Invitation to Membership in GLOSAS
The GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the U.S.A. (GLOSAS/USA) is a publicly supported, non-profit, educational service organization. All contributions and membership fees are tax deductible. Reduction of membership fees for those who contribute "in-kind" services is available.
Its ultimate goal is to establish a Globally Collaborative Environmental Peace Gaming (GCEPG) System for Globally Distributed Decision Support System with a globally distributed interactive computer gaming simulation system, focusing on the issue of environment and sustainable development in developing countries. This is for problem analysis, policy formulation and assessment, and is to be used for training of would-be decision makers in conflict resolution, crisis management, and negotiation with win-win cooperation. This is to be done with integrated use of distributed computer conferencing, databases and simulation systems among various countries. Several systems will be interconnected to form a global neural computer network [a term coined by Utsumi in 1981]. The total system will act as a single system with parallel processing of those subsystems in individual countries. Here each game player with his submodel and database corresponds to a neuron, an Internet node to a synapsis, and the Internet the nerves of a global brain.
Over the past three decades, GLOSAS/USA has played a major pioneering role in extending U.S. data communication networks to other countries, particularly to Japan, and deregulating Japanese telecommunication policies for the use of e-mail (thanks to a help from the Late Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldrige), through ARPANET, Telenet and Internet. This triggered the de-monopolization and privatization of Japanese telecommunications industries. This liberalization of the telecommunication industry has been emulated and has now created a more enabling environment for economic and social development in many other countries. Over 180 countries have Internet access and more than 750 million people use e-mail around the world nowadays. American and other countries' university courses now reach many under-served developing countries.
Next to that, since 1986, GLOSAS conducted a series of innovative distance teaching trials with multipoint-to-multipoint multimedia interactive videoconferences using inexpensive hybrid delivery technologies accessible to less developed countries, which often spanned the globe and came to be called the "Global Lecture Hall (GLH)TM". These demonstrations have helped build a network of leaders in the global electronic distance education movement.
Global University System (GUS), which GLOSAS/USA founded in 1999, aims to build a higher level of humanity with mutual understanding across national and cultural boundaries for global peace. The mission of GUS is to help higher educational institutions in remote/rural areas of developing countries to deploy broadband Internet in order to close the digital divide. These institutions act as the knowledge center of their community for the eradication of poverty and isolation through the use of advanced Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). A GUS education thus hopes to promote world prosperity, justice, and peace, based on moral principles rather than political or ideological doctrines.
GUS will seek to improve the quality and availability of international educational exchange through the use of telecommunication and information technologies. GUS' main activity is to achieve global electronic education across national boundaries by developing a cooperative infrastructure, so as to enlarge and expand the present exchange of educational courses into a worldwide system. GUS will provide underserved people of the developing countries with access to the educational excellence available from all the world's finest sources. Students could access the sources with a far greater variety of educational philosophies, courses and instructional styles than they could ever encounter on a single campus. This is "the 21st century version of the Fulbright exchange program."
GUS is an evolutionary concept with no global precedent. GUS attempts to provide cooperative, experiential learning opportunities on the widest possible scale and for the purpose of fostering peace and sustainable development. GUS has already gained wide support of prominent educational institutions, information technology specialists and industry in many countries. The time is ripe for global electronic learning.