After the accomplishments of the World Car Free Days collaborative program over its first seven years, and in particular as a result of the notable success as a result of our technology-mediated cooperation with the City of Bogotá to organize its first massive prize-winning Car Free Day program in February 2000 -- some eight hundred thousand cars off the road for 13 hours, resulting in the 2000 Stockholm Challenge Award for the Environment being jointly awarded to the team of the City of Bogotá and The Commons for their outstanding accomplishment -- The Commons was approached by representatives of the United Nations (Division for Sustainable Development) in 2001 and asked to structure and lead this cooperative program in preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

Over the first year of its existence and running with a very small budget, the team succeeded in organizing and supporting the first three UNCFD events: in Colombia (Bogota, a city of seven million people), Indonesia (Surabaya, three million), and Australia (Fremantle, not quite thirty thousand). These were, as might be expected, vastly different events which showed how culturally aware, heavily interactive, flexible collaborative work can be put to service in the very wide variety of situations and possibilities that are the case in the real world.

Zero Carbon Events: In keeping with our stubborn if imperfect commitment to sustainable development in all its corners and interstices in daily life, and with a careful eye on the potential of technology to lend a hand in this, each of these projects was set up to make extensive innovative use, not only of a high quality IP communications link involving several participating websites, private and shared internet conference rooms, and of low cost, low-pollution voice and videoconferencing links in support of both program organization and then the major conferences and events that followed. This reduced air travel by the Commons team to a round zero. Thus a zero carbon event for us.

The entire strategic framework behind this program now needs to be re-examined, overhauled and redirected in order to achieve its ambitious objectives. This is above all a process- and event-driven approach to opening the windows of sustainability in the developing world when it comes to matters of transport in cites. This rather unusual approach requires collaborators who are comfortable working with a international project that has as its goals something other than more reports and conferences. New, appropriate collaborators and sponsors are being sought. In the meantime the New Mobility Agenda team continues to cooperate with cities in the developing world to support and counsel their events.