Context

“[…] That since wars begin in the minds of Men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed […]” (Constitution of the UNESCO, 1946)

“So that in this third millennium, which has only just begun, no child on our shared planet, regardless of gender or language or religion, shall be abandoned to hunger or ignorance, or turned away from the feast. This child carries within him the future of our human race. In the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, a very long time ago, the kingdom belongs to a child.”
(J. M. G. Le Clezio, Nobel Speech, 2008 - transl. Alison Anderson)

The dawn of the information age has fundamentally affected the humanity. Evolution of new means of communicating, sharing experience, creating, learning, contributing, allows for an enriched life experience that reaches beyond the physical space into the cyberspace. As the Gutenberg press recorded and made available to all the written, printed wisdom of humanity, we have the means to record, share, replay, search, express, expand and communicate not only the written and the printed, but also the spoken, the sung, the music, the image, the dynamic image.

A new global community has formed and the heritage of humanity can now be conveyed ever more broadly into the future; the prospect of a global education granted to all is now feasible and foreseeable.

Consequentially, also, a chasm has appeared based on access to this new medium, becoming the basis for the separation of ‘have’s’ and ‘have-nots,’ affecting the future of those who are born into either group.

Further, the promise that such unprecedented flow of information may circumvent barriers, reach out to other cultures, facilitate communication and exchanges thus promoting a sense of community, tolerance for others, and common collective values, has yet to be realized.

Beliefs

Hence, as citizens of the world, we believe in a common thread of humanity that connects us all more strongly than it differentiates, or separates us.

We thus believe in an egalitarian access to our common heritage that includes information and knowledge, which as a right -not a privilege- cannot be monopolized.

We also believe in the right of every child to an education, to learning; a broad literacy that cannot be constricted by lack of access to information.

We believe in the wisdom of the community, creating an intelligence beyond the sum of its constituent parts; and that this community creates value in a broad sense.

We further believe that the value the community generates must be shared and distributed.

We believe that there is no monopoly of wisdom, ethics or common sense by any group, and only by sharing our common experiences and knowledge in a spirit of openness and tolerance can we hope to find solutions to our shared challenges.

Mission

The Gdium Foundation aims to foster a global community and to organize an ecosystem that encourages people to collectively contribute to a corpus of knowledge and in return shares with each contributor the value generated by this ecosystem.

The community facilitates access to information and knowledge for all, specifically so that all can exercise their right to education.

The ecosystem is therefore a self-sufficient system whose increase in value benefits its contributors; the stakeholders reap the benefits of the value they create.

Means

We want to organize a community of users and contributors sharing in our beliefs who provide their time, efforts and experience, or who contribute materially.

The Foundation will explore different means, and use the best of them to organizing the community, to assess value and allow it to be shared among members.

We promote open platforms that facilitate access to online information and knowledge and create a secure, trusted yet playful, environment for learning, collaborating and growing.

The Gdium Foundation will then build on:

• An online environment, Gdium.com, combining the features of a social network with those of a content management system, providing users with all necessary tools to create their mini-communities, interact, contribute to delivering meaningful, educational content and collaborate. Specifically students, teachers, members of education community, parents can customize the environment to accommodate their local needs in terms of education.
• Innovative hardware, fit for mobility, low-cost, tailored to educational needs, with limited maintenance requirements, facilitating deployment, content delivery and learning experience.
• Partnerships with schools, teachers and prominent educational specialists to build a trustworthy, resourceful ecosystem, that proposes relevant content, federates resources and acts as an intermediary between the end user and relevant services.

Focusing its efforts on:

• Advocating best practices in technology use in gathering content in a social environment and in education, including the implementation of an ecosystem consisting of computers, content and user group management system.
• Ensuring, through oversight by a committee of advisors and user groups, that the development of the community part of the Gdium project, notably in terms of content, will be consistent with the spirit and the quality required for the endeavor.
• Developing processes that ensure the value generated by the Gdium Foundation is shared by the community of its members.
• Seeking and collaborating with other organizations dedicated to improving the common good. In return the Gdium Foundation expects that its mission and its ecosystem be promoted as well to reach a wider audience. We shall ensure that these collaborations will be mutually beneficial.