Executive Summary

December 2023 

This project is being carried out under the aegis of the 
Truth Beauty and Goodness Commission.

I – Project purpose

Wisdom gathering about successes and failures.

The Global Library of Wisdom (GLoW) concept is suggested as a highly desirable asset for Urantia's planetary progress towards achieving Light and Life status. GLoW will have the dual purpose of 1) preserving and 2) disseminating wisdom related to Light and Life issues. 

As an Information Technology system the GloW will be a publicly available online knowledge base that will capture and aggregate the best available wisdom, or best practices that can be applied to promote sustainability and wide spread stability. GLoW will also document known strategies that have led to major failures. GLoW will cover all the major sectors (as outlined in the GLoW directory) inherent to personal growth, planetary management and societal progress. In simple terms, GLoW will be a significant and curated collection of Best Practices (foresight) and Bad Practices (hindsight).

Consideration will be given to archives that have helped guide mankind toward a stable unification of society. Since we are a civilisation that has often lacked adequate planetary management, our historical record has significant gaps in it, especially in relation to wisdom pertaining to the achievement of Light and Life status. In order to help fill in these gaps, numerous revelatory initiatives have been put in place as co-creative endeavors between adequately trained human and spiritual personalities.

Global Library of Wisdom for guidance.

Today’s nations have no formulated policy on how to resolve their great problems. This points to the imminent fact of elements that contribute to the instability of our world. Our nations, societies and their institutions were never formed with the underlying intention to become sustainable. A civilisation that lives under the constant and destabilising threat and actuality of war and destruction does not logically make any plans for the distant future. Making it even more difficult is the fact that there is no library of wisdom of what works and what doesn’t, to assist political, economic, scientific and social decision-makers on how to proceed sustainably in difficult situations. This will be seen in the future as a “no brainer,” that there must be a base of wisdom, of what works and what doesn’t work, to guide the decisions that affect so many people. There are, in fact, a number of problems in our contemporary societies and their operation that will be seen in the future as silly—not to have thought about that, and to not plan for a sustainable future.

A library of wisdom is essential.

There has never been a library of wisdom to guide decision-making leading to Light and Life status, whether as a father or mother, family, community, state or a nation, and in recent generations as a global scale civilization. There are actions that support continuity, durability and stability, and actions that do not. There are actions that, in fact, are detrimental to the sustainability of families and nations. It is now time that someone begins to develop such a library of mankinds sustaining and stabilising wisdom, refined into logical categories, containing concise information, and made readily accessible to everyone. There are certain rules, certain proofs, certain truths that when broken they will surely bring about eventual social decline and collapse.

II – Our vision and design of GLoW

The Truth Beauty and Goodness Commission (TBG) operates as much as possible with Free Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) as part of our Sustainability policy and this is reflected in our choice of software for GLoW.

GLoW is to be built as a digital repository of wisdom. No physical (paper) copies will be produced by TBG, but means will be available to users of the system wishing to produce printed media of portions of the GLoW data set, all of which is organized as books, chapters and pages.

Physical documents will be digitized as high resolution imagery then Optical Character Recognition (OCR) will be applied to these images to transform them into electronic text that can be edited to suit the needs of GLoW. The high resolution imagery will be archived separately from GLoW for safe keeping using the ISO standard PDF/A archival format which will ensure an archive lifespan of up to 1000 years, in conformance with the requirements of wise planetary management.

The back end of GLoW will be a robust electronic database software application sufficient for handling the large quantities of data that GLoW will collect. The front end Graphical User Interface (GUI) to be used for DATA INPUT by staff members and collaborators should be simple and effective to use. Some training of staff members will be required, and the required skill level to learn the system should be moderate to low.

The front end Graphical User Interface (GUI) to be used by everyone for searching should be simple and effective to use and well documented. Minimal user training for learning the search parameters may be required, and the required skill level to learn the system should be moderate to low.

GLoW will be accessible by everyone with internet access using a modern web browser and a reasonably fast internet connection. Every effort will be made to construct GLoW so that it will also work well on many types of devices such as laptop computers, tablets and smart phones, while keeping the technical requirements for its use as low as possible.