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.