Congratulations if
you found your way here.
The Quick Plan - Smile / Scowl photos To get us off the ground, we will solicit photos, smiling or scowling with a 140 character max caption for each photo. If you are smiling, then your caption will explain a benefit of nuclear disarmament. If you are scowling, then your caption might highlight one of the multitude of problems with nuclear weapons. Besides a photo and caption, please send your address at least down to the city level, and your faith tradition. Send to RogerEaton@ii4nd.net. Phase 2 takes us to facebook. The reaction to phase one photo collection has been very positive. People smile about scowling against nuclear weapons. Really, they do! A proportion, especially amongst the younger crowd would like to share with their friends, so it seems very likely that with a coordinated launch, we can go viral, very possibly gathering tens of thousands of photos and emails in a short period. We are therefore preparing automatic photo upload capability, since any manual process will clearly be overwhelmed. We will have the auto photo upload ready by August, 2011 or, worst case, no later than September 21, 2011, UN Peace Day. The Larger Plan - thinking cap required -- UNDER DEVELOPMENT Organize locally, every city, every town around the world, bottom up autonomy, connect globally, voice of humanity software as our megaphone, intercity and interfaith focus, umbrella marches, smile/scowl photos of everyone on the planet, a big-time connection with the sustainability movement, and we all do something for a change. Individual Initiatives We do love our nations, and we are attached to our religious traditions, but as the world has become more closely knit we have become acquainted with such a wide variety of people that we cannot help but begin to think for ourselves. As independent thinkers surveying the world, we can see there are great global issues that are not being sufficiently addressed by the nations of the world. Many now realize that what was once a religious admonition to be kind to each other is now also a practical necessity. Either everyone prospers or no one does. War is too great a waste of resources to be supported, yet the nations, and we with them, cannot seem to get past the old us-vs-them thinking. There is a way, and that is for all of us as individuals to come together as the one humanity that we are. Nuclear Disarmament For many, nuclear weapons are a secondary issue. Sustainability issues seem graver: global warming, species extinction, soil loss, peak oil and the crossing of other red lines. Then there is the great and growing problem of income disparity, particularly within nations, and the questions of human rights and democracy. It is all a package, and one thing is for sure: we will never get the consensus we need to move on the other issues in a two-tier world of nuclear haves and have-nots. Moreover, nuclear disarmament has the advantage of being popular in most nations, even those that have nuclear weapons. Nuclear disarmament does need to be a priority in conjunction with the other great global issues. Organize locally, every city, every town around the world The key to making a difference is organization. Even a small local organization can have an impact that will elude all but the most extraordinary individual. If we can get 10,000 individuals from all over the world to start 10,000 local organizations with 5 to 25 members each, we will be halfway to our goal of a nuclear weapons free world. We will use the list of 4800+ cities who have signed on to the Mayors for Peace network of cities for nuclear disarmament as scaffolding for our organizational effort, aiming first to have an organization in each of those cities. Where we get something going in a city outside the MfP list, we will encourage that local organization to sign the city up to the MfP list. As we make this organizing strategy work, we will come to the attention of the Mayors for Peace organization in a good way, and that will help when we look for funding. bottom up autonomy This is our grass roots philosophy in action. Our local organizations will be largely self-formed and as a practical matter they will be autonomous. Ii4nd sees itself as a coordinating body with a leadership team that both emerges from and is elected by the local organizations. connect globally Well of course. This means we use all the global forums: facebook, twitter, google+, our own intermix voice of humanity forums, wiserearth, and many more. But it also means we encourage ii4nd membership and organizations to join and support the existing global nuclear disarmament networks: Abolition 2000, Beyond War, Global Zero, International Day of Peace, Mayors for Peace, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Pathways to Peace, Reaching Critical Will, Space for Peace and more and more. voice of humanity software as our megaphone The InterMix Voice of Humanity Software will sport a fully threaded discussion forum and integration with facebook, twitter and google+. Highly rated messages will be automatically tweeted, fb'd and g+'d creating a collective voice for Individual Initiatives. From the beginning, Women, Youth and Men will each have their own collective voice. As we grow, each metropolitan and rural area will break out its own identity and collective voice. InterMix is being programmed on a shoestring budget by a programmer in the south of France. More information is available at intermix.org. Our Blog will be driven by the Voice of Humanity software - see below for a discussion of the concept. We can play with this software in various ways. For instance, we could elect a message from the world to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. For instance we can dream of having a collective dialog between Israelis and Palestinians in the context of an interfaith dialog. intercity and interfaith focus The smart way to build the nuclear disarmament movement is by intercity and interfaith organizing. The cities and the faiths don't have any nuclear weapons - pray they never do! - so they can see the madness of having them. The international arena must eventually be tackled if we are to have success, but first we need to have built a very large global movement. Table of Contents First
Fiscal Year
We begin September 1, 2011 and think in terms of fiscal years, running September 1 to September 1 We start with local organizing in San Francisco and the beginnings of a global network. Ii4nd-SF will be going strong by June 1 of 2012 (smile!). We already have a sister organization in Los Angeles, the LA Area Nuclear Disarmament Coalition (LAANDC). We will network with LAANDC via our Voice of Humanity software. By January 1 of 2012, we will have connected our website directly into the Voice of Humanity database and software. Ditto for our facebook presence. Both the website and facebook will implement a collective ii4nd Blog. Twitter will be connected as well. We have a modest budget for our first fiscal year. This money will go towards programming. In the Winter of 2012 we will set ourselves up as a corporation and file for 501(c)(3) status so that in our second fiscal year we can seek serious funding.
The Interfaith Initiative for Nuclear Disarmament was originally conceived as a URI Cooperation Circle (CC) and it is still our plan to qualify as a URI CC down the road. Individual Initiatives intends to develop a global reach, so we will apply to be a CC in the "Multiregion", where other CCs who accept members from all over the world are set up. We will work through existing local organizations that take a special interest in the Nuclear Disarmament issue, such as UNA-SF, PSR, UNA-East Bay, Peace Action West, Pathways to Peace, SGI and others as we discover them. Our first push will be to recruit online membership. In January of 2012, we will begin monthly meetings of Individual Initiatives-SF building towards a 2012 umbrella march to commemorate Hiroshima.
1) New participants can sign up online with
3) The home page will have a scrolling set of smile/scowl photos. New photos/captions will have to be OK'd by an online moderator before they make the scroll. Otherwise the process will be fully automated. 4) We will establish a database of ii4nd local organizations and affiliates. 5) We will establish a database of cities (and towns) with
Articles for the Blog will be submitted by ii4nd participants. The Voice of Humanity software allows articles to be rated by the participants. The Blog will display only highly rated articles. We might say that the Blog will be the bottom up collective voice of the ii4nd community. Links in the Blog will enable members to reply to blog articles or to link in and view the thread that each blog article has generated. Replies will be eligible to appear in the blog as well. For facebook, we will have an organization page, and we will implement the ii4nd blog as an application. Other organizations will be able to add our ii4nd app. The captions for the smile / scowl photos will be entered into the InterMix forum, and using the same technology that we use for the blog, the most popular new caption each week will be selected to be distributed from our Twitter account. This will be something novel and we should be able to get some media coverage. The InterMix Voice of Humanity software is key to our success. The software aims to enable a bottom up democratic collective voice of humanity with the participation of tens or hundreds of millions of all sorts from everywhere. By regularly (annually?) electing a message to represent the world, we will establish that global consciousness that is the sine qua non of world and regional peace, which in turn is the requirement for nuclear disarmament. The Women's movement is already global and because it cross-cuts the nations and religions, a collective Voice of Women makes sense in the push for a nuclear weapons free world, either as a pre-cursor or simultaneous development with the voice of humanity. Likewise a Voice of Youth is a powerful direction, and a Voice of Men in this context will be enormously useful. With our current level of funding, we will be able to handle hundreds or thousands of participants, but to ramp up to have a separate voice for each of the major metropolitan areas will require more money for more powerful web servers, and to upgrade the software to be peer-to-peer. The InterMix Voice of Humanity software is written on Ruby on Rails, soon to be open source. Going peer-to-peer is a requirement so we can distribute the process instead of centralizing it., but that transition will require a team of programmers. As we ramp up the number of cities in the dialog, there will come a time when we can elect a message from the Cities of the World to the Secretary General of the United Nations and expect a reply. This should be an inflection point where we begin to really take off with major funding. Not that we need all that much money to make the voice of humanity a reality.
please send comments, suggestions
to RogerEaton@ii4nd.net
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