The United Nations organisation has many problems (bugs). Many have been addressed in the past, but have never been solved. Some of them are the power of veto, the number of the UN Security Council members, permanent or not, UN peacekeeping forces mandate and many more. Many countries agree that these problems should be solved and many also agree on how to fix them. However, the most prevailing blocking obstacle on their trek is the veto power. The P5 do not want to give up the veto, they do not want to expand the US SC member count etc. This is an endless loop of never ending argument without solution.

As a programmer, especially one familiar with open source software development, I’ve had an interesting idea. United Nations, as an organisation, is pretty much open. Its source code (charters, resolutions etc) is open, for everyone to read and analyse. Just like any other open source project, if enough people do not like the way the original authors are taking the project’s trek, they can decide to fork it and continue the project’s development in some other direction.

So, in a few simple steps, we could solve many issues that currently seem pretty much unsolvable. Say that a couple of countries decide to fork UN, checkout to a rework branch, patch it with a “remove veto, increase SC membership, upgrade peacekeeping force mandate+” (cannot put more text in 72 characters), commit changes and merge with the master branch. Now they can sit back and accept new members, in time completely replacing the original UN. Members of the original UN project would redirect their donations and “patronage” to the new forked project to regain their original UN status. New members would be accepted into the NUN SC, based on some agreed criteria, probably by merit of the power of economy per capita, factoring the ratio of own population to the World total etc. This is an implementation detail. Nothing to worry about now. Accepting new NUN members should also be addressed carefully, making sure not to provoke conflicts and unrest in areas sensitive to these kinds of topics and so one... more implementation details, so I will not elaborate. The point has, hopefully, been made.

Of course, this is a joke post. :)