We live in a risky world. War, disease, genocide, crime, natural disasters, and random violence destroy lives and livelihoods. Political strife, oppression, poverty, and homelessness take a toll, widespread and continuous, on the quality of life for billions of people. We don't know what to do. Even in advanced industrial nations, even within the pockets of prosperity where the wealthy and upper-middle classes live, there is a desperate perception that world events increasingly are out of hand. More often than not, the unexpected consequences of rules and regulations imposed by national governments and transnational institutions (like the International Monetary Fund) exacerbate rather than mitigate risk. High-speed telecommunications, the media, and the Internet accelerate humanity's sense of a world out of control.

Unwilling to deal with the stress, it's not surprising that people, in America especially but also globally, studiously remain ignorant about world events (even bare-bones geography). But businesses and governments can't afford voids in their knowledge. For them, specialized services exist -- often very large and lucrative -- to assess the state of the world and the meaning of things. The best known are institutional, like the CIA and its counterparts around the world; university centers and foundations; and the think tanks (like RAND, SRI International, Global Business Network, and INSEAD) that trade focused intellect for influence and profit.

More interesting, however, are the private firms that offer informed analyses, scenarios, and forecasts about global processes and world events that most of us may never even know about. This knowledge has commercial value. So the knowledge these firms provide is protected, proprietary, and confidentiality. If you have the means, however, they'll share it with you (usually at a considerable price). Though not always accurate or actionable, the knowledge these firms provide mitigates uncertainty for their clients. Able to see through the fog of world events better than the rest of us, the knowledge buyers can act to abate or exploit real or imagined risk in their own interest. For this article, I took a spin on the Web among the private knowledge providers.

In the English-speaking world, the best known of these private knowledge providers about world events are publishing houses including Reuters, Pearson's Financial Times Group (Financial Times), and Dow Jones & Company (Wall Street Journal and Barron's). Also publishers, but more deeply vested in consulting, are The Economist Intelligence Unit and Jane's Intelligence Group. I was particularly impressed by Aon, Inc., a global insurance and risk-management firm, that offers on its website downloadable “risk maps” depicting global and regional risks and dangers. A tier of lesser-known companies operates more quietly and privately. These include Oxford Analytica, Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), and Kissinger McLarty Associates (whose amazing website features...nothing!). And then there are the “black” intelligence providers that are so secret, they defy Google itself (or anyone else) to locate them on the Web. Although I knew a few of these dark dealers during my prior professional work, I'm no longer able to say who's in the business today and what they're doing. They aim to keep it that way. C'est la vie.

There is a moral dimension to informing others, as there is to being informed. No religion condones lying, at least overtly, or refusing to render aid to the endangered and suffering. In most legal systems, withholding vital information that can prevent harm is a criminal offense. And most of us feel it's reprehensible to withhold information that would result in socially beneficial outcomes. That's why the majority of firms engaged in analyzing world events and risk-abatement eventually are open with their findings, albeit after giving first notice (and advantage) to their paying clientele. But this openness comes with blinders imposed by professional and cultural biases, and political and disciplinary boundaries that isolate rather than integrate knowledge domains. These limitations defeat the practical benefit of sharing knowledge, which is to help people generally make better, more beneficial decisions about how to live in the world.

The nonprofit National Geographic Society, is an exception. Its National Geographic magazine's universal content and ever bolder coverage reaches a broad public, making its brand of global awareness (and advocacy for geographic knowledge) available for the price of a mere magazine subscription. National Geographic's topics range the gamut from geophysics to cultural geography, but increasingly, unavoidably, it's editors, writers, and photographers are drawn into geopolitical conflicts and topics that force the magazine's readers to confront the realities of life in a risky world. Happily, new leadership in the Society has abandoned the pollyannish “only good news” philosophy that was conflated with an almost exclusive boosting of Western values. National Geographic has gone “International Geographic” in deed, if not in title.

Another exception, in blog form, is the excellent worldchanging, whose mission I find perceptive and highly sympathetic:

WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together.

What if there was an open, global system that enabled everyone to learn about, understand, and cope with world events, current and anticipated? It would be revolutionary. To a small extent, today's Internet serves this function, if one has the ability and is willing to slog through swamps of information to discover and organize gems of knowledge that give meaning. However, because most people don't have knowledge about world events in the first place, most of the knowledge available on the Internet is trivial and can't be acted upon.

Several initiatives may point the way to this System. These include (of course) Google Earth and the online bulletin board, Digg, on which readers direct other readers to the best articles on the Web dealing with pressing problems; and Meople.net, an “attention bazaar” that enables experts to advertise their availability and sell their knowledge in Attention Stores open to all comers at affordable prices.

But by far the most ambitious of these initiatives is one in which I'm personally involved, the World SimulatorTM. Fully developed, the World Simulator will be an open-architectured Web service accessible to everyone for learning about world events. Real-time data feeds will keep its world model always up to date. Individuals and groups will be able to easily access the World Simulator to see what's happening and, if they follow the rules of construction, also be able to compose and integrate regional, process, and domain-specific knowledge modules with the world model, making it ever more realistic. People can then run simulations to test hypotheses and scenarios, globally or regionally, depending on the knowledge modules they choose to implement. We're concentrating our first efforts in the domain of geopolitics, because geopolitical events as a class are familiar to most people even if they aren't fully understood or their meanings appreciated. In the same way that Linus Torvald's open-source project resulted in Linux, the software language that drives most Web servers, or as the Wikipedia community is building the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia (caveat lector), we expect the World Simulator to result in a broadly public, heightened geopolitical awareness ( “Gaia consciousness”, in its most enlightened form). In turn, that awareness we believe will enable real-world action with beneficial outcomes, public as well as private.

I don't want to get ahead of myself while the project is in its early stages, but if you'd like to learn more, write to me. As well as being project organizer, I'm its evangelist. I can't think of a better cause, living in this risky world.