British Prime Minister David Cameron's “Longitude Prize” initiative and international Global Mind Share project are compared from effectiveness and grassroots points of view.

Washington, D.C. -- (SBWire) -- 06/25/2013 --On June 14, 2013 British Prime Minister David Cameron promised a £1m “Longitude Prize” for what he called a new "grand innovation challenge”. He encouraged the British nation to be engaged in defining the biggest problems in science and in their lives that need to be resolved, with a multi-million pound prize to help participants do that. The problem or problems has not been identified yet, but British cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees is going to run a committee of experts for identifying the challenge. And he was going to discuss this idea at the 2013 G8 summit.

Meanwhile, more than a year ago we (George Mikhailovsky and Gary Sorrell) established Global Mind Share as an international, non-profit organization to build a global cognitive network that aggregates the problems faced by mankind and their suggested solutions. Global Mind Share is a grassroots humanitarian venture in which anyone can identify problems, propose solutions, and comment on and discuss problems and proposed solutions to solve the most critical of the earth’s problems. Our web site www.globalmindshare.org is a tool to maximize the collective thought power of our planet in order to improve future prosperity.

In the last century, French philosophers Equard Le Roy (1927) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1959) and Russian geochemist and philosopher Vladimir Vernadsky (1944) developed a concept of noosphere, the sphere of human thought. It’s hard to understand how before the appearance of the Internet, and even computers, they could believe that at some future time creative people of planet Earth would ignite a spark of the global mind. Hasn’t our time with its Internet and social media already seen the placement of the first bricks in the foundation of the noosphere?

The first stage of our project - formulating the main global problems – is pretty simple and straightforward: everybody submits a problem or problems that he/she considers the most important; then, the list of submitted problems is cleared by removing garbage and duplicates; and finally, the problems from the cleared list will be voted on by everyone who wishes to participate. This allows us to create a short list and to rank the remaining problems by their severity, priority, and importance.

The second stage – discussing the selected problems and finding ways to resolve them - is far more challenging and complicated. We are going to use crowdsourcing as a main tool there but anybody could suggest and discuss any other possible methods. For now, we have 55 global problems submitted by volunteers from all over the world.

There are two principal differences between our project and Cameron’s initiative:

1) We don’t and aren't going to create any committee to formulate the greatest problems of the time. Everyone can submit his or her problem or idea and then experts and other participants will decide what problems are the most important and severe at this moment by rating voting.

2) We don’t promise any prizes. Our goal is to solve the problems by contemporary methods of crowd-sourcing and global thinking where a particular author of the found solution could hardly be identified.

We consider our approach more productive and matched with a spirit of our American nation.

George Mikhailovsky,
President of Global Mind Share

Global Mind Share is an International Non-Profit Organization to connect our minds.

Together we are building a global cognitive network that aggregates the problems faced by and solutions suggested by mankind. This is a tool to maximize the collective thought power of our planet to improve future prosperity and happiness of all people.

All of us want a better future for themselves, their children, their grandchildren, and all future generations. Global Mind Share will collect the problems that are most important to the world, the problems that must be solved if mankind is going to survive and endure. Then, we will solve them together. Once solutions are suggested and rated, the most popular solutions are passed on to international decision-making entities.