Short Version of the Plan for World Peace

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could. In doing so, I have sometimes erred and learnt by my errors. Life and its problems have thus become to me so many experiments in the practice of truth and nonviolence…

Mahatma Gandhi

Part of the premise for this system is in World Peace Using Social Networks. To get an idea of some of the theory, that might help. Please send any additional questions or feedback to will@techoanarchy.org. I much prefer to catch problems now than after I've headed down the wrong road for a year.

Will

In short, the proposal is:

1. Encourage the non-centralized maintenance of reasonably reliable virtual identities.
2. Funnel resources into a self-limiting profit-donation economy.
3. Fund coordinated scientific efforts to solve the problems of the world.

The elements of the proposal tie together in various ways. In slightly more detail, the plan is:

1. Found the Department of Happiness.
   1. What are the goals of the DoH?
   2. What are the underlying principles of the DoH?
2. Write an efficient peer-to-peer searchable network of cryptographically signed XML documents.
   1. What is a cryptographic signature?
   2. What is ontological markup?
   3. What is the Ideapool?
   4. Why use a peer-to-peer network?
3. Release a CMS to publish aggregates of semantic documents from network using templates.
   1. Why not simply create the application directly on the network?
4. Create an application for the distribution of personal opinions using the CMS.
   1. What will TagItAll look like?
   2. How do I prevent people from saying things about me?
   3. Why won't hackers just flood the network?
   4. Why won't people people just lie?
   5. What do you hope to get out of TagItAll?
5. Simultaneously:
   1. Open profit-donation interactive bar.
      1. What is a profit-donation business?
      2. What is the incentive for entrepreneurship in profit-donation capitalism?
      3. What is the incentive to patronize profit-donation businesses?
      4. Why open a bar?
      5. Are you qualified to do this research?
   2. Create tools to support open research.
      1. What is open research?
      2. What are the advantages of open research?
6. Return money from bar to a pool to sponsor open research projects.
7. Crowdsource the approval of research proposals for projects of at least four types:
   1. New profit-donation research businesses to feed the pool.
   2. Meta research projects such as how new profit-donation model is interacting with existing total profit model.
   3. Research projects on methods for assessing happiness and developmental cognitive models of life-satisfaction.
   4. Charitable research projects on improving lives where market forces don't provide incentive.
8. Maximize functions of the the business and research branches using direct democracy and maximum expected happiness functions.

How's that sound? People in this economy still have jobs. The point is for them to find jobs which compensate them in non-monetary means to make up for the lack of a total profit incentive. Competition still exists to the extent there are limited resources, and selection pressures work toward creating ideas that do the most to help society at large.

Instead of treating evolution as a long-term process, recognize that societal pressures feature select more heavily than genetic ones in today's world. Then give people the human, logistical and financial resources to focus their amorphous I'd like to do something drive into specific actions.

It is a sort of market socialism driven by a direct democracy. (I'm not an expert economist, I figure if the plan works, someone will put in for a research grant to do a better analysis.)

My hope is that we're at a point where enough people can recognize that, if for some reason peace is not important enough in itself, we need to do something simply to avoid the ever increasing danger our technology poses directly (weapons) and indirectly (environmental damage).

I've got $8,000 in the bank, and I figure I can make that last a year and a half before I have to get a job again, particularly if I get part time work in a bar.

My hope in publicizing the plan is to get feedback so that if I am overlooking anything major I can adjust the process now rather than by trial and error. It's certainly not possible to foresee everything, but that's no reason not to identify the potential issues that can be seen.

If things go well, you'll hear something from me within the next couple years. I'm getting married in September of 2010 and I'm going to try and have some of the tech stuff for the bar interaction working for the wedding. You may get e-mail messages about a new social networking app called TagItAll in 2011ish. Join it, and maybe you'll get to hang out in The Anarchist Grill in 2012 or so.

If you'd like to help out now:

• If you're a lawyer, I want to register "The Department of Happiness" as a LLC in Maryland and as a 501(c)(3).

• If you like robots, you could take my job. Until May, I am responsible for designing the interface for a soldier to command a robotic team within a squad. The robots are hunting for IEDs and interacting with humans to identify questionable items. It's pretty cool, and you might save someone's life if you do it well.

  As you might be able to tell, the application of computational modeling on a large scale is what really interests me. It would be awesome if someone who likes robots as much as I like applied sociology could do my job instead of me.

  I'll give you the $1,500 a month Vanderbilt currently gives to me and, if you come up with a creative project, maybe using glove-mounted accelerometers to control a surfaceless multitouch interface, we could try to talk my adviser into letting you get the Ph.D. I signed up for.

• If you have a good knowledge of cryptography, peer-to-peer networks or distributed search, you could help me design Ideapool. That's the network for retrieval of signed XML documents that underlies much of Project Ecesis, the technical arm of the DoH.

• If you like the DoH idea, subscribe to the DoH blog.

• If you have any suggestions on how I could get to Barcelona cheap, I think it'd be really interesting to discuss these ideas with the guys at the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, but don't have the scratch for a plane ticket.