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Javul.org: Introduction

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. -Margaret Mead

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet appeared on Reddit for a Q/A session. A user asked him “Hi! What's the best thing to come from the Internet?” and he responded: “The spirit of global collaboration among all the people working on it.”

Javul is a hungarian word which means “to improve”. The name was chosen because of its meaning, its short and the domain was available. This name is tentative and can be changed later if needed.

What is the world that we want to live in and how do we get there? If everyone thought about this question on a regular basis and made efforts related to it, humans would be in a better situation than they are today.

The basic idea behind the Javul project is community-based problem-solving assisted by technology. People have been solving problems for a long time. This project’s goal is to use technology to bring people together and make it easier and more effective to solve problems in society of any kind. Human welfare is the primary goal. Similar to open-source software which is maintained by volunteers and subject-level experts, Javul would help to create an ‘open-source society’ in which anyone can contribute.

It is suggested that all the documentation about Javul should be read carefully forming opinions about the project. It should also be kept in mind that the same improvement tools and mechanisms provided by the project will be used to improve the project itself and its features. Therefore nothing written here is fixed. To be more useful, intuitive and easy to use, the project may need more or less complexity than what is observed in the first version of the site. It may need significant improvement to be of any use at all. Using the tools provided by the project, people can create suggestions on how to improve the project, what goals and policies to create, what features to add, remove or change so it is always undergoing constant improvement using its own features. There is also a section near the end that addresses criticisms of the project.

The contents of these pages may be long but they have no difficult or complex ideas. The concepts are very simple and intuitive. Many of them are not new but have been taken from existing situations. It is easy to talk about ideas like this. The difficult part is an actual successful implementation of this project and it is the only criteria by which the success of this project should be judged. Currently the project’s implementation is very simple. It will need to keep evolving for greater effectiveness and impact.

Background

Technology and internet is already being used by different websites like Wikipedia (readers and editors), Ebay (buyers and sellers), Reddit (entertainment), Facebook and Twitter (social media). In these websites people connect from all over the world for different reasons. The closest example is Wikipedia where volunteer editors work on a source of free knowledge used by all. Its the 6th most popular website in the world. These websites provide inspiration for the Javul project. There are some other existing websites like Kickstarter (raising money), CUUSOO (product designs) and others but none of them provide the planned functionalities of Javul.org.

Problems We Face Today

Here are some of the major problems that we face. They are complex, high-level problems that have detrimental effects on multiple levels and are the root cause of many other problems:

1. Inefficient or corrupt governments
2. Organizations/Corporations/Industries operating sub-optimally/inefficiently or controlling and manipulating the system for maximum profit with minimum concern for customer satisfaction.
3. Bad/dysfunctional parenting
4. International and regional hostilities
5. Environmental damage
6. Poor management and/or uncontrolled usage of Earth’s resources

With regards to governments, we have to create new ways that society can use to manage itself and with regards to organizations, we have to create better ways of making products and services.

Many solutions depend on solving problems #1 and 2. We have to start tackling all these problems gradually, starting with #1. These problems have deep and wide-spread roots and resolving them in any significant way will take a long time. However we have to remember that there are brilliant and capable people with good intentions who are wanting to help if given the opportunity.

The World we want to live in

Its hard to work towards anything if we dont know what we are trying to achieve. This section lists some possible aspects of an ideal society. We all know that it’s almost impossible to achieve ideals but we can use them as goals for what we want to improve in society. Ideals are subjective and based on personal opinions so the ideals below are not in any way official ideals for the project. Actual goals/ideals will be chosen by people. The following ideals are just examples. When we compare them with what we have today, its easy to see why today’s situation is sad and why it needs improvement. Here are some possibilities:

• New leadership systems to augment or replace today’s governments and organizational leaders to create more accountable and transparent systems with very low or no misuse of power, doing the things that people want.
• All countries and regions unified and working together with no boundaries or international hostilities. Talented and hard-working people of all nationalities working as part of leadership systems and governments in other countries and improve the standard of living in other countries.
• Babies being born to parents or caretakers who are mentally and financially qualified and able to take care of all their needs (emotional, physical and others) so they have a greater chance of being good global citizens (see section below).
• Companies creating products and services according to the needs of the people, doing only the things that benefit people.
• Environmental impact on the Earth caused by humans is minimized.

In short, we want to imagine a society with none of the negative elements that we see today.

All of us have our own unique visions of what we want to see happen in the world. The visions will be different and we have to work together and comprise. As long as we’re moving forward, that’s what matters. Another important thing to remember is that big changes take generations to be implemented. This means we cannot expect to see a complete solution being implemented but if we try our best and we’re making progress no matter how slow it is, that’s all we’re aiming for.

Solving these problems

A persistent and strong belief that things can be made better is the first and most critical required component for solving these problems. Without this component, the battle against these problems is severely weakened and almost nothing can be achieved. After there is a positive belief that things can be made better, the following items are needed: Organizing ourselves into groups. Javul provides people a way to organize into ‘Units’ which allow people to divide into teams and focus on specific areas.

• Talking about the problems and discussing possible solutions. Javul provides communication tools for each unit.
• Working hard to turn words into actions. Javul.org has given special attention to the task management system on the website.
• Working on continuous improvement.

Let's take a closer look at the problems mentioned above. The following small sample of links were found on reddit.com and other websites over a small period of time. They are meant to give a glimpse of a picture that most of us are already familiar with and to illustrate the need for doing things in a new and better way in regards to mainly governments and corporations, however there are many other issues that we need to work on. Clicking on the links is not required. Just reading the text of the link is enough to give a quick summary. Can one person do something which others find immensely useful? Ask anyone who uses regular expressions which were invented by Stephen Cole Kleene. These are very powerful tools for text searching and pattern matching and they are widely used in software. We can use this example to know that we cannot doubt our ability to produce something which can be immensely useful to others.