Hi Shannon,
I wrote to John Bunzl, one of the Simpol authors and he replied and in a quick further exchange gave me the OK to publish his reply. See below for John's letter and below that for my email to him.
----------- from John Bunzl --------------
Hi Roger,
Great to hear from you and many thanks indeed for writing that very nice review!
What we are finding is that too few people will get involved in policy-making until they see substantial political support for Simpol being available first. That is, they need to see politicians signing the Simpol Pledge and they want to see the campaign getting more recognition and public profile. Only then will they feel it worthwhile to get involved in the nitty-gritty of policy-making.
So our strategy thus far has been to build political support and, as you know from the book, we’ve been quite successful in the UK. But we are still far from breaking through the ‘glass ceiling’ to get any attention in the mainstream media. So it’s a long job!
So I appreciate all that you’ve done and do hope we can keep in touch and develop things where we can.
Thanks again and all the best,
John
------- my email to John Bunzl which earned the above reply ------
Hi John,
Sorry for being so long in replying. I noticed your book was coming out and ordered it many months ago so I could read it and understand Simpol better before answering. Now I have had a chance to read it and much like it. I have posted a short positive review of the book at https://voh.intermix.org/items/2534/view.
> I’m still not quite clear what function you see VoH
> performing. As I said, to me it seems like one means
> of facilitating agreement on potential policies.
I do think that Voices of Humanity could help develop simultaneous policies at the national level, but it will take some work to add that capability. VoH is designed to build a sense of human unity by electing messages to give a collective voice to every possible segment of humanity capped by the voice of humanity-as-one. It is up to the participants what they write. There is a built in ability to break out national collective voices, so that gets us part way to what you are thinking of in the section of your book where you reference Crowdocracy. Also, we could create a Simpol community, so we could elect messages from the Simpol participants at the national level, but I think we need something more focused to develop detailed policy options.
On page 144 you write “The building of sufficient international trust is an absolute prerequisite to implementing significant global agreements and sticking to them.” This is where Voices of Humanity will be helpful when/if it takes off in a massive way. We have a powerful tool here to share positive visions and action initiatives from the bottom up, across the silos, in a way that builds both unity and diversity. That is it should work to strengthen national and other identities at the same time that it builds a human identity.
I am stretched, as we all are, but whatever I can do for Simpol while keeping on with the VoH project, I will be interested.
best to you,
--Roger Eaton
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#simpol, #gr8transition
