The Global Ideas Bank

Thanks to the efforts of Flemming Funch of the New Civilization Network in California, the Institute's main publication, The Book of Visions - An Encyclopaedia of Social Innovations, is now available in full on Internet's World Wide Web, as the foundation for the Institute for Social Inventions' new online Global Ideas Bank, a bank which is subtitled 'an International Suggestion Box'.

Online readers are encouraged to send in details of their innovative ideas and projects for inclusion in the Global Ideas Bank to the Institute's e-mail address (<rhino@bbcnc.org.uk>). All ideas will automatically be entered for the Institute's annual £1,000 awards (deadline June 1st each year) and the best will be added to the Global Ideas Bank, at irregular intervals. All the ideas submitted may be freely edited and used by the Institute in its paper-based publications too.

For ideas already in place elsewhere on the World Wide Web, please merely send an abstract of up to 100 words and a hypertext link to the relevant page with the fuller details.

The Global Ideas Bank, by the time you read this, may boast the additional refinement of a reader rating scheme - the provisional idea is that readers will be able to rate ideas from 0 to 100; the average rating and number of voters will be displayed below each idea, with the current top 20 ideas listed at the front of the book, so as to avoid readers drowning in an ocean of information.

A similar rating scheme will surely need to spread to every World Wide Web page so that quality pages, as voted by readers, can rise to the surface throughout the Internet.

The Global Ideas Bank contains descriptions of some 800 ideas and projects at present. It represents the culmination of a dream first put to the Institute by Greg Wright (for which he won the main award in 1992).

The Global Ideas Bank's World Wide Web address is:

http://www.newciv.org/GIB/