 We are an amnesic civilization. Do you remember that amazing post you read seven or eight years ago? Probably not. Despite the fact that we're flooded with information, we hardly remember what we've seen, probably because we're flooded. Today, people are tweeting, retweeting, blogging, vlogging, tumbling, pinning, and otherwise sharing amazing amounts of information, all of which they drop into the giant infostream, like casting beautiful petals in, hoping someone will see them and share them with others. Then the petals float off. They have no place to stay put or be recombined into something more powerful, more lasting, and more useful to others. What if we had a software platform that, with a little bit more effort than today's retweets, gave us a rich context, a context that helped us know what we know and share it? Imagine a tumbler for fully formed ideas where you could learn the difference between being defenseless and being undefended, or compare notions of polycentric governance described by Nobel Laureate Eleanor Ostrom with governance lessons from open source projects and governance experiments in cities around the world. What if those beautiful illustrations behind the RSA talks came to life and clicked and led to underlying materials? My name's Jerry Mikulski. I'm applying for a Shuddleworth Fellowship because I want to prototype a set of open web services and client apps that help people make better decisions together by mapping their beliefs, assumptions, and understandings in a way that bypasses argument and stalemate and leads instead to dialogue and positive action. Open Global Mind, this project, is symbiotic with Dan Whaley's hypothesis. OGM is creating a social knowledge map. Think Wikipedia meets Ushahidi. It's also very complementary with David Riley's Open Educational Resources and other projects around the world like Lumio, a wonderful open discussion system based in New Zealand. Personal Experience has given me a glimpse of the solution of a very useful contextual fabric for sharing and refining what we know. For more than 16 years, I've been using a proprietary concept mapping tool called The Brain. I was a tech industry analyst on The Brain's first press tour, and I'm now an advisor. You can see the 16 years of data that I've woven into context at jerrysbrain.com. All 230,000 nodes and 400,000 plus links of it. Yes, I've only ever built one brain file and I publish it openly as a labor of love in the hope that this legacy of mine will inspire others to do similarly. From using this software brain, I learned what it's like to remember what you learned earlier and promptly forgot. Often I answer questions by sending people links into my brain where they can, on their own time, see background materials and competing arguments. With my brain, I express my beliefs for others to find and occasionally change them as I learn and grow. Jim Fallows has written about my use of the brain in the Atlantic. From Fallows to high school students and African tour guides, I hear uniform support that we need better tools for context, not just more content. What's needed, though, is broader and more open than the brain. I've cared about this topic for so many years that I'm uniquely qualified and situated to prototype a solution. I've met many of my sense-making peers around the world. I'm active in many relevant working groups from mind mapping, data visualization, graphic facilitation, those are all different communities, believe it or not, to argumentation theory, the semantic web, Wikipedia, decision making, open educational resources, the Flock Society in Ecuador, that's the Free and Libra Open Knowledge Society, Transmedia, and then the really important interpersonal side as evidence in places like the NCDD, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. I've worked on projects in the news, education, civic discourse, development and collaboration domains, and more, all of which would benefit from an open global mind of the sort I propose to prototype. I can see what needs to be built, but I also know others will have fabulous ideas. So I'm building a community of practice with Alpha Geeks and other knowledge mappers who care very deeply about this topic and will experiment together to build a suite of tools that can help us elevate decision making by creating a credible fabric of knowledge, one that is collective yet still personal, visual as well as textual, logical but also emotional. As Mark Twain said, what gets us into trouble ain't what we don't know, it's what we know for sure but just ain't so. I'm applying for a Shuttleworth Fellowship, so I might have the resources to create this open learning context that helps us act on better conclusions we reach together. Thank you.