LEVERAGING THE PUBLIC GOOD, ELeCTRONIcALLy.   A VISION WAITING TO BE REALIZED.

            by Frank Odasz           frank@lone-eagles.com
    Imagine, if you will, how the world would change for the better if ideas could be exchanged mind-to-mind without limitations due to geography, economic status, or time available; that ideas could be exchanged without preknowledge of one's race, religion, gender, age, or physical appearance.
 
    Imagine fonts of phosphor at the speed of light allowing ideas to ride an electronic wind worldwide. Imagine communities coauthoring daily, their electronic journals of hope and activity. This is already happening on hundreds of community networks and among thousands of communities of interest, globally via the Internet.
 
    Imagine communities working potentially so closely together, that unmet needs are matched with excess resources. Imagine a community-of-communities worldwide, where each looks out for the others' health, education, fair governance, and economic wellbeing.
 
    Where the hand of reason prevails; goodheartedness and neighborly caring will overpower selfish greed. Could such gentle caring, representing the light of knowledge, ever prevail over the crass, dark, strength of ignorance?
 
    We have the tools for realizing these visions of extended family across the human community, but we're still learning to use them effectively.
 
    Expectations increase with connectivity, like hitting the first few correct notes when learning to sing. Expectations soar, amid awaking awareness that mass learning, collaboration, activism, have suddenly become possible on a scale never before available throughout human history.
 
    Those who would lead us along these electronic pathways must be continuous learners, adventurers and active participants in the ongoing discovery of how the public good can be leveraged electronically.
 
    As you learn to empower yourself, will you mirror back to society what you've learned? Or will you delegate this task to others, and sit on the sidelines without making a difference? Will we collectively shift from being individual online browsers to become active participants in purposeful collaborative communities?
 
    We're in a testbed era where experimentation and carefully considered evaluative metrics will show us the strengths and weaknesses of many different communications mediums.
 
    We have been given the opportunity for great works of public good, and learning. Our opportunity is to use the tools we have at hand to create a means for anyone to create their own opportunities of learning, entrepreneurship, and action, through understanding our most fundamental human connection.
 
    As a global community, we're over five billion minds living in a time where we may soon be joined in a global hologram of shared multimedia imagination, able to change the world through having learned to work together, to understand each other, and to find ways to build a future for all the human family, while protecting our precious earth and all its living things.