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Background

Technology and internet is already being used by different websites like Wikipedia (readers and editors), Ebay (buyers and sellers), Reddit (entertainment and information sharing), Upwork, Meetup and Github. On these websites people connect from all over the world for different reasons. 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 in one place.

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.”

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.

Javul is a Hungarian word which means “to improve” (more on the name). The basic idea behind the Javul project is community-based problem-solving assisted by technology with a focus on human welfare. People have been solving problems for a long time. This project’s goal is to use software and technology to bring people together and make it easier and more effective to solve problems in society of any kind. Similar to open-source software which is maintained by volunteers and subject-matter experts, Javul.org would help to create a transparent, accountable, software-driven ‘open-source society’ in which anyone can contribute. The basic idea is that the involvement of the public creates a system that is naturally transparent, has accountability built into it and allows for the best ideas and skills to be utilized, recognized and where possible, rewarded. This applies to governments as well where accountability is a huge issue with today's government systems.

The goal is to gradually create a society where people have the opportunity to make positive contributions to society, to help improve our existence and solve our problems and be recognized or rewarded for their work. When people have a good ‘work’ history, they can then be trusted to play roles in higher-level leadership systems that stress on accountability and transparency. We want to create a system that captures and showcases people's capabilities, dedication and passion for helping their communities and resolve problems.

This initiative will be fully non-profit. See the Website Functionality for an overview of how the website will work. At its core its a task-management system. Many times additional functionality-specific software/websites/apps will be needed and Javul.org will help create and maintain them.

It is easy to forget that there are millions of articles on Wikipedia, each of which have been worked upon by 100's and 1000's of people spending hours over long periods of time. The level of detail of Wikipedia articles on popular topics is beyond amazing and all of this work has been done for free. It is amazing what people can achieve when they work together. All of what is present on Wikipedia has been made possible via online collaboration. Let us use that same concept for the purpose of problem-solving. It is interesting to note that this documentation is being compiled on a website running Mediawiki, the same great software that Wikipedia has created and uses it for its own family of websites. Note that this installation of Mediawiki is only being used for documentation. The software for the main website is different.

The documentation for the project may be long but there are 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.

It is suggested that all the documentation about Javul should be read carefully before 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. Read this section that addresses some possible criticisms of the project.

It is likely that this project will not appeal to the general public until we're able to at least launch a few important and interesting initiatives successfully and prove ourselves so that is what we're working on right now.

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

Examples of these things can be seen on this page: Examples of Issues

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. It takes 20 minutes for a fully-loaded oil tanker to come to a stop. The above problems have deep and wide-spread roots and resolving them in any significant way will take a long time. We have to start somewhere and we have to remember that there are brilliant and capable people with good intentions who are wanting to help if given the opportunity.

The Javul Information Technology Group will assist in creating and maintaining any necessary specialized software, websites and apps needed to address the above issues.

The Overview effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface.[1][2][3][4][5]

It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void", shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative.[5] -- (read more at Wikipedia)

All of us can partially experience this cognitive shift if we care enough about our planet. Speaking of space, scientist Stephen Hawking has said the humans must leave Planet Earth and find other habitable worlds. Such a huge undertaking will not be possible if we humans and our leaders continue to manage society in the way we do.

International Cooperation and the Overview effect

Ideally we want to see a world where no country has serious issues with standards of living and other elements of society such as education, health care, crime and others. Subject-matter experts in different countries could help another country. As an example, according to World Health Report 2000 (pdf), France has the best health care system. Health care experts in different countries could help in improving the health care system in another country to whatever extent is possible.

This is a comment on Youtube on this video:

“I love the space program because we're actually working together with other nations as brothers and sisters rather than as adversaries. Europeans, Russians, Asians and Americans all working together for mankind.”

International cooperation does not have to be limited to space. We have to work hard for creating cooperation like this for other areas of life. Eric Schmidt of Google said “We want the best people in the world, regardless of any form of sex, race, country, what-have-you. We want them to work for us ...”

There are good people on every continent, in every country, in every belief system, in every political party, in every race and gender and other groups. We want those people to cooperate and work together to solve today’s problems faced by everyone.

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 on shared goals (see this link about related research). 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.
• 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.

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 for all kinds of things. We can use this example to know that we cannot doubt our ability to produce something which can be immensely useful to others.

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. See this page for an overview of the functionality.

• 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.

How can Javul.org Help?

Javul.org can help by providing open-source software tools and platforms for problem-solving, issue-reporting, task management and any other custom software solutions that are needed in order to improve human welfare. Here are some examples:

• Creating a website that helps people work with each other on issues relating to any area of interest such as politics, parenting, environment, products and services and so on. It will provide a task management and issue-reporting system to manage tasks and goals relating to those issues. Additional tools like a wiki, chat and forum for each Unit will also be provided. See Website Functionality for an overview. This is the primary software tool that can be used for managing all other software development and initiatives. This website is currently under development and this is what you currently see at www.Javul.org
• Helping other organizations and individuals working on External Initiatives. Before working on any new projects, we must check for existing initiatives with similar goals and see if we can help.
• Creating an open-source app to monitor the performance of government officials with respect to transparency, non-partisan teamwork, responsiveness, openness to community feedback, environment and other performance metrics. Helping citizens become involved in making initiatives, leadership, decision-making and achieving results.
• Creating software to help in development and deployment of the Global Citizen Curriculum
• Software to help improve Products and Services
• Helping out in any other initiatives such as the ones listed on this page: Possible Initiatives

Software can be for the Desktop and servers and it can include Phone apps and websites. Software can be in any form and it can be for any platform according to what is required.

Who will work on all this software and who will pay for it? Its up to people to decide what they want to do whether its contributing to software development, testing the software, reporting bugs, giving feedback and providing financial assistance.

Because of the massive amount of work that needs to be done, we have to be persistent and aggressive in in reaching our goals. We cannot be complacent and passive and we must not be satisfied with mediocrity.

Platforms

These are the different Javul.org platforms as of now:

Platform Name	URL	Purpose
Main website	https://javul.org/	Main website for the Task management system
Documentation wiki	https://javul.org/mw/	All documentation for Javul.org's main website and supporting information. Note that all Units at Javul.org will have their own wikis.
Sub-Reddit	Older links: https://www.reddit.com/r/Javul (doesnt work anymore, archived here: /r/a:t5_39a6n/)	A discussion forum that is available to everyone including users with a login on Reddit.com. Note that all Units at Javul.org will have their own discussion forums.
Github	https://github.com/javulorg/javul	Code Repository (open-source)

Links

• Computer-supported cooperative work (Wikipedia)