might be a sign of Mal Gnosis. ;-)
Welcome to the Original Wiki.
You may be interested in How To Achieve World Peace and other pages here in the category "Category Wiki Saves The World".
Other wiki are also talking about how to coordinate improvements, such as
www.communitywiki.org
.
Your term "uplift" is interesting -- it seems that many times we put a lot of time and effort into analyzing what problem causes something to be worse than average, then we fix things until it is merely average, then we stop. Perhaps we should start putting some time and effort into analyzing what we could do to make things better-than-todays-average for everyone. If we say average is "5", then Turn All The Knobs To Seven. Maybe even think about what happens when the knob Goes To Eleven. :-)
I'm working on a project that I think might help against the number one killer of humans,
and I mentioned it in these 3 wiki:
wiki.asiaquake.org
gfxalgo.wiki.taoriver.net
electronicschat.org
Alas, all three have gone offline. How strange.
So I come up with the idea of a wiki distributed across several machines/buildings/continents, so that if one of them goes offline, people don't even notice.
(analogous to Google and some of the better RAID storage systems. No data is lost, and people don't even notice, when any particular box fails).
I wrote up a nice, long description, at
wikifeatures.wiki.taoriver.net
with links to other projects that looked like they had code I could use ...
... then that wiki went offline. Isn't that ironic?
But seriously, yes, I do want to develop a fault-tolerant wiki.
(Is this how Don Knuth felt when he got sidetracked? He got sidetracked from writing The Artof Computer Programming (first volume of 7 published in 1968, third volume in 1976), to build a few tools that would make writing it easier: Tex The Program and Meta Font. I hear that, as of 2004, he's done with that little side-trip and starting to write volume 4 of 7. I hope my little side-trip won't take 27 years.)
-- David Cary
See original on c2.com