The complexity of the world’s problems are now exceeding the capabilities of any single person, organization, nation, or international governing body. Be it the next wave of nuclear proliferation, bio-weapons, nano-weapons, ozone depletion, genetic die-off, or rapid industrialization in the face of inequitable distribution of dwindling resources, the prospect of a solving the next century’s problems calls out for new forms of cooperation. Thus, Bootstrap.org was formed to initiate a new infrastructure for cooperation that exceeds the capabilities of any individual, organization, or governing body.

Our basic charter is to develop software that:

1) Expands every individual’s ability to explore, integrate, and deploy knowledge.

2) Maximizes the collective intelligence of groups of individuals

3) Enables every organization to self improve its knowledge infrastructure

4) Insure that any organization’s improvements can proliferate to other organizations

5) Allow self improvement infrastructures to grow at the same exponential rate as computation and communication infrastructures

Which is leading us to the following first steps:

6) leverage the self-improvement potential of current open software projects

7) exploit widely deployed knowledge representation frameworks

8) deploy the first amorphous knowledge infrastructure

9) deploy the first human interfaces for collective intelligence

10) bootstrap the first of a multitude of self improvement communities