Saturday, September 24, 2005

 

Gathering a Body of Agreements

For this new blog - United Nations 60th Anniversary Countdown - there is just a month to go before October 24, 2005, the actual date of the anniversary.

For the last month or so, it had been becoming clear that the process I had begun in March of compiling a hyperlinked set of documents - at www.culture-of-peace.net - relating to the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World - the half-way point for which is the end of this year, and that has been growing in fascinating and engaging ways since then - is by way of a 60th Anniversary Gift to the United Nations community, whose form and shape continues to emerge and take shape, in ways that evoke no resistance.

The second phase that was formally launched on Earth Day, 2005 - April 22 - with the registration, inter alia, of earth-stewardship.net - added a focus on the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, following a wonderful meeting / workshop with the Faith Action team of the US Partenership for the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development

With the initial focus on a Culture of Peace, I had begun to compile the key document for the Decade, and create hyperlinks to any other documents to which they referred from the key documents relating to the Decade.. Once I had decided to nake a link to a referenced documents, I then needed to find the document - with the help of Google and with various UN online web sites - format it for the database - and then needing to find and process any documents that this new document referred to ... in what has become a process that sometimes feels as if will continue almost ad infinitum

If I am lucky, I can find the document in HTML format, although there is a ggrowing number that I was only able to find at pdf files with scanned copies of the official, printed, records at the site of the Official Document System of the United Nations which I then had to covert - with evaluation copies of Abbyy FineReader and ReadIris Pro 8 OCR software. There is much more of the technical side of the process I could describe, but will hold off on that for another posting - perhaps on a separate blog that is interlinked with this one.

As I began to write this, what has been coming into focus for me is on Open Gates <~-- - www.open-gates.net - --> as the theme - with the project intended to be one small demonstration of open gates to the larger freedoms and greater o-pportunites for understanding of a virtually unbounded and exponentially expanding knowledge-based universe - and of offering the vision of an Open Gates as a conceptual kernel of an operating system for the United Nations, and more broadly as an operating system for sustainability, justice and peace.