The W3C and the Beyond One World Process

I am keen to put together ideas of how the whole process of Beyond One World can be run. Knowing that it is very unlikely that I will get it right and for the fact I have not managed to get any feedback yet I am going to put forward a process that I consider to be the best of its kind - that I am aware of so far. I do know that the process that I choose will completely change if it goes forward, but I consider that the best way of making any progress is to put together my mistakes as quickly as possible and then work towards a solution when the problem is understood better.

The solution I have chosen is as far as I am aware the best candidate to start from - the World Wide Web Consortium Process, the latest version being used is 14th October 2005 . This process is the biggest driver of open source and technology on the Internet and is constantly used and under review and change to meet its objectives. Now it is probably quite a bit removed from the intended use here but I will give it a go and see what comes out of it. What is intended is a process by which agreement and action for global issues and government is possible where every person can take ownership, take part and globally change for themselves in a way that is absolutely fair and efficient - quite a big undertaking... However, if a first attempt is made to create a process by which it can create and evolve itself then as more knowledgeable individuals join in it can be improved to fulfil its purpose.

To start work on this I am happy to put the current document in a Wiki and hack the process where I can see possible matches. Or indeed leave questions for myself or others later to answer where I find any areas of difficulty. The wiki can act as a simple form of version control too, where changes can be explained, noted and date stamped and the full history of it can be followed. In the future I am keen to use the best of breed configuration management techniques to make sure that its evolution is controlled, quickly made and robust.

I have a choice at the moment of where to start this work and I think I need to wait a week before considering where it should go. The building of the idea behind Beyond One World was initiated by the Google Project 10^100 and it seemed appropriate to use Google Apps to get the ball rolling. However, using this is a learning curve for me and I am not sure what support there is where any unusual is attempted. If I were to do this on my own platform then I would be certainly happy to run open source applications on my favourite hosts at Dreamhost, knowing that if there were any problems or unusual programming needed then I could just dive in and do it. The Google Apps however in theory should be far more scalable with a decent level of support. I must make sure I know that this support will be there though. I am not at all confident that this idea will make it to the voting next week on January 27th and if it doesn't, I will be on my own for probably quite a while longer working on the site. In that case I prefer complete control on fixing any problems and will pull the site back to Dreamhost.

Well let's see what happens - they actually had over 100,000 submissions and voting will only be for 100 hence my realism - flatly a 1:1000 chance.

It would certainly get exciting if it were in though...