What is The Third System Foundation trying to do?

I came up with the idea of Web Of Wealth early in this millennium as a repository for intellectual property which I aimed to develop. This is why it is a Company Limited by Guarantee, not a Private Limited Company. It therefore has no shareholders, but it does have Directors and can also have Members. When the time is right, it will apply to become a Registered Educational Charity.

I chose the name as a tribute to Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The web became open to the public in 1993 and I first saw it in November 1994. There wasn’t much to see then, but it was already expanding exponentially, leading to the mania and crash we now know as the Dot-com Bubble early in this millennium.

Weaving the Web Of Wealth

Back in those days, it was still hard to find anything on the web and I had failed to locate a good explanation for what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he invented it. One day, I was in a bookshop and discovered a slim volume called Weaving the Web, written by the man himself. I bought it, read it and found it very illuminating. it amused me that I had to read an old-school book to really make sense of what he was trying to do (which does not bear much resemblance to how things have turned out).

I was thinking a lot about the nature of real prosperity and what creates it. This is a subject that goes much deeper than the shallows represented by the discipline of economics. It occurred to me that we are all sustained by a Web Of Wealth which we barely understand. Like a delicate spider’s web, we can easily break it, without realising the damage we are doing.

A great deal of this Web consists of resources we get for free and don’t own, but the cultures humanity has developed continually evolve and create newly emergent layers on top of the substrate of resources that already exist.

I registered a domain name, put up a feeble web site, and set up an email server in March 2007.

I registered the company Web Of Wealth here in England in 2013. I had already done a lot of research on the subject and gathered a collection of books which I thought of as the Web Of Wealth Library. This collection started out with physical books, but has been growing for years with the addition of e-books, which I hope we can find a way to index as a searchable resource for people who want to learn and contribute to this field of study.

So Tim’s book title inspired the name Web Of Wealth. But it has been widely misinterpreted as some kind of get-rich-quick scheme. The women in my life all hated it, but being stubborn, I ignored their objections (definitely a bad idea!).

In the last quarter of 2019, I worked with a good friend, Dil Green, to try out new methods of developing and deploying web content, and we liked the look of Netlify. I like to experiment when learning a new technology, so I used it to re-develop the Web Of Wealth web site. Late that year and early in 2020, I published some blog posts on the new site about what I was trying to do with Web Of Wealth. You can find them here.

The Third System Research Programme

Although I wrote the above pieces over five years ago, events since then suggest the issues under investigation are becoming increasingly important. Many people recognise this, but there is a risk of “re-inventing the wheel”, because knowledge about what needs to be done is scattered across many disciplines. Many efforts to address these issues are “heroic” and collapse because of a lack of coherence and a lack of understanding of how to put those efforts in a context where they can be effective.

We have recently launched Context Cohere Consulting (CO3) to apply the knowledge we have developed so far to help organisations at many scales and stages in their evolution. CO3 is licensed to use this knowledge and aims to develop partnerships with other organisations to increase its scale of operations.

It is this recent development which has led us to revisit Web Of Wealth to raise its profile. As a first step, we have renamed it to The Third System Foundation, which more accurately reflects the work it has been doing and its aspirations for the future.

Watch this space for more news, as we move forward…