Paris, 23 February 2004

Welcome. This is for the time being an almost blank working area for the World Energy Futures program of The Commons. Work on this international collaborative program was first initiated in the late nineties, building on a decade of collaboration and research on a variety of energy and energy-related topics (including transportation, environment, technology developments and commercial applications). For reasons of limited resources and pressing work in other areas however, those responsible for this area of activity under The Commons have until the opening months of 2004 been sidetracked with other assignments and the site has lain largely unattended and unused. This situation is about to change.

Subsequent to the considerable enthusiasm and level of participation and interest before and in the wake of the World Energy Technologies Summit that was convened in Paris from 10-11 February 2004, the decision has been taken to start today to update and extend this website, at least in part to offer an intermediate tool of information gathering, presentation and discussion in the months immediately ahead.

For more information on the Summit we invite you to visit the the UNESCO/World Technology Energy Summit with the title: "Should We Leapfrog the Grid?: Distributed Generation in the Developing World". It is expected The World Technology Network will shortly have its own site ready to host follow-up discussions; however in the meantime, we may be able to lend a hand here while bringing this program back on line.

We will be continuing our work on this site in the months ahead and as a first step are beginning by loading in a certain number of documents and reports to the Public Library here. In addition we intend to gradual develop the collection of linked sites and programs, which you can already begin to see if you click the "Links & Media" hotlink just to your left. Finally, we invite you to go to the Group Calendar and pop in your events and key dates so that all can see and benefit from.