A global commitment: crowdsourcing the Millennium Goals

“5,000 LIVES SAVED TODAY!!!”

This should be headline news. It’s a remarkable achievement!

Yet, the amazing outcomes from the 8 Millennium Development Goals are little known. These visionary goals were set top-down by elite technocrats, using their own knowledge in a closed environment to decide among themselves how to make our world a better place.

New goals will be set in 2015, and Jammie Drummond argues that the whole world should be involved in a global crowdsourcing process to set them – a bottom-up process giving everyone, everywhere an equal voice. The world would decide what the world wants to work on and the world will make it happen.

He strongly believes that this is an opportunity not to be missed: by setting the goals, everyone would personally commit to achieving them and would have a stake in their outcome. Together we can achieve more than the politicians alone.

This thinking can be (and should be) applied to more than just the Millennium Development Goals (coincidentally, ZN is working with Education International to make sure that quality education continues to be a top priority for the UN). When you get more than just the key leaders involved (and include local communities, the audience, or anyone with a vested interest) remarkable things can be achieved because the goals would not just be there for us all to see – they would be part of all of us, our personal achievements.