Welcome to the Planetwork
Consortium
The Planetwork Consortium is a new initiative, bringing together information technology professionals with civil society to create a network of individuals, organizations and businesses who endorse the Earth Charter, and the ecological sustainability and social justice values it represents.
The new kind of network we envision cannot be centered around any single website or database. It will instead be made up of a myriad of existing networks, organizations and individuals, using a new generation of software which will make it possible for people to see themselves in relationship to each other, and the Planet, in a totally new way.
The Planetwork Consortium is itself a network of many different, but cross connected, projects and initiatives which have come together to create conditions for a new kind of network phenomenon on the Internet; one which will empower people with common values to see how many others share these values, and give us new more coherent maps of a vast number of interlinked people, ideas and organizations, representing an online global village.
The Planetwork Consortium is:
A forum promoting the use of information technology in service of ecological sustainability and social justice.
A place where everyone involved can lay out their pieces of the puzzle and see how they all fit together.
A consortium of software providers, not-for-profit organizations, independent media sources, and responsible companies who share an intention to work together to provide support for ecological stewardship and social equity.
An initiative to transform the world by creating a new commons - an evolving pool of software made available to noncommercial social networks.
A network of people who endorse the Earth Charter and their right to control their own identity and relationship data on the Internet.
A way to support development of a wide variety of mutually synergistic online social network initiatives.
An opportunity to support the development and integration of the key technologies needed to make all of this possible.
Register your interest, discover new partners, and stay informed about new tools to empower your network.
as a Planetary Citizen to become a participant and begin to use social network software network to connect with others who share an intention to create a sustainable world that works for all. This system allows users to create and maintain their own identity on a free, noncommercial system hosted by Favors.org, which has been is operation for several years and has over 12,000 "cultural creative" users world wide.
To participate:
As an Individual, simply and thereby affirm your support for both the ecological sustainability and social justice values embodied in the , as well as the right to control your own online identity and relationship data represented by the purpose and principles.
As a Software Partner, endorse the Earth Charter, join Commons Holdings, and agree to strive to achieve greater interoperability in the software you make available through the consortium by implementing as many of the consortium software principles as possible.
As a Nonprofit Organization, endorse the Earth Charter, join Commons Holdings, and begin to make the consortium software tools available to your membership.
As a Sponsor, contribute to the Venture Collective, thereby participating in a broad based grassroots funding movement for social network software, independent media, green economic development and "digital diversity".
Participants agree to engage in open constructive critique of each other's performance in achieving the agreed upon goals, using the Planetwork Consortium forum for that process. Thus, participating in the Planetwork Consortium does not confer a guarantee of any participating entity's green credentials beyond the fact that they have affirmed their commitment to the sustainability and social justice values articulated in the Earth Charter, and have agreed to take part in an open dialog regarding their own performance.
There are "two sides of the coin" in this effort to catalyze a new kind of global social purpose network phenomena. One involves a technical initiative to evolve the infrastructure needed to make more meaningful social network phenomena possible. The other involves bringing together links to a vast network of organizations and "networks of networks" to make them aware of the potential, and allow them to be rapidly informed as new software becomes available. We invite representatives of both groups, as well as interested individuals, to participate.
The first principle of this initiative is the idea that each individual Citizen of the Planet must control their own identity and relationship data online. Thus, the network will reflect only what each member chooses to portray. If we can each describe ourselves - our interests and values, as well as our skills and needs, projects and offerings - and publish this self-description, electronically and globally, in a form that can be searched and mapped by software, then new and empowering portraits of our demographic power will emerge. However, for people to feel secure doing this, the design of the system must insure that this information cannot be used to identify information about people individually without permission, and can only be used to form aggregate maps of overall interests and opinions.
To actually find specific people, or to see network maps showing people's actual identity must depend, just as it does now in live social interactions, on "networks of trust." In other words, people introduce each other to their contacts. New software tools will allow people to automate this process to grant each other permission to "see" those portions of the network where they have the necessary contacts. When integrated into a next generation messaging system this kind of social network information could also be used to build a new "spam free" messaging paradigm.
The Planetwork Consortium is made up of parties who endorse both the Earth Charter, and the principle of user control of their own identity on the Internet, and who are committed to using transparent and collaborative methods to develop new global standards in social purpose inter-networking.
planetworkers.org, a project
of PlaNetwork, Inc. a CA 501c3, was launched at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg
on September 1st, 2002. info@planetworkers.org
October 10, 2002 - 2:20 pm PDT
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