Let's build it

Build an online education project

2005-10-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

In order to provide free education to everyone,
I propose that we build an online education project in the following way.
1) We create or use tool that will allow people to easily create or modify education material.
2) We set up a set of websites that will organize, rank and freely provide this material.
3) We create or use a tool that will enable to test people knowledge and learning.
4) We create or use a tool that will enable that have the knowledge of a topic to teach it online.

There is no such a tool freely available that allow people to create any education material as this would include a wide spectrum of different techniques : text, audio, video or even objects or facilities.

So in order to start somewhere, I propose to first focus on language learning.
We could more specifically start with english learning since it is with no doubt the internantional language, and the language used in our organization.
I propose that we begin by listing and evaluating existing tools that will enable to create lessons.

The mandatory criteria for general usage could be:
-Open source software (so that we can continue to develop it and specialize it for our needs),
-English interface (so that anyone can use it)

The criteria for evaluation could be:
-Easyness to write and publish lessons
-Possiblity to publish lessons in formats adapted to the web and printing.
-Portability: it should be easy to switch to another tool

Open Art

2005-10-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. (Albert Camus)

A corollary is that we cannot order an artist to be creative in an imposed tight framework. He may create products that marketing will sell easily but he will not produce revolutionary work.
The present system includes art in a market logic.
It has the merit of provinding well know artists with exceptional standing (provided that they produce what is needed to fill the demand).
But its drawbacks are numerous:
- few opportunities to discover non marketed art
- no future for artists that do not follow the law of the market
- and probably art recession.

We should acknowledge that art is one of the fundamental human need.
And as such we should provide access to diversified art to everyone,
provide high quality education to potential artists, set up a
system that finance a large artistic community... and leave them free!

To participate, register into the forum (link on the right menu).

Organisations of the organisation

2005-10-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

We can in the same time :
1)Move towards the goals of the constitution (eliminate poverty, ensure human rights,...)
2)provide customers to our sub-corporations
3)Facilitate direct democracty

The idea is to split taxes into public and personal parts. Public taxes are the part of taxes that are spent on a public basis (they constitue the budget that is spent on a common agreement), personal taxes is the part of taxes that is spent according to personnal wishes.
Non profit (existing or new) non profit organisations register into a directory (we'll call it the organisations directory).
Sub-corporations and users write down their tax policy. This policy describe how personal taxes are split between registred organisations.

When a customer buy a product or service to a sub-corporation, to cases appears:
-If the customer is a registred user, then the personal tax is spent as he decided, independtly of the company policy.
-If the customer is not a user, then the personal tax is spent according to the company policy.

1)This will participate to realisation of the constitution's goal since to be accepted in the directory, non profit organisations will have to satisfy the following criteria:
-The goals of the non-profit organisation must agree with the goals of the constitution.
-The organisation should provide a complete transparency about how is spent the money they receive.

2)This will bring customers to our sub-corporations since they will be able to spend part of the taxes according to their own policy.

3)This will facilitate the direct democracy since population will decide by themself how to spend the personnal part of the budget.

Corporations

2005-10-01T22:36:00.000-07:00

Firstable, corporations are with no doubt the most efficient entities to produce and distribute products.
This comes from the fact that humans are much more motivatived by working for themselves than for someone else.
With respect to this, capitalism is a great system, but it is still too dificult to start a new company: it requires time, money and skills in various domains that are far from the core business one would like to open.

Secondly, Corporations earning's are the source of finance for the political system and any organisation or system needs money to finance its projects.
Through taxes, corporations finance the system, so the taxes should be high enough to have a powerfull and efficient system and low enough to incite people to create their on business.

In order to attract entrepreneurs, I propose the following.
-Creation of an economical board whose mission is to study and suggest economical orientations and decisions.
-Give to each member the possibility to open corporations for free.
-Provide free tools and services for accounting, marketing, mangement, legal and human resources (see previoous post on education)
-Have an attractive tax policy (will be discussed in a later post)
-Provide a structure that will easily bring customers

The long term goal is that every user will have its own company, and employement will be replaced by contracts between corporations.

Universal Education Project

2005-09-28T23:22:00.000-07:00

I believe that it is not difficult to propose to every human a high quality free education covering all the topics, at any level.

For this I propose to :

Create a group for the definition and implementation of common tools, exchange protocols and procedures related to education.

The aim is to provide modules that will allow actors (reaserchers, authors, teachers, tutors, ...) to create adapted, evolutive and reusable education material.

This material could be licenced under an open source licence, and freely available for use and modiciation.

A knowledge database could keep track of users' educational history and current knowledge.
This database, connected to a job offer database would lead to an efficient job market. For instance if some skills are needed but not available, users would know that the learning of the specific topics would gice them more chance to work. Reciprocally availability of human resources in a domain could drive evolution of business.

This project could be first performed by volonteers. A lot of teachers over the world are willing to write educational material, but usually do not share it by lack of an appropriate structure.
Later part of it could be financed by taxes.

One-to-one online tutoring could be provided by using a mechanism similar to the following:
-Have 1 hour tutoring free for a level n course if you successfully taught (for free) 2 hours for the level n-1.

If you want to participate to this project, please leave a post on the forum under the "education project" section

Writing the constitution

2005-09-26T21:11:00.000-07:00

The constitution being the base of the political system we have to be carefull and take time to write it. I propose we do the following:
-Register to the forum ( here)
-Propose and discuss the different articles of the constitution
-Create a constitutional council.
-Vote the articles.

To be universally applicable, a quorum of lets say 1000 registered members is need to vote any article with at least one member from each nationality (stateless persons very welcomed).

So the first task is to advertise a litlle bit our project so that we have enough members to get a constitution. Please help by talking to your friends.

Of course this does not not imply that we cannot start to work.
In fact time is counted and we should hurry.
So do not hesitate to participate to the forum now, and add comments to those posts.

PS: Spam comments will be deleted.

Moving ahead

2005-09-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

In the previous posts I presented the core content of a constitution.
From now on I will concentrate on to how build a political system (called organisation) based on such a constitution.

If we want to go from utopia to reality, the system should be shared by a large number of people. For this to be possible without loosing time to advertize, the organisation has to be attractive.

Here is the list of features that will make our organisation attractive:
- The organisation will be open. Joining will be free,
- Free and open education material,
- Free and open tools for job seekers,
- Free and open tools for associations and corporations,
- Free and open market exchange,
- Free and open art, culture and leisure material.

Leisure

2005-09-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

Whatever exciting could be a job, there is a time when we have to rest.
And what is the more interesting thing to do when we do not work ?
It is certainly something that you enjoy when doing it but also that, when finished, remains as a great souvenir.
And since repetition is boring, the richest are those who have a large panel of activities they can practice at leisure time.

As for health care, it is clear that everyone will not be able to do everything.
But there is a lot that can be done:
-Free Libraries with recent material (books, video,..).
-Low price multimedia devices (TV,radio,computers).
-Free Internet access worldwide (it is a condition for democracy)
-Low price public transportation.
-Cheap lodging in touristic sites.
-Development of public parks, pic-nic areas, campings.
-Development of public sport resorts.
-Low price cultural manifetations, theaters, museums...

In rich countries some of these features already exist and this is good, but they have to be generalized everywhere else.

Education

2005-09-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

From a personal point of view, education provides knowledge and knowledge garanties freedom.
Without knowledge, we have to trust the persons who know and therefore depends on them.
Knowledge brings also satisfaction as it gives deeper and deeper understanding of our world.

From a political point of view, education allows the system to progress.
If we want our population to thrive, we need to raise the level of everyone.
If we want to defeat natual threats, we need an excellent team and everyone should be able to join this team.
So the common knowledge should be transmitted as much as possible to everyone.
It is not too difficult since humans are naturally avid of knowledge.

But learning time can represent only a small part of our life, so we have to make sure that when someone is available to learn he can do it easily.
Therefore our political and economical system should be such that everyone could learn any subject at any time, for free.

Democracy

2005-09-05T21:41:00.000-07:00

Democracy has a long history but it never existed in its full flavour.

Most of the democracies are participatives. The population do not take the political decisions but vote for some representative that will take the decisions in their name.
This approach of the democracy as an obvious drawback : There is no way to be sure that the elected politicians will take the decisions they were elected for.

For the population to have the political power, the democracy has to be direct.
This means that anyone should be able to vote any political decision, if he wishes.
Until recently, direct democracy was not realizable for technical reasons, but with the expansion of communications it is now possible.

Compared with our present systems, the difference would be the following:
-A constitutional council make sure that political decisions are globally coherents and obey the constitution (this only involves logic and could eventually be automatized).
-One man,one vote for any political decision (laws, budget, planification,...). Since no one can participate to all the decisions, vote's delegation is possible for any domain (such that economical decisions, environmental decisions, ...) but delegations can be taken back at any time.
-On any project, experts analyse the impacts and produce a public report.
-In any situation where a representative of the system was needed (for instance in meeting with other countries), the representative will be replaced by a communication chanel where messages sent will be voted in advance and messages received will be publically published.

It is the role of medias to classify, order, summarize and explain the huge amount of ongoing political decisions with their own sensibility.

Freedom

2005-09-01T21:20:00.000-07:00

Freedom is a set of human rights which is composed of at least:
-Freedom of thougt
-Freedom of expression
-Freedom of information
-Freedom to own property
-Freedom of circulation and residence
-Freedom of enterprise
-Freedom of association
-Freedom of peaceful assembly
-Freedom to demonstrate

The freedoms of any human are limited by the respects of the others' rights.

When the amount of freedom is quantifiable, the repartition should follow from strict equality of all humans.

One of the role of the educational system is precisely to enable peoples to use thoses freedoms to their full extent.

Those freedoms must be listed in the constitution.

Health

2005-08-25T19:11:00.000-07:00

It is true that health cost a lot of money.
And we'll hardly avoid the fact that best doctors, equipment and medicine will be available for rich only.
But basic health care (the one available free for everyone) should improve as technology and knowledges are progressing.
If a medicine is cheap : we have the obligation to distribute it everywhere.
If a medicine is too expensive: we have to invest so that its production cost decrease.

We also have to realize that medical science is not an exact science: we use it under our own responsibility. So we cannot sew doctors or hospitals in order to make money.

Also a question to answer is : Does basic health care have to cover all the diseases ?
We know that some diseases are related to the way we live.
For instance tobbacco can produce cancers.
So we can imagine that costs induced by those diseases are not covered.
Those who propose this discrimination say that this would force people to have a better life style.
But the answer to the discrimination question is clear and there is no alternative: basic health care should cover diseases independently of the life style.
First we cannot be 100% sure about the cause to effect relation of the (let's say) tobacco to the cancer,
secondly any disease is related to the whole life style (to avoid most diseases we should live in a steril bubble),
and finally we do not change our "bad" habbits under the pressure of not being covered in case of disease.
Drugs for instance are taken to escape this world. If we make the world better, there wont be need to escape it.

A last point about drugs (from cocain to coffee):
They should be available in supermarket at a price lower than the ones we can find in the street.
But everyone should be aware of the consequences of taking them.
This would have the great effect of breaking the vicious circle of poverty-drug-violence and would fight proxenetism.

Housing

2005-08-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

Adapted housing is also a human right. But even the largest democracy, India, whose constitution includes this right, has hundreds of thousands of people living on the pavement (or worth).
To estimate how many people lack a roof in the world, and how are they distributed in the world, we just have to look at the website of the Housing Organisation of the United States.
There is just a small problem here: this organisation doesn't exist !
There exists a United Nations Human Settlements Programme located in Kenya with a 56 members bureau and a annual budget of 71 million dollars, if we exclude money devoted to Iraq (This is the price a Basketball player like Joe Jonhson would get to change club). But this is inadapted to its huge task.

As for food, housing right should imply that everyone in the world has free access to adapted housing.

Behind the housing right lies another fundamental right, which is the right for a private sphere.
This sphere is caracterized by the fact that none can enter inside or disturb it without the owner's permission.
This right being a human right, it has to be respected in any circumstance, even in jail.

Food

2005-08-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

We all know that we are able to produce food for everyone and that a large part of the population remains undernourished (as graphic shows).

Most of the countries agreed that food access is a human right and some of them included it in their constitution.
This is far from being sufficient, right to food is for instance included in the Bangladesh's constitution but more that 20% of its population suffer from hunger.

The origin of the problem lies in the definition of "right to food".
For the FAO (that is for the UN), the right to food does not mean that the states have to provide food to every human but merely that they should not forbid their citizen to access food.
This implies that a rich country is not committed to give food to a poor country.

But food is a human right, not a "citizen" right.
So a better system should first offer adapted food to its citizens for free and act in all possible means so that non-citizens have access to food.

With our technologies this is possible and we should not wait too much to start ...
the number of undernourished increase every year by 5 millions.

refs: Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Diseases and other natural threats

2005-08-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

Once violence and environment destruction is prohibited by constitution, humans still suffer from natural threats.

Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, typhoons, meteorits, climat changes, gamma ray burst, diseases... are few of the natural phenomena that can kill humans and other species.
Contrary to violence and human environment destruction, we cannot simply prohibit them in our constitution.
A solution is to join our forces and declare a war to all natural threats.

Of course, it is not a new idea and lots of researchers over the world spend their working time on those problems, but the point is that they only represent a tiny part of the population.
This war, should be caried out by most of us !
Not all of us can be a researcher, but there is at least two things that we should do:
- Increase the number of reseachers through a better educational system
- Organise research so that it uses all the available human resources.
Researcher are those who ellaborate the strategies, the rest of the army implements the strategies.
The problem of the present army is that troops are almost inexistant.

Once we realize that this army requires all available resources, then it should provides work to most of us.

Environment destruction by humans

2005-08-21T06:04:00.000-07:00

In both communist and capitalist systems, natural resources are destroyed or altered for economical reasons.
The quite new ecology science tought us that such a way of living could well be a threat for us or our futur genetrations.
Our constitution should therefore include the fact that any human action should, when possible, protect environment and bio-diversity.

Non violence

2005-08-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

I realize that most of us do not like violence but are ready to use it for self protection.
But the boundary of what represents "protection" is fuzzy.
It also leads to violence vicious circles :
Country A (or part of it) attacks country B to protect itself (its interests...)
Country B (or part of it) fights with country A to protect itself.

Sometimes A or B is defeated and in good cases the war stops.
In other cases the violence can last for a long time.

In any case there is a way to avoid war: refuse to participate (directly or indirectly).
It is not as easy as it might appears, for instance even if A is a democratic country any
citizen that pay tax supports indirectly the war.

In case of agression, since we have only few historical experiences, the power of non-violent resistance might be diffult to evaluate.
I believe anyway that non-violence is the best group strategy in any situation.

Since violence is forbiden in all cases, this interdiction should be written in the constitution of our organisation.

Problems with actual systems

2005-08-18T23:12:00.000-07:00

No system:
-Contain the "non-violence" notion in its constitution
-Consider fight against hillness and natural threats as major goal of the community
-Consider that we should have what we need (see previous post)
-Is really democratic (I'll explain that later)

For instance

Capitalism:
-Do not consider that we all need food, house, health care and leisure

Communism:
-Do not consider that we all need freedom
-Wrongly assumes that we are all generous

So we need to build a new system !

The most obvious changes

2005-08-18T22:57:00.000-07:00

Things that we have but do not need

1) Violence
2) Hillnesses
3) Natural threats (earthquakes, tsunami,...)

Things that we need but do not all have

1) food
2) house
3) health care
4) freedom
5) democracy
6) education
7) leisure

Why this blog ?

2005-08-18T22:44:00.000-07:00

1) I'm not happy with our economical and political systems
2) I know what I want to change
3) I think you could agree with my changes or criticize them so I understand and correct my mistakes
4) I have ideas about how to perform the changes
5) The world will change only if we are numerous to push in the same direction