Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) was founded in 1958 as an independent, nonprofit organization devoted to research, education and advanced study in human affairs.

Current projects apply global communications technology to distance learning, policymaking, and the formation of influential communities of scholars, scientists and leaders.

In 1981, before there was an Internet, WBSI already a highly regarded research and educational institute, foresaw the revolutionary importance of the new marriage of computers and telecommunications. As a result the Institute undertook a series of programs that pioneered the use of computer conferencing in leadership development, policy formation, education, health, and the formation of global communities of influence.

Today the primitive computer communication technology WBSI used has advanced to form the Internet, now numbering its users around the world in the hundreds of millions. This remarkable development now makes it possible to move to a new level of program design, enabling us to tackle those issues we previously worked on - and others we could not before deal with - more intensively, more effectively and on a much larger scale.

Dominated so far by commercial enterprises, the Internet's potential to form communities that clearly serve higher order goals has scarcely been tapped. Using this powerful medium to improve life for the two billion people it will soon reach is the goal to which the WBSI programs outlined here are directed.