David, I thought about your post for a few days--not that I've thought of anything great to say.

The title of the thread was a bit jarring to me. Now I want to be clear that I don't mean that as a criticism, but I do want to explain a bit why I found it jarring.

I'm not sure that "selling the Worldwide Connectory" is the best way to think about it.

One the other hand, I liked very much your metaphor:

I feel as if I’m sitting in the middle of a coalfield with stacks of coal all around me and with the WWC idea like a lighter in my hands. There is a capacity here to harness a huge stock of energy to warm communities across the globe.

The first difficulty I have with the idea of "selling" has to do with the association with money. A friend a while back wrote about the talk about MySpace and a commentator wondering: Where's the money?

My friend Phil turned the question around and asked: Why the Money?

But it's the wrong question. The more interesting one is "why the money"? And it's still gonna take us a long time to get our heads around that. But that's what we're all gonna be asking at some point.

The more effective the internet and the web are at helping us communicate and co-ordinate, the less money will be involved. Because ultimately the economy is a communication network and money is its protocol

The network is not the means to the end of money.

Instead, money and IP are rival protocols in rival networks which are means to the same end : that of articulating human labour to create more wealth for humanity. Money isn't wealth, it's just a kind of signal which can be used to help identify good ideas and channel more resources to them. On the internet we are increasingly finding alternative ways of identifying and signalling what things are worthwhile.

I imagine the Worldwide Connectory very much a product of the communications and technology network--social Web-- that Phil is suggesting as a rival network to money.

I'm probably taking your metaphor of "selling" too literally, but to follow Phil's point is to realize a difference between social networks enabled by communications tools and the markets.

Trust is obviously an essential feature of these new networks. With our experience at Omidyar.net, the subject has been talked to death not only in terms of the reputation system at Omidyar.net, but also how reputation was the key to eBay's success.

Many companies invest in their brands. Brands in a sense are a message that you can trust the product. But public relations manipulates. Even if we are not certain as to how we are being manipulated, we know at some level we are.

Sokari at Black Looks has a post up today about Edward Bernays, the founder of Public Relations, and nephew of Sigmund Freud. She has posted a video of a documentary about Bernays and list a link, Tobacco fixing which tells how Bernays was able to convince women to smoke.

An argument similar to "Guns don't kill people, people do" might be made about advertising. That's fair enough, but perhaps it's possible to see how the unreasonableness of ad campaigns undercuts the objectives of a social network.

Pierre Omidyar's insight about eBay was that an eBay "seal of approval" wasn't going to work. No amount of advertising would make such a seal trustworthy. The reputation had to be separate, and his genius was to provide a system where customer's provided the reputation for the sellers.

Mark has posted a thread about America's Giving Challenge. Can you imagine that I'm a little bit grumpy about these sorts of competitions? I am, but on the other hand I find watching how the organizations have mobilized for the effort extraordinarily informative about the kinds of kindling to set your bags of coal alight.

Scott Beale clearly has done a great job. I do get his messages from Atlas Service Corps at Facebook. But I also follow Beth's Blog and have for some time. So just by following Beth Kanter's blog I was already aware of the Sharing Foundation and her advocacy of it. Beth's Blog is a blog whose purpose is to show non-profits how they can use social media. So at her blog the whole complicated story of Beth's campaign to get matching money from America's Giving Challenge is laid out for all to see.

The approach is not selling and the differences are important because the methods used I believe will be much more effective for the Worldwide Connectory.

Opinions vary, but one case study to look at is Bono's (Product)Red. This campaign is very much about using selling, but it's not a brand that's taken off despite the very best persuaders in industry.

The alternative ways people are finding to do cool things on the Internet that Phil points out aren't just different, they are different because they are not premised on money as the communication network. "Selling" says to put your money where your mouth is. But what the Worldwide Connectory is about really is the communication, the engagement across boundaries. The social media approach that Beth Kanter and others write about is a real alternative. It's new and still in creation, but there are a number of trail blazers to engage and to learn from.

David Bale said:

Originally I gave this thread the title of "Selling the Worldwide Connectory" pointing out that I wasn't talking about a comemercial sale but how best to "sell" the idea of the World Connectory Project? John Powers has alerted me to the misunderstanding that could arise from the original title &, thanks to his good advice, I've re-named it

Oh my goodness ...I do love the spirit of Ned in action - it's a joy!

G. :)

Thanks, John.

The only part of your post I would really take issue with is this:

David, I thought about your post for a few days--not that I've thought of anything great to say.

I disagree: your thoughts are invariably interesting and always great to read!

:)

You're right, of course. "Selling" is not what's needed at all. It's about getting people involved with the idea and turning the idea into sustainable reality.

Perhaps what are needed are conceptual catalysts. Things that make things happen without themselves being actual ingredients or purchasable commodities. I've always like the idea of building an arch. I don't think it can be done without using an arch-shaped frame, yet the frame has to be totally removed for the self-sustaining arch to be created.

Another name for this type of process is scaffolding. To re-frame this issue, we might ask "What are the types of scaffolding that will enable (or necessitate, even) the creation of a working World Connectory Project?"

The basic premise - which of course may be wrong - is that if you take two human beings, one of whom has resources surplus to requirement (i.e. someone living in a List B country) while the other has an urgent need for those resources (ie someone living in a List A country), if you then put the two human beings together so they get to know each other well and to understand each other, they will tend to find ways to better use the sum total of their resources to their mutual advantage. In other words, if people understand sufficiently, they like to help each other. It's a natural energy, synonymous with being human.

If, tomorrow, it were possible for every person on the planet to receive in the post a detailed profile and contact details of someone with totally different economic circumstances from their own, together with some simple and practical suggestions for action that would greatly assist the other person, I believe that many would respond positively by trying to share things more equally, at least as far as health, education and the ability to provide for one's family are concerned. Especially as it can be done without in the slightest jeopardising the health and welfare of your own loved ones.

Since it is logistically impossible for a massive postal intervention of this kind to be engineered, the Worldwide Connectory is intended to be the next best thing: one that will take large groups of people from List A countries and connect them up with large groups of people from List B countries, giving them all a similar brief.

The two basic catalytic impulses contained in this are:

• people's desire to help (provided it is not too difficult to do so)
• people's desire to be helped (provided it can be done in a respectful, sustainable way)

Activating those impulses by providing the right scaffolding for them to thrive is what I was misleadingly speaking of when I referred to "selling the idea" and which I now have re-named "kindling the enthusiasm".

The internet is itself a kind of scaffolding, but it contains within it, a capacity to design more detailed, more specific and more effective forms of scaffolding, many of them to be used within the scaffolding framework of the internet itself.

Specifying these more detailed designs and gathering them in some kind of User Manual for effecting change is what I'd like the Worldwide Connectory to be all about.

And thanks to Gayle too.

Pure joy!

John, you'll have to share with us someday, how you are able to remember all of these links to important commentary on such a variety of subjects...

Let me expand on what I wrote in the intro to this thread.

Among those that I think need to be recruited to the cause are the following:

International development non-profits
National & local media in over a hundred countries

Both non profits and the media stand to benefit if the WWC is a success. The more that people support the World Connectory project, the more support there is likely to be for international development non profits; and the more the public is interested, the greater their appetite for more news stories about international development.

So, in a sense, both non profits and the media are likely to behave like coal. They have a great long-term capacity for maintaining a high profile for the WCP, provided people can first be enthused.

But they are also unique well-placed to act as kindling for the project. If only we can work out how to enlist their support.

Take non profits:

• they could be proactive in developing the nonprofitslist as a uniquely comprehensive documentation of the geographical distribution of international development aid projects
• they could promote the WWC as a means of raising their own profiles in the community
• they could take the lead in proposing new community initiatives: for example, in the countries or regions where they are already actively working they could offer to look into expanding or developing projects if community groups would undertake to raise a given level of funding for this.
• they could work with new community-based partners in response to specific community initiatives. They could meet regularly with a wider range of community groups and be prepared to be responsive to community initiatives

For the media:

• they could sponsor community initiatives in support of their own local WWC partnerships
• they could develop and document their own story of establishing contact with the media in their own respective partner areas - a regular newsletter from a fellow journalist in their partnership area or professional exchange visits while sending stories home.
• they could help recruit and organise WCP supporters
• they could offer awards or prizes to the best local WCP initiatives
• they could give advance notice of, and thorough post-event coverage to, all efforts to get the WCP off the ground.
• at a national level, particularly, TV and radio programmes could incorporate the WCP into their programming with interviews, news stories and even whole series documenting the development of partnership projects in different areas. It could provide the basis for reality shows, televised exchange visits, wildlife or travel documentaries & news programmes.
• they could sponsor cultural and vocational exchanges, exhibitions and festivals

Is kindling of this kind too much to ask? And if not, how best to work with non-profits and the media to enthuse others?

I mentioned Beth's Blog. Her tagline is:

How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media. A place to capture and share ideas, experiment with and publish links about nonprofit technology, educational technology, adoption challenges, information design, visual thinking, creativity, ICT in the developing world, and much more.

I have no clue how she manages to put so much up. Recently she's been blogging heavily about America's Giving Challenge. But she blogs about such a range of topics. One problem I have is finding past posts on her blog, there's just so much there.

Recently she did a post My Organization's Fundraising Has Been Abducted by Aliens! (Notes from my Berkman Center Bloggers Session). I searched for it because David talking about nonprofits embracing the World Connectory project reminded me of Beth's idea of aliens taking over.

Clearly organizations are wary about aliens. She notes that The Sharing Foundation has allowed her the freedom to go out and fund raise on her own. She notes that one reason they might be willing to do that is the organization is only ten years old. But the obvious point she doesn't make is she's someone who's established her trustworthiness.

So one hurdle in collaborating with non profits is understanding the fear of aliens. Of course the obvious solution is not to be an alien.

I know that you've given considerable thought to the launching of the World Wide Connectory. And I'm just thinking aloud.

Something that I think is quite difficult is to explain the big picture of the World Wide Connectory. If your partner areas are randomly assigned, then it's one thing for the media in the Japanese cities of Ichinomiya & Konan to tell people they are partnered with Ngororero and Nyabihu in Rwanda, but another to expect the media there to write about the World Wide Connectory in the abstract. In other words to explain the Connectory in the context of their particular partnership seems easier. And it seems that's it's in the particular partnerships where enthusiasm is most needed.

A part of me would like to see articles about you, David Bale, as a sort of guru. The problem with that, and the problem of you putting out a public face on a blog for example, is the amount of time needed to attend to that public person.

One model that may have something to glean from is Global Voices. Ethan Zuckerman is very well-known on the Internet. So he does have a public personae. Global Voices was his idea primarily. Basically the idea is to aggregate and make available blogger's voices around the world. Now the cool thing is it works. Even though Zuckerman came up with the idea and writes about it, I don't think he has to deal with lots of inquiries about it on a day to day basis.

It's interesting to look at how Zuckerman got Global Voices off the ground. Something that seems essential is the institutional support that the Berkman Center at Harvard University offered. Some sort of institutional support seems as though it would be a good thing for this project.

In any case, just as you've solved the massive task of apportioning the world by making it into chunks, the kindling enthusiasm is something to chunk too. My thinking right now, this moment, changeable at any moment, is that I would begin thinking about some sort of institutional support. Perhaps the Royal Geographic Society, or some institution convenient to David. The American Friends Service Committee came to mind, but I don't know if there is a similar organization in the UK?

Few organizations would sign on with much of a promise of financial support. It's getting them to sign on in the first place that seems most important. The Berkman Center has a number of programs, lol, so even while it isn't local to you David, it's a place to consider. Also one of the off shoots of Global Voices is Rising Voices. Several participants here at Ned participate there. Basically the MO of Rising Voices is small grants, and I'm not sure that the initial phases of The World Wide Connectory really matches their objectives.

Anyway, my sense tonight is where I'd be looking to kindle some enthusiasm would be to get some institutional involvement. Figuring out a good match and then the pitch is a lot of work, but at least that's one way to chunk the effort to ignite some kindling.

John, that really is most helpful!

Thinks.

Thanks David for being cool about my just thinking out loud.

When you were a did did you ever take a watch apart? I did and of course was fascinated by all the moving parts. Of course I couldn't put it back together again, just like Humpty Dumpty:-( The world Wide Connectory is like a watch with lots of moving parts. But a mechanical metaphor really doesn't do the complications justice, because in addition to being complicated we want the movement to grow rather organically.

I'm not so good at metaphors, at least thinking them through. But I'll point out two common metaphors for organic growth: One is the metaphor of a tree. The other is the metaphor of a rhizome. I'm not sure what's best for thinking here; I'll have to think about that some more.

In thinking about the World Wide Connectory it seems as though little parts of it come to mind and I'm not sure how they fit. One resource which seems important to this effort is Flickr.

It is interesting that Global Voices was taken on as a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It makes sense when thinking about blogs. But blogs are of course just one form of Internet communication. Still the learning potential for a world wide effort is very significant.

One of the areas of interest to academic institutions is the collection and representation of data. Data collection and representing it seems to me will be a key for the success of the project across so many boundaries. Flickr is an interesting site not only because of it's vast user base, but also because Flickr has been very open in sharing data with it's users.

Clearly in an effort like the World Wide Connectory most of the effort and funding should be between partner areas. But there is a need to have some "back office" infrastructure. And in thinking of that, an institution like Berkman makes a lot of sense.

A rather different model is Transition Towns is a local effort of Totnes. But it has grown rapidly to include other communities around the world. So it's quite conceivable to imagine the World Wide Connectory beginning as a local project; i.e. one town and one partner area but with the explicit idea that it will grow.

The ways that people are connecting online is something new. I'm curious about it, but not really up on all the latest ideas. Nevertheless that the subject comes up across so many different viewpoints is quite fascinating. John Robb, a military theorist linked to a post at Mark Pesce's Hyperpeople blog. Pesce's whole piece is good, but I wanted to just copy the snippet that Robb extracted:

Earlier this year, I was privileged to go “on tour” with Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, the founder and public face of Wikipedia, as we crisscrossed the nation, talking to educators in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Everywhere we went, people asked the same question: why is Wikipedia such a success, while my wiki languishes? What do you need to achieve critical mass? The answer, Jimmy said, is five people. Five individuals dedicated to an altruistic sharing of collective intelligence should be enough to produce a flowering similar to Wikipedia. Jimbo has learned, through experience, that the “minor” language versions of Wikipedia (languages with less than 10 million native speakers), need at least five steady contributors to become self-sustaining. In the many wikis Jimbo oversees through his commercial arm, Wikia, he’s noted the same phenomenon time and again. Five people mark the tipping point between a hobby and a nascent hyperintelligence.

Robb bolded the last bit. I not sure how one goes about finding the five people, but it strikes me there's something to this rule of five.

When David first brought up the question of how to get otheres in the know about the World Wide Connectory, my first thought was that someone needs to tell the story of what David has done. Well, maybe David can best tell the story. That story is somewhat different from the World Wide Connectory itself, but integral to it.

I'm not sure that "recruiting" five people is really possible. In Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Opps, I just remembered I haven't figured out how to format poetry here) The Ancient Mariner is on a ship in dire straits, his killing of the Albtross was the event that began it, and the body of the dead bird was hung around his neck. Then the Ancient Mariner watches the water snakes:

O happy living things! no tongue
 Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
 And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
  And I blessed them unaware.

I suspect that there's something in "I blessed them unaware" about the composition of the five, or at least in their motivation. Maybe not, but that's why I wonder if recruitment would work. There's something of a "falling in love" that required. Still I think this idea of five altruistic folks creating the tipping point is something to look for in the emergence of the project. And between partner areas their success the rule of five will also probably come into play, so perhaps this ideas is something worth some attention.

[Edited by group owner: David Bale on 04 Feb 2008 00:25 PST: edit - using his poetic licence ;)]

John said:

Still I think this idea of five altruistic folks creating the tipping point is something to look for in the emergence of the project. And between partner areas their success the rule of five will also probably come into play, so perhaps this ideas is something worth some attention.

I find the idea of the rule of five wrt the World Connectory Project both interesting and heartening even though it implies that for the project really to operate fully as intended, something upward of 600,000 thousand people - as a minimum - would need to be operating as part of a critical fivesome (i.e. "Five individuals dedicated to an altruistic sharing of collective intelligence should be enough to produce a flowering similar to Wikipedia." - see John's post)

That may sound daunting to a glass-half-empty type person, but to a glass-half-full type it offers the promise of significant achievement even if the actual numbers recruited are far fewer. For example, at the lowest level of WWC recruitment of this kind, let's suppose that in 2,399 of the 2,400 allocated partnership less than five people become consistently active and nothing much is achieved. But let's suppose that in the 2,400th partnership, five committed individuals emerge in both of the linked List A and List B countries. The rule of five suggests that those 10 individuals could achieve remarkable things. I'll try to enumerate what these might be in a separate post.

First, I need to explain why I arrived at a figure of 600,000+ individuals needed, when 10 individuals in each of 2,400 mutualities would come to just 24,000.

Based on The Rule of Five, I reckon that the minimum number for the whole project to work is 600,205.

To work together to organise the project globally = 5

To work together to organise allocations, training and recruitment strategy: 
in each of the 20 world zones for List B countries.(5 x 20) = 100

To work together to organise awareness and training:
in 20 regions for the List A countries (5 x 20) = 100

To work together to coordinate initiatives in each List A or B Connection Area.
(BTW I'm beginning to prefer that term (CA) to "Partner Area")
(5 x 4,800) = 24,000

To work together in each principal locality within each Connection Area. 
(Working on the assumption that there will be an average of 4 such localities per Connection Area,
that would require 5 x 4 x 4,800 = 96,000

To work together with each individual member-group at each locality within each CA, 
assuming a minimum of 2 projects per CA (5 x 2 x 4,800) = 480,000

Total = 600,205                        

I'll explain each of these requirements in a separate post. Please your comments.

David, the way you break things up into manageable parts is such a gift. I agree with you that the rule of five is actually rather encouraging.

Seeing the global vision of this project seems hard for me to do. But attention to the component parts seems easier. Then when you put the parts together it makes sense to me.

The old saw goes "Nothing breeds success like success." My sense is that if one partnership is able to create good things that the news of that will spread and encourage others to come forward.

1. A minimum of five people to work together to organise the project globally

I think it is very important for the WCP to work primarily at a local level and to have at its centre as small a central organisation as possible. But there are important central tasks to be performed.

The creation of the WWC is the starting point. As well as listing all the connection areas (or partner areas, if you prefer), it will need basic instructions and advice about how the user might take active steps to help realise the WWC dream. There is still much work to do in completing this manual, but it is well within the compass of five well-motivated individuals, especially if together they can draw on varied experience of both List A (or developing) and List B (developed) countries and possess or have access to others with some language skills. This is not to say others should be excluded; simply that five people could be sufficient to get the job performed to a good standard and to give the World Wide Connectory immense Kindlability. I know that Kindability has not previously been a bona fide word, but I’m sure you’ll catch my drift.

Provided the manual sets down the task clearly for each of the 4,800 connection areas, there should be no need for any subsequent interference with, or direction of, whatever is decided at a local level. But there will need to be a point of contact for each connection area for purposes both of recruitment and cross-pollination of ideas. There will therefore be an ongoing task of supervising and maintaining the accuracy of the information contained in the WWC. Those who work together to complete the compilation of the WWC (i.e. both the listings and the manual) would also be best-placed to maintain and update it.

The same group of five might also be the best ones to address other relevant central concerns such as deciding the preferred long-term legal status of the World Connectory as an organisation and the need to decide if and when any paid staff will be required. Also, there will no doubt be occasional disagreements between members of local WCP organisations. The central WCP body may need to adjudicate on such matters, while protecting the interests of the project itself.

But of more urgent concern would be the role that the central group of five (or more of course!) might play in the Kindability process. It would be good to give different people a watching brief for each of the 40 regions or zones into which the places featuring in the WCP have been divided. In the shorter-medium term, proof-reading and translation needs to be done, in the medium-medium term, a region-by-region awareness-raising exercise needs to be done and in the longer-medium term, zones and regions will to be encouraged to develop their own support structures to foster training, promote collaboration and assist in the allocation process for deciding which areas are to be linked.

Even with just five people actively engaged in these tasks, it should be possible to maintain a credible expansion and enkindlement process. For example, consider the following:-

The List A areas have been sorted into 20 world regions and List B areas have been sorted into 20 World Zones. If we had (a minimum of) five people committed to work consistently for the success of this project, each one of the five could oversee any problems that might arise in relation to up to, let us say, eight regions or zones. Moreover, it would be ideal if the allocation of this kind of oversight could be arranged so that each person involved could have at least one or two List A regions and at least one or two List B zones. The distribution might then look something like this (where R1 indicates the first of the 20 world regions listed and Z20 the last of the 20 world zones):

Person 1: R4, R7, Z1, Z2, Z4, Z7, Z8, Z18 (mostly Northern areas / countries, including those from the former Eastern bloc)

Person 2: R1,R2, R8, R9, R16, Z10, Z11, Z14 (most of the areas from South Asia and the Far East)

Person 3: R3, R17, Z3, Z12, Z13, Z16, Z19, Z20 (including most Spanish speaking areas, plus areas in the Pacific & Southern bits of America)

Person 4: R5, R6, R10, R15, R19, Z5, Z9, Z18 (including mostly areas with Anglo or Italian links to US and East Africa)

Person 5: R11, R12, R13, R14, R18, R20, Z6, Z15 (including most French speaking areas in Europe and West Africa)

Hi All at last am here

now i need to edit and write something on my parts were i do stay

2225. Uganda - Central region: Kalangala district and Masaka district (Bukoto county and Masaka municipality)

This is the County were i wasborn an my mother and my father Bukoto-masaka distric. Kalangala district was demacted from Masaka and it is an Island part of lake victoria Both districts are in Buganda Kingdom and the languange spoken is LUGANDA.

2226. Uganda - Central region: Kampala district (Central division - north of Namirembe Road and Rubaga division)

Kampala is the capital city of uganda and its mayor is called Nasser Ssebagala. Kampala cental division is in the city center and its Chairman is called Godfrey Nyakana former Boxing Champion. Rubaga dision is in the North Of Kampala and this is were my university that i go to every day is found.

2227. Uganda - Central region: Kampala district (Central division - south of Namirembe Road and Makindye division)

This is the headquaters of the military police of uganda

2228. Uganda - Central region: Kampala district (Kawempe and Nakawa divisions)

This is were the Industrial area is and many factories of uganda are found in this division.

2231. Uganda - Central region: Kiboga and Mityana districts

These are the districts in the cetral Region were they keep many cows and they are pastrolists.

The languange used is Luganda.

2232. Uganda - Central region: Luwero and Nakasongola

districts

This is were the guorila war that brought the current President of uganda in power started and there died many people when you go there you will find many skulls.

2234. Uganda - Central region: Masaka district (Bukomansimbi and Kalungu counties) and Sembabule district

Pastorist people leave theere and the main activity is Agriculture languange spoken is Luganda but in parts of Sembabule they speak Lunyarwanda and runyankore

2235. Uganda - Central region: Mpigi district

This district is full of Agriclture and forestly. languange luganda

2238. Uganda - Central region: Wakiso district (Entebbe municipality and Kyadondo county)

This is the district were i currently reside and stay it has got part of lake Victoria and the Airport, zoo, it has got the beautifully Beaches in Uganda beatiful road and the organised municiparity Entebbe municiparity its mayor is called Steven Kabuye we go to same church

Thanks, Kayiwa, for bringing these places to life.

I'll copy them to the What's What in my area thread because your comments will be of value there too.

But in the context of how to kindle enthusiasm for the project, your thumbnail sketches of the WWC areas in and around Kampala seem to me to demonstrate both the potential for developing partnerships and some of the challenges that will need to be overcome if the project is to succeed.

The potential

• each List A area has its own distinctive character: in finding out about this, List B areas will get to know something of their partner area's characteristics, culture and needs. A group of individuals from a List B area could make contact with someone in the List A partner area willing to take photos of the area and post them on the internet. They could send this person a digital camera to achieve this end.
• Kayiwa Fred's familiarity with so many of these areas indicates the potential for cross-area support and cooperation, especially in spreading the word in the early days of the project. If Kayiwa has knowledge of many areas, and ongoing links with many of them, so too will others.
• List A countries have a great need for resources that are concentrated disproportionately in List B areas, often lying idle, often never to be used again. There's a potential to re-distribute and share these more fairly.
• Personally, I'm convinced that people in List B countries have as much, if not more to benefit from interaction with their List A partners or virtually neighbours than they do themselves. Not only will these experiences of widening their horizons make them better people, but List A countries have resources of their own to offer too. Just looking at Kayiwa's thumbnail sketches, the things that come to mind include educational exchanges, industrial products, agriculture produce, sporting links and not only the "beautiful beaches" of Wakiso district that are already well-known, but also the potential perhaps for developing other visitor attractions in areas like WWC #2225 which contains "the Island part of Lake Victoria".

Thanks, Kayiwa for opening this up!

edited for clarity

Some of the challenges:

Languages - I know very little about African languages. I now have the opportunity of finding out more.

Is Luganda widely used as a written language? If so, there will be a need to translate key ideas and documents. I've started looking at this in Translating information about the World Connectory Project. Please add your comments or offers of help!

Where people are unable to read (due to poor educational opportunity or other factors), how can we best get the WWC message over?

This seems to be another area where The Rule of Five might apply.

Luganda is mainly used in Uganda.It is a well written language mainly for people in the central( Buganda). In fact i was born in Uganda - Central region:in Masaka district, Bukoto county.I think the rule of five can work here as well.

In another WCP thread, in responding to ideas put forward by Chris Macrae, I wrote:

In a truly bottom-up approach, every individual should be empowered to initiate action on their own account in their own home district, not just in response to initiatives from above. That's why starting at the bottom, with initiatives in every small locality could potentially work much better than trying to engineer one large overall campaign or cause.

The Kindling thread has been a little quiet of late. I think I better post there some ideas I have of how a team of "human kindling" might start up a lot of small fires leading eventually to one large conflagration.

What I had in mind when speaking of "human kindling", arises to some extent out of the discussions here earlier about the relevance of The Rule of Five to the development of the WWC idea. In getting most things done, there needs to be a minimum of five committed individuals required in each major task area to move things forward in a sustainable fashion. We might say that these multi-groupings of 5+ key players represent bundles of sticks in the kindling process. But how can these bundles themselves be kindled?

The WCP seeks to involve large numbers of people in 4,800 areas of the world (covering in total two-fifths of the world's population). Getting this process started over a necessarily very wide area means employing some very powerful mechanisms. Not only must we achieve widespread visibility, we need also to achieve widespread appeal. this is not easy: fairness dictates that the process must be random; randomness means that people almost everywhere in the world will need to be invited to get involved, and if not invited simutaneously, then invited within a fairly tight time-frame.

Okay, a team of five could achieve this - if it were, let's say, Dr Yunos, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Oprah Winfrey and the next president of the United States - but it could achieve this only in a top down fashion, because each team member is in a sense a red-hot coal: a market leader with a huge ready-made following. Any one of a team like this could make a pronouncement that, say, the moon is made of blue cheese and immediately half the world gets to hear this - and at no immediate financial cost to the team member concerned (though the cost the their reputation might be somewhat greater!). But if you or I wanted a similar sized audience to be told that the moon is made of blue cheese, it would cost us billions of bucks (that we don't have) in advertising revenue.

So what is a cheaper, more effective alternative of getting one's message out where it matters?

The answer could be what I'm calling "human kindling": a team ideally of at least 120 people, each one a "sub-team" whose task it would be to focus on just a single WWC partnership within each WWC world zone. Over the course of a week or two, each sub-team would send e-mails to the main local media outlets in one pair of linked areas; to all the organisations they can locate; to all the schools and colleges and hospitals and CBOs etc etc. This could be a complicated task, because within each connection area thre will be at least a dozen or two separate localities, each of which might have their own organisations. No way can any sub-team reach everyone in their area, but within a week or two, a considerable number of e-mails might be sent out, any one of which might turn out to very combustible!

The e-mails would all be basically the same. They would need to:

• be written in an appropriate language for each specific area. (Language advisors will need to be recruited to assist with this)
• explain what the WCP is all about
• announce the identity of their area's WWC partner area for the next five years
• direct them to the WWC where there will be suggestions about how they might proceed to develop their partnership

Each sub-team would then field questions, make any referrals required, help make new connections between and within areas and keep a note of people willing to act as contact points either for their connection area or for a locality within it.

It would therefore take either 20 weeks or 40 weeks to announce the WWC partnerships in the 20 world areas using this method, depending on whether we spent one week or two on each partnership. There would be no big bang, just a steady release of information.

But I think it might just work. What do others think?

Sometimes my brain doesn't accelerate very fast. There's a great deal to your post David, so my tendency is to want to think about it some more. But it's better to keep something on my radar, if I comment. Sadly that means I'm coming off half-cocked.

One of the thoughts is that young people so often say of email, "that's for old people." Oddly, Twitter seems a big hit among thirty-somethings, so it's something for "sort of old people."

In business talk there's a lot of discussion about push and pull models. The old fashioned model is push and the vanguard is looking to pull. I'm not sure I really understand this talk, but my hunch is that pull is what the DNA of the WWC is all about. So when I paused at the idea of emails, it isn't just about age but about what the WWC really is. Press releases and emails seem push when I'm trying to imagine pull.

That said, I don't have any great ideas about ho to get the word out in a pull sort of way. Certainly, I haven't thought it out as well as you.

Tonight I watched Karen Armstrong's Ted Talk. She was one of this year's Ted Prize winners. In addition to money the prize winners get a wish which the community helps to make real. Her wish is to develop a Charter of Compassion among the world's Abrahamic religions.

It's a lovely talk, but I notice when she gets to the "how to do it" part she reaches out to the audience and says in effect "you tell me." I do think that watching what happens with this effort may contain great clues for this work.

Something that Armstrong mentioned was the UN's Alliance of Civilization. I had never heard of it. Now the UN programs are quintessentially push programs, so this really isn't a model. Nonetheless the aims of the program seem in keeping with some of the aims of the WWC. I'm not sure how, but I can imagine that the WWC could be a player in the this UN initiative. And might possible provide some bureaucratic infrastructure for the WWC.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, John.

I get confused about push and pull. The nature reserve where I work as a volunteer is about to embark on an exciting expansion programme which will involve the planting of huge reedbeds and the control of water levels to improve breeding conditions in three newly linked areas of the reserve. We are confidently expecting as a result to attract new breeding species such as marsh harrier, avocet, bittern and bearded tit.

I'd say that was clearly pull rather than push.

We are not sending out leaflets to every householder withing fifty miles telling them they really ought to come and visit. But if we did, I'd say that was pretty clearly push rather than pull.

But when people visit the nature reserve, I usually tell them about the expansion plans and they are usually interested and glad I told them. Is that push or pull?

If I create a garden specifically to attract wildlife, is that pull or push? Is it different from putting out a huge quantity of bird food every day? Or from releasing new species into my garden knowing that I have made conditions there such that they are likely to remain?

I've said before that I see the way the WWC process should work is like a see-saw, with both sides of each WWC partnership continuously pushing themselves and pulling their partners at the same time.

John Powers speaks of the Alliance of Civilization. I too had not previously heard of it. I too think it sounds like it might be a very useful link to make.

John says:

...the aims of the program seem in keeping with some of the aims of the WWC. I'm not sure how, but I can imagine that the WWC could be a player in the this UN initiative. And might possible provide some bureaucratic infrastructure for the WWC.

Recently, I have been thinking more and more about how to make some useful UN connections. Mostly though I have been thinking of people I know who might have useful contacts with QUNO, the Quaker office at the United Nations. In particular, I think the WCP needs to be linked to a universally trusted organisation that could oversee the random number generation process on which all the WWC partnerships will be based. That means securing the cooperation of a reputable organisation that can vouch for the fairness/randomness of the process.

I will offer some thought soon, I am thinking. LOL the holiday is taking some time. I wish you a lovely Easter.

Thanks, John.

Have a wonderful time this Easter too!