DRAFT FOR AN EXCESSIVE SUFFERING CONTROL NETWORK

The Algonet Excessive Suffering Control Network is a geodesic organization of members who cooperate, in small teams but as a single body, to plan and to carry out a series of collective interventions aimed at reducing systematically the number of registered excessive suffering events occurring in the lives of individuals throughout the world.

The notion of excessive suffering refers to any particular psychoneural phenomenon that is experienced as too aversive to be acceptable as a part of a humane existence. Excessive suffering events may be associated with any kind of condition or problem: physical or psychological illnesses and disabilities, social or economic problems (war, poverty, hunger, human and animal exploitation, torture, crime and punishment...), accidents, disasters, etc. Excessive suffering seems impossible to define objectively. But what people say about it constitutes a body of data upon which a humanitarian network could act. It is believed that the geodesic dynamics would be a most appropriate means for conveying people's words and actions on such matters.

A geodesic network is a new kind of organizational structure in which relationships between people are modeled by, for instance, the Epcot Center dome rather than the Cheops pyramid. The advantages of a geodesic structure, it is said, are many: equality between the participants (direct democracy and bottom-up initiatives are allowed), scalability of cooperation (concerns may be addressed by each member at any level of grouping, from the team level to the whole network level), tensegrity (inherent checks and balances between agreeing and opposing people or views are provided), organic growth (from a few hundred members to many millions)... Here is an instance of one possible geodesic network organization: individual members cooperate within a team; a team has twelve members; each member belongs to two teams; each team hold one meeting each week; meetings produces results; some results circulate between teams to get improved or adopted; the network interacts with the surrounding world by inputs and outputs of information and energy through its individual members.

Members will participate in the Algonet by giving money and time (e.g. 9.99 dollars and 3 hours 59 minutes each week). The work to be done will be the planning and the implementation of collective interventions. One round of activity at the network will consist of five succeeding sub-cycles : 1-information, 2-proposition, 3-decision, 4-preparation, 5-action.

The interventions planned and implemented by the Algonet will be time-limited actions of all the members acting together as one single body. Later eventually, local, regional or sectorial actions will be performed as well. Each action of the whole network will be the result of one full round of activities at the Network. The aim of each intervention, as well as the whole series of them, will be very specific: to reduce the number of excessive pain cases. It is believed that making this precise intent systematically operational on an extensive scale will contribute significantly to the advent of an effective control of pain and suffering in the world.

To make sure that the action of the Network will be measurably efficient, the target of each intervention and of the series of all interventions will have to be the "registered" number of excessive suffering events occurring to individuals across the world. And among the possible criteria for deciding what collective intervention will be implemented, the following ones can be mentioned: number of people helped, gravity of the suffering relieved, success probability of the intervention (nothing short of 98 % for the first years of operation), the costs/benefits analysis in terms of money, labor, time, matter and energy.

Let us imagine that the Algonet has been set up and launched successfully. How would it work? What would it do? A small geodesic network with teams of twelve members would comprise about 700 persons, let's say. Those people would exchange messages during at least four hours each week. They would inform themselves about the number of individuals experiencing excessive pain at this time in the whole world; about the nature and the causes of their problems; about the solutions to their problems that are already attempted or that could be attempted. The Network members would propose and discuss various interventions that they could perform together as a single body. They would come to decide what particular intervention they would achieve concretely. For instance, they could decide that they can target three hospitals and make sure that these institutions will provide to cancer patients an adequate treatment for pain, setting an example for other hospitals. Or, as another instance, they could decide that in a period of one month they can help a hunger stricken village of 700 people in such a way that the villagers would be able to take care of themselves from then on. The Network members would prepare to act accordingly to their decision, and finally they would act. After acting, they would inform themselves again, and the whole cycle would repeat indefinitely. Successful interventions would bring more people to participate in the Network, larger interventions would bring larger successes, and in time, within twenty or fifty years, with millions of participants and millions of people preserved from pain, and with progresses in pain control occurring in other human activities as well, a fairly good control would be established over most events that threaten to make people suffer excessively.