An “open laboratory” for the “global mind”: a place where great minds gather to collaborate and facilitate transformations in solving complex global problems while creating a place where eminent researchers gather to develop new transdisciplinary approaches.
The world is becoming increasingly interconnected as new opportunities and highly complex problems tie us to the rest of the world in ways we are only beginning to understand. When we don’t solve these problems correctly and in a timely manner, they rapidly become crises. These problems, such as hunger and the global water crisis, threaten the very existence of the world as we know it today. For example, a new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen (Financial Post, May 2008). The new face of hunger from global food shortages has taken everyone by surprise. (April 17, 2008, From The Economist, print edition). And the world water crisis is one of the largest public health issues of our time. Nearly 1.1 billion people (roughly 20% of the world’s population) lack access to safe drinking water (Water Aid, 2005).Other problems such as pollution, energy shortages, transportation, humanitarian needs, security, natural disasters, health, international development, ethnic violence and terrorism, military conflict, and lack of emergency response are among the few global complex problems facing humankind in the 21t century. Global scientific and engineering workforce and the wisdom of all the great minds of the world to fuse together to form a global mind will be indispensable in solving many critical unstructured problems facing humankind in the 21t century. The its-Village will be a community of international academic institutions, each of which sets up a presence here to collaborate in tackling these complex problems with their faculty members and students, as well as businesses who want to take advantage of this gathering of top talents in order to produce the next generation of products and services. At its core, science is an international undertaking. The fundamental workings of nature—the function of a gene, the quantum behavior of matter and energy, the chemistry of the atmosphere, the symbiotic nature of life—are not the sole province of any one nation. Louis Pasteur noted more than a century ago that Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch, which illuminates the world.
Its-Village will establish new international partnership to provide a forum for improving the links between science, technology, and the arts by fostering research and educational collaborations among the nations. This will promote a highly intellectual exchange to develop new abstractions, methods, and investigations beyond any barriers presented by academic disciplines.
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