Robert David Steele - The Open Source Revolution Is Coming and It Will Conquer the 1%

 

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010) - and he is also a columnist for The Guardian (UK). In this recent article, Ahmed speaks with Robert David Steele, author of book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust (2012), and summarizes his work.

Here is a summary of the book, published by Evolver Editions:

What the world lacks right now—especially the United States, where every form of organization from government to banks to labor unions has betrayed the public trust—is integrity. Also lacking is public intelligence in the sense of decision-support: knowing what one needs to know in order to make honest decisions for the good of all, rather than corrupt decisions for the good of the few.

The Open-Source Everything Manifesto is a distillation of author, strategist, analyst, and reformer Robert David Steele life's work: the transition from top-down secret command and control to a world of bottom-up, consensual, collective decision-making as a means to solve the major crises facing our world today. The book is intended to be a catalyst for citizen dialog and deliberation, and for inspiring the continued evolution of a nation in which all citizens realize our shared aspiration of direct democracy—informed participatory democracy. Open-Source Everything is a cultural and philosophical concept that is essential to creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for one hundred percent of humanity. The future of intelligence is not secret, not federal, and not expensive. It is about transparency, truth, and trust among our local to global collective. Only "open" is scalable.

As we strive to recover from the closed world corruption and secrecy that has enabled massive fraud within governments, banks, corporations, and even non-profits and universities, this timely book is a manifesto for liberation—not just open technology, but open everything.

This is a fascinating article - and there is quite a bit of higher order thinking apparent here.

I hope to hell Steele is correct, and the sooner the better.

The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy

The man who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods calls for re-invention of intelligence to re-engineer Earth

A businessman tries to break through a line of Occupy Wall Street protesters who had blocked access to the New York Stock Exchange area in November 2011. 

Photograph: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.

With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.

Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.

In 1992, despite opposition from the CIA, he obtained Marine Corps permission to organise a landmark international conference on open source intelligence – the paradigm of deriving information to support policy decisions not through secret activities, but from open public sources available to all. The conference was such a success it brought in over 620 attendees from the intelligence world.

But the CIA wasn't happy, and ensured that Steele was prohibited from running a second conference. The clash prompted him to resign from his position as second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and pursue the open source paradigm elsewhere. He went on to found and head up the Open Source Solutions Network Inc. and later the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network which runs the Public Intelligence Blog.

 

Former CIA spy and Open Source Intelligence pioneer, Robert David Steele speaking at the Inter-American Defense Board in 2013

I first came across Steele when I discovered his Amazon review of my third book, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism. A voracious reader, Steele is the number 1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction across 98 categories. He also reviewed my latest book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, but told me I'd overlooked an important early work – 'A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change.'

Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain.

Steele's book is a must-read, a powerful yet still pragmatic roadmap to a new civilisational paradigm that simultaneously offers a trenchant, unrelenting critique of the prevailing global order. His interdisciplinary 'whole systems' approach dramatically connects up the increasing corruption, inefficiency and unaccountability of the intelligence system and its political and financial masters with escalating inequalities and environmental crises. But he also offers a comprehensive vision of hope that activist networks like Reclaim are implementing today.

"We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making," he writes in The Open Source Everything Manifesto. "Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted."

Today's capitalism, he argues, is inherently predatory and destructive:

"Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditised by the Industrial Era."

Open source everything, in this context, offers us the chance to build on what we've learned through industrialisation, to learn from our mistakes, and catalyse the re-opening of the commons, in the process breaking the grip of defunct power structures and enabling the possibility of prosperity for all.

"Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realise such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth - all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the 'utopia' that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach."

The goal, he concludes, is to reject:

"... concentrated illicitly aggregated and largely phantom wealth in favor of community wealth defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity, the latter being the ultimate arbiter of shared wealth."

Despite this unabashedly radical vision, Steele is hugely respected by senior military intelligence experts across the world. As a researcher at the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, he has authored several monographs advocating the need for open source methods to transform the craft of intelligence. He has lectured to the US State Department and Department of Homeland Security as well as National Security Councils in various countries, and his new book has received accolades from senior intelligence officials across multiple countries including France and Turkey.

Yet he remains an outspoken critic of US intelligence practices and what he sees as their integral role in aggravating rather than ameliorating the world's greatest threats and challenges.

This week, I had the good fortune of being able to touch base with Steele to dig deeper into his recent analysis of the future of US politics in the context of our accelerating environmental challenges. The first thing I asked him was where he sees things going over the next decade, given his holistic take.

"Properly educated people always appreciate holistic approaches to any challenge. This means that they understand both cause and effect, and intertwined complexities," he said. "A major part of our problem in the public policy arena is the decline in intelligence with integrity among key politicians and staff at the same time that think tanks and universities and non-governmental organisations have also suffered a similar intellectual diminishment.

"My early graduate education was in the 1970's when Limits to Growth and World Federalism were the rage. Both sought to achieve an over-view of systemic challenges, but both also suffered from the myth of top-down hubris. What was clear in the 1970s, that has been obscured by political and financial treason in the past half-century, is that everything is connected – what we do in the way of paving over wetlands, or in poisoning ground water 'inadvertently' because of our reliance on pesticides and fertilisers that are not subject to the integrity of the 'Precautionary Principle,' ultimately leads to climate catastrophes that are acts of man, not acts of god."

He points me to his tremendous collection of reviews of books on climate change, disease, environmental degradation, peak oil, and water scarcity. "I see five major overlapping threats on the immediate horizon," he continues. "They are all related: the collapse of complex societies, the acceleration of the Earth's demise with changes that used to take 10,000 years now taking three or less, predatory or shock capitalism and financial crime out of the City of London and Wall Street, and political corruption at scale, to include the west supporting 42 of 44 dictators. We are close to multiple mass catastrophes."

What about the claim that the US is on the brink of revolution? "Revolution is overthrow – the complete reversal of the status quo ante. We are at the end of centuries of what Lionel Tiger calls 'The Manufacture of Evil,' in which merchant banks led by the City of London have conspired with captive governments to concentrate wealth and commoditise everything including humans. What revolution means in practical terms is that balance has been lost and the status quo ante is unsustainable. There are two 'stops' on greed to the nth degree: the first is the carrying capacity of Earth, and the second is human sensibility. We are now at a point where both stops are activating."

Former CIA officer's matrix on the preconditions for revolution

It's not just the US, he adds. "The preconditions of revolution exist in the UK, and most western countries. The number of active pre-conditions is quite stunning, from elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate socialisation and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation to energy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on."

So why isn't it happening yet?

"Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. We are waiting for our Tunisian fruit seller. The public will endure great repression, especially when most media outlets and schools are actively aiding the repressive meme of 'you are helpless, this is the order of things.' When we have a scandal so powerful that it cannot be ignored by the average Briton or American, we will have a revolution that overturns the corrupt political systems in both countries, and perhaps puts many banks out of business. Vaclav Havel calls this 'The Power of the Powerless.' One spark, one massive fire."

But we need more than revolution, in the sense of overthrow, to effect change, surely. How does your manifesto for 'open source everything' fit into this? "The west has pursued an industrialisation path that allows for the privatisation of wealth from the commons, along with the criminalisation of commons rights of the public, as well as the externalisation of all true costs. Never mind that fracking produces earthquakes and poisons aquifers – corrupt politicians at local, state or province, and national levels are all too happy to take money for looking the other way. Our entire commercial, diplomatic, and informational systems are now cancerous. When trade treaties have secret sections – or are entirely secret – one can be certain the public is being screwed and the secrecy is an attempt to avoid accountability. Secrecy enables corruption. So also does an inattentive public enable corruption."

Is this a crisis of capitalism, then? Does capitalism need to end for us to resolve these problems? And if so, how? "Predatory capitalism is based on the privatisation of profit and the externalisation of cost. It is an extension of the fencing of the commons, of enclosures, along with the criminalisation of prior common customs and rights. What we need is a system that fully accounts for all costs. Whether we call that capitalism or not is irrelevant to me. But doing so would fundamentally transform the dynamic of present day capitalism, by making capital open source. For example, and as calculated by my colleague JZ Liszkiewicz, a white cotton T-shirt contains roughly 570 gallons of water, 11 to 29 gallons of fuel, and a number of toxins and emissions including pesticides, diesel exhaust, and heavy metals and other volatile compounds – it also generally includes child labor. Accounting for those costs and their real social, human and environmental impacts has totally different implications for how we should organise production and consumption than current predatory capitalism."

So what exactly do you mean by open source everything? "We have over 5 billion human brains that are the one infinite resource available to us going forward. Crowd-sourcing and cognitive surplus are two terms of art for the changing power dynamic between those at the top that are ignorant and corrupt, and those across the bottom that are attentive and ethical. The open source ecology is made up of a wide range of opens – open farm technology, open source software, open hardware, open networks, open money, open small business technology, open patents – to name just a few. The key point is that they must all develop together, otherwise the existing system will isolate them into ineffectiveness. Open data is largely worthless unless you have open hardware and open software. Open government demands open cloud and open spectrum, or money will dominate feeds and speeds."

 

Robert Steele's vision for open source systems

On 1st May, Steele sent an open letter to US vice president Joe Biden requesting him to consider establishing an Open Source Agency that would transform the operation of the intelligence community, dramatically reduce costs, increasing oversight and accountability, while increasing access to the best possible information to support holistic policy-making. To date, he has received no response.

I'm not particularly surprised. Open source everything pretty much undermines everything the national security state stands for. Why bother even asking vice president Biden to consider it? "The national security state is rooted in secrecy as a means of avoiding accountability. My first book, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World – which by the way had a foreword from Senator David Boren, the immediate past chairman of the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence - made it quite clear that the national security state is an expensive, ineffective monstrosity that is simply not fit for purpose. In that sense, the national security state is it's own worst enemy – it's bound to fail."

Given his standing as an intelligence expert, Steele's criticisms of US intelligence excesses are beyond scathing – they are damning. "Most of what is produced through secret methods is not actually intelligence at all. It is simply secret information that is, most of the time, rather generic and therefore not actually very useful for making critical decisions at a government level. The National Security Agency (NSA) has not prevented any terrorist incidents. CIA cannot even get the population of Syria correct and provides no intelligence - decision-support - to most cabinet secretaries, assistant secretaries, and department heads. Indeed General Tony Zinni, when he was commander in chief of the US Central Command as it was at war, is on record as saying that he received, 'at best,' a meagre 4% of what he needed to know from secret sources and methods."

So does open source mean you are calling for abolition of intelligence agencies as we know them, I ask. "I'm a former spy and I believe we still need spies and secrecy, but we need to redirect the vast majority of the funds now spent on secrecy toward savings and narrowly focused endeavors at home. For instance, utterly ruthless counterintelligence against corruption, or horrendous evils like paedophilia.

"Believe it or not, 95% of what we need for ethical evidence-based decision support cannot be obtained through the secret methods of standard intelligence practices. But it can be obtained quite openly and cheaply from academics, civil society, commerce, governments, law enforcement organisations, the media, all militaries, and non-governmental organisations. An Open Source Agency, as I've proposed it, would not just meet 95% of our intelligence requirements, it would do the same at all levels of government and carry over by enriching education, commerce, and research – it would create what I called in 1995 a 'Smart Nation.'

"The whole point of Open Source Everything is to restore public agency. Open Source is the only form of information and information technology that is affordable to the majority, interoperable across all boundaries, and rapidly scalable from local to global without the curse of overhead that proprietary corporations impose."

 

Robert Steele's graphic on open source systems thinking

It's clear to me that when Steele talks about intelligence as 'decision-support,' he really does intend that we grasp "all information in all languages all the time" – that we do multidisciplinary research spanning centuries into the past as well as into the future. His most intriguing premise is that the 1% are simply not as powerful as they, and we, assume them to be. "The collective buying power of the five billion poor is four times that of the one billion rich according to the late Harvard business thinker Prof C. K. Prahalad – open source everything is about the five billion poor coming together to reclaim their collective wealth and mobilise it to transform their lives. There is zero chance of the revolution being put down. Public agency is emergent, and the ability of the public to literally put any bank or corporation out of business overnight is looming. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, you cannot screw all of the people all of the time. We're there. All we lack is a major precipitant – our Tunisian fruit seller. When it happens the revolution will be deep and lasting."

The Arab spring analogy has its negatives. So far, there really isn't much to root for. I want to know what's to stop this revolution from turning into a violent, destructive mess. Steele is characteristically optimistic. "I have struggled with this question. What I see happening is an end to national dictat and the emergence of bottom-up clarity, diversity, integrity, and sustainability. Individual towns across the USA are now nullifying federal and state regulations - for example gag laws on animal cruelty, blanket permissions for fracking. Those such as my colleague Parag Khanna that speak to a new era of city-states are correct in my view. Top down power has failed in a most spectacular manner, and bottom-up consensus power is emergent. 'Not in my neighborhood' is beginning to trump 'Because I say so.' The one unlimited resource we have on the planet is the human brain – the current strategy of 1% capitalism is failing because it is killing the Golden Goose at multiple levels. Unfortunately, the gap between those with money and power and those who actually know what they are talking about has grown catastrophic. The rich are surrounded by sycophants and pretenders whose continued employment demands that they not question the premises. As Larry Summers lectured Elizabeth Warren, 'insiders do not criticise insiders.'"

But how can activists actually start moving toward the open source vision now? "For starters, there are eight 'tribes' that among them can bring together all relevant information: academia, civil society including labor unions and religions, commerce especially small business, government especially local, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit. At every level from local to global, across every mission area, we need to create stewardship councils integrating personalities and information from all eight tribes. We don't need to wait around for someone else to get started. All of us who recognise the vitality of this possibility can begin creating these new grassroots structures from the bottom-up, right now."

So how does open source everything have the potential to 're-engineer the Earth'? For me, this is the most important question, and Steele's answer is inspiring. "Open Source Everything overturns top-down 'because I say so at the point of a gun' power. Open Source Everything makes truth rather than violence the currency of power. Open Source Everything demands that true cost economics and the indigenous concept of 'seventh generation thinking' – how will this affect society 200 years ahead – become central. Most of our problems today can be traced to the ascendance of unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory capitalism, all based on force and lies and encroachment on the commons. The national security state works for the City of London and Wall Street – both are about to be toppled by a combination of Eastern alternative banking and alternative international development capabilities, and individuals who recognise that they have the power to pull their money out of the banks and not buy the consumer goods that subsidise corruption and the concentration of wealth. The opportunity to take back the commons for the benefit of humanity as a whole is open – here and now."

For Steele, the open source revolution is inevitable, simply because the demise of the system presided over by the 1% cannot be stopped – and because the alternatives to reclaiming the commons are too dismal to contemplate. We have no choice but to step up.

"My motto, a play on the CIA motto that is disgraced every day, is 'the truth at any cost lowers all other costs'", he tells me. "Others wiser than I have pointed out that nature bats last. We are at the end of an era in which lies can be used to steal from the public and the commons. We are at the beginning of an era in which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace."

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT. ZERO POINT is set in a near future following a Fourth Iraq War. Follow Ahmed on Facebook and Twitter.

Open Source Summit - Managing Open Source Communities & Converting Closed Communities to Open

On June 25 and 26, NYU hosted an Open Source Summit in Washington, D.C. The Open Forum Foundation organized more than 11 government agencies for a two-day symposium on open source communities, how to convert closed communities into open communities (day one), and then a discussion on creating new communities (day two).

Here is the organizer's statement:

This year's Open Source Summit will explain how to build, engage with, and maintain open source communities -- and when we say open source, we don't just mean software, we also mean hardware and data.

If you are a federal civil servant that needs to build or engage with an open source community, you should plan on attending.

Be warned however: this is not your average event! The multi-agency planning team is tasked with ensuring that the event provides substantive benefit to federal agency personnel, and the format is uniquely designed to deliver not just abstract content from subject matter experts (of course we have those), but also the opportunity to see this knowledge applied to a specific case study, and then to learn how to apply it to your specific situation.

In addition, we will collate the results of the discussions during the event and make them available afterwards so that others may learn from the shared experiences and wisdom of their peers.

So far NYU has posted the sessions from the first day - if they add the second day, I will share them.

Open Source Summit
Part One: Open Source Communities - How they work. How to engage with them. How to manage them

NYU Washington, DC
June 25-26, 2013

The 2013 Open Source Summit features professionals explaining how to build, engage with, and maintain open source communities -- not only with software, but with hardware and data as well.

Open Source Summit
Part Two: Converting Closed Communities to Open

If you have a pre-existing development community and you are open sourcing the project, how do you manage this complexity?

Michel Bauwens - Proposed Next Steps for the Emerging P2P and Commons Networks

From Michel Bauwens' P2P Blog, here are his proposals for "Next Steps" in the emerging P2P and Commons networks.

Proposed Next Steps for the emerging P2P and Commons networks

Michel Bauwens
2nd April 2013

In short, we need a alliance of the commons to project civil and political power and influence at every level of society; we need phyles to strengthen our economic autonomy from the profit-maximizing dominant system; and we need Chambre of the Commons to achieve territorial policy; legal and infrastructural conditions for the alternative, human and nature-friendly political economy to thrive. Neither alone is sufficient, but together they could be a powerful triad for the necessary phase transition.

Michel Bauwens:

The recent success of a global mobilization (500+ participants and collectives in 23 countries and over 50 cities) to collaborative map P2P-driven, commons-oriented, collaboration/sharing-based initiatives in hispanic countries, has shown a grassroots hunger for more mutual coordination to enhance the capacity to initiate social change. I would like to add the hypothesis that what is in the making is not just a new social imaginery, but also a potential new political subject. To build and obtain more civic infrastructures to enable and empower autonomous social production, I believe we must move to mutualize our forces and create a new set of political, social and economic institutions which can have ‘transitional’ effects, i.e. prepare the ground for a phase-transition to a political economy and civilization in which socially and environmentally friendly free association between autonomous producers and citizens become the norm.

I believe the time is there to start constructing the following three institutional coalitions:

* The civic/political institution: The Alliance of the Commons

An alliance of the commons is an alliance, meeting place and network of p2p-commons oriented networks, associations, places; who do not have economic rationales. These alliances can be topical, local, transnational, etc … An example is the initiative Paris Communs Urbains which is attempting to create a common platform for urban commons intiatives in the Paris region; another Parisian/French example is the freecultural network Libre Savoirs, which is developing a set of policy proposals around digital rights. (both examples were communicated to me by Lionel Maurel).

An alliance of the commons is a meeting place and platform to formulate policy proposals that enhance civic infrastructures for the commons.

* The economic institution: the P2P/Commons Globa-local « Phyle »

A phyle (as originally proposed by lasindias.net) is a coalition of commons-oriented, community-supportive ethical enterprises which trade and exchange in the market to create livelyhoods for commoners and peer producers engaged in social production. The use of a peer production licence keeps the created exchange value within the sphere of the commons and strengthens the existence of a more autonomous counter-economy which refuses the destructive logic of profit-maximisation and instead works to increase benefits for their own, but also the emerging global commons. Phyles created integrated economies around the commons, that render them more autonomous and insure the social reproduction of its members. Hyperproductive global phyles that generate well-being for their members will gradually create a counterpower to the hitherto dominant MNO’s.

* The political-economy institution: The Chamber of the Commons

In analogy with the well-known chambers of commerce which work on the infrastructure for for-profit enterprise, the Commons chamber exclusively coordinates for the needs of the emergent coalitions of commons-friendly ethical enterprises (the phyles), but with a territorial focus. Their aim is to uncover the convergent needs of the new commons enterprises and to interface with territorial powers to express and obtain their infrastructural, policy and legal needs.

In short, we need a alliance of the commons to project civil and political power and influence at every level of society; we need phyles to strengthen our economic autonomy from the profit-maximizing dominant system; and we need Chambre of the Commons to achieve territorial policy; legal and infrastructural conditions for the alternative, human and nature-friendly political economy to thrive. Neither alone is sufficient, but together they could be a powerful triad for the necessary phase transition.

TED Book: Radical Openness by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams

This new offering from TED Books looks interesting, Radical Openness: Four Unexpected Principles for Success. And at only $2.99 for the e-reader versions (for the Kindle), quite affordable.

A brand new TED Book: Radical Openness

17 January 2013

At TEDGlobal 2012, Don Tapscott gave us an beautiful metaphor for how society could function: like a starling murmuration. By flying as a group — dipping and diving as a single unit — starlings successfully ward off predators through cooperation. While there is leadership, there is no discernable leader.

Tapscott shares much more of his vision of cooperation in the new TED Book, Radical Openness: Four Unexpected Principles for Success. In it, Tapscott — with co-author Anthony Williams — looks at how, around the world, people are connecting and collaborating in new ways. They give examples of how smart organizations are shunning their old, secretive practices and embracing the values of transparency and collaboration. Meanwhile, movements for freedom of information are exploding like never before. Overall, Tapscott and Williams show how this new philosophy is affecting many facets of our society, from the way we do business to whom we chose to govern us.

But while radical openness promises many exciting transformations, it also comes with new risks and responsibilities. Tapscott and Williams ask: How much information should we share and with whom? And what are the consequences of disclosing the intimate, unvarnished details of our businesses and personal lives?

Radical Openness is available for the Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.

Check out Tapscott’s 2012 TED Talk.

TEDxUHowest - Fabien Pinckaers - Open source as a mature example of emergent collectives

Open Source is the future of cooperative learning, business, research, and community - nice talk.

Open source as a mature example of emergent collectives

Fabien Pinckaers is the founder and CEO of OpenERP, an open source business applications company. His talk is about how open source communities can leverage their cooperative business model to compete in a market that is crowded with commercial players. Open source collaboration gives an edge to innovative early market players.

Authors@Google: Rich DeMillo - Abelard to Apple (The Future of Higher Education)

Rich DeMillo believes the current higher education system is obsolete and needs to be changed - drastically - to bring it into the 21st century. He offers Apple's iTunes U and MIT's OpenCourseWare as examples of where higher education needs to look for a model of reform. His book is Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities.

Abelard to Apple
The vast majority of American college students attend two thousand or so private and public institutions that might be described as the Middle--reputable educational institutions, but not considered equal to the elite and entrenched upper echelon of the Ivy League and other prestigious schools. Richard DeMillo has a warning for these colleges and universities in the Middle: If you do not change, you are heading for irrelevance and marginalization. In Abelard to Apple, DeMillo argues that these institutions, clinging precariously to a centuries-old model of higher education, are ignoring the social, historical, and economic forces at work in today's world. In the age of iTunes, open source software, and for-profit online universities, there are new rules for higher education. DeMillo, who has spent years in both academia andin industry, explains how higher education arrived at its current parlous state and offers a road map for the twenty-first century. He describes the evolving model for higher education, from European universities based on a medieval model to American land-grant colleges to Apple's iTunes U and MIT's OpenCourseWare. He offers ten rules to help colleges reinvent themselves (including "Don't romanticize your weaknesses") and argues for a focus on teaching undergraduates. DeMillo's message--for colleges and universities, students, alumni, parents, employers, and politicians--is that any college or university can change course if it defines a compelling value proposition (one not based in "institutional envy" of Harvard and Berkeley) and imagines an institution that delivers it. 

Why I Support the Creative Commons Initiative

The Creative Commons idea has been around for a while, but it seems very few people have adopted its use. I have been a supporter of this approach to sharing information on the web for several years - the "intellectual property" monopoly is simply a way to keep information sequestered in a capitalist legal structure, restricting the free flow of information from those who can use it and benefit from it.

As a writer and researcher, I often come up against articles that are behind a pay-wall - and the asking price is often in the range of $30 per article (or more). The sinister thing is that authors in these journals also pay to have their articles published - and the cost to them goes WAY up if they choose an open access journal.

Being the owner/publisher of an academic journal is a very profitable business.

Even in the mainstream internet publications, however, information is (mostly) free on the site where it is originally posted, but sharing that information with others, with full attribution and links to the original site and post, is still a pay-per-use system.

The argument against a Creative Commons approach for these folks usually revolves around the short-term loss of "visits," the way they count user traffic to generate advertiser dollars - the more visits, the more they can charge for ad space on the site. What they neglect, it seems to me, is the long-term benefit of exposure to readers who might not otherwise view the material or the site, who are introduced to the author, idea, or site through it being shared on another venue.

But it seems most of the major online magazines (and magazine-like sites) don't take this longer perspective and only worry about the visits they might not get today. I hope that this will change - it is a policy based in 20th century content presentation that cannot fathom the 21st century changes in that system.

Here is the summary statement of the Creative Commons organization, explaining their values and mission.

Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.

Why CC?

The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.

Our mission

Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

What we provide

The infrastructure we provide consists of a set of copyright licenses and tools that create a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates.

Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to keep their copyright while allowing certain uses of their work — a “some rights reserved” approach to copyright — which makes their creative, educational, and scientific content instantly more compatible with the full potential of the internet. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law. We’ve worked with copyright experts around the world to make sure our licenses are legally solid, globally applicable, and responsive to our users’ needs.

If you’d like to see what kinds of companies and organizations are using Creative Commons licenses to realize the full potential of the Internet, visit our Who Uses CC? page.

For those creators wishing to opt out of copyright altogether, and to maximize the interoperability of data, Creative Commons provides tools that allow work to be placed as squarely as possible in the public domain.

Where we’re going

We build infrastructure at Creative Commons. Our users build the commons itself. We are working to increase the adoption of our tools, to support and listen to our users, and to serve as a trusted steward of interoperable commons infrastructure.

Your support

In order to achieve the vision of an Internet full of open content, where users are participants in innovative culture, education, and science, we depend on the backing of our users and those who believe in the potential of the Internet. We are alive and thriving thanks to the generous support of people like you. Spread the word about CC to your friends and family, and donate to help maintain Creative Commons as a robust, long-lived, and stable organization.

Creative Commons is a Massachusetts-chartered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable corporation. For more information, see the corporate charter, by-laws, most recent tax return and most recent audited financial statement.

Frontline Club Discussion With Julian Assange and Slavoj Žižek

Interesting Frontline Club discussion with WikiLeaks Editor-In-Chief Julian Assange and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek - originally from Democracy Now!

Watch live streaming video from democracynow at livestream.com

Tags: Politics, government, free speech, open source, Philosophy, Frontline Club, discussion, WikiLeaks, Editor-In-Chief, Julian Assange, Slovenian, philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, Democracy Now!

The Connectome Viewer Toolkit: An open source framework to manage, analyze, and visualize connectomes

Excellent - as research into connectomes increases, it will be cool to have an open source platform for sharing findings and images. Anyone can download the viewer software and look at the images - more importantly, to me, it creates an open access and open source platform for the sharing of brain science information. Other fields of science might learn something from this project.

Before the sharing the article, a brief definition of a connectome might be useful for those who do not follow brain science in all its geeky depth.

A connectome is a synapse-resolution mapping of connections between all neurons in a model organism's brain. In other words, a synapse-resolution circuit diagram of the brain. Current approaches to mapping the connectomes of model organisms employ serial block face scanning electron microscopy (SBF-SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The only connectome that has been mapped out to date has been from the flatworm, C. elegans, which has only around 300 neurons. Candidate future connectomes include the fly, with around 10,000 neurons, and the mouse brain, with 100 million neurons.

A projectome is more modest than a connectome, and is defined as a mapping of all inter-areal connections, at the single axon level, within an individual brain.

Source: Kasthuri N, Lichtman JW. The Rise of the Projectome. Nat Methods. 2007 Apr;4(4):307-8.

Here is the introduction to the article, from the open access Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, which explains some of the technology and features of the tool kit that has been developed.

The Connectome Viewer Toolkit: An open source framework to manage, analyze, and visualize connectomes

Stephan Gerhard¹*, Alessandro Daducci¹, Alia Lemkaddem¹, Reto Meuli², Jean-Philippe Thiran¹ and Patric Hagmann²

• ¹ Signal Processing Laboratory 5, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
• ² Department of Radiology, University Hospital Center and University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Advanced neuroinformatics tools are required for methods of connectome mapping, analysis, and visualization. The inherent multi-modality of connectome datasets poses new challenges for data organization, integration, and sharing. We have designed and implemented the Connectome Viewer Toolkit – a set of free and extensible open source neuroimaging tools written in Python. The key components of the toolkit are as follows: (1) The Connectome File Format is an XML-based container format to standardize multi-modal data integration and structured metadata annotation. (2) The Connectome File Format Library enables management and sharing of connectome files. (3) The Connectome Viewer is an integrated research and development environment for visualization and analysis of multi-modal connectome data. The Connectome Viewer’s plugin architecture supports extensions with network analysis packages and an interactive scripting shell, to enable easy development and community contributions. Integration with tools from the scientific Python community allows the leveraging of numerous existing libraries for powerful connectome data mining, exploration, and comparison. We demonstrate the applicability of the Connectome Viewer Toolkit using Diffusion MRI datasets processed by the Connectome Mapper. The Connectome Viewer Toolkit is available from http://www.cmtk.org/

1 Introduction

What nervous systems do – essentially – is to connect. Investigations into the connectivity properties of nervous systems have a long history (Douglas and Martin, 2007; Fishman, 2007). Despite many efforts, contemporary knowledge about the specificity of structural and functional connectivity is still poor. The new field of connectomics is emerging to tackle the challenge of mapping complete neural circuitry, or connectomes.

Connectomes represent the fundamental pathways on which complex spatiotemporal activity patterns evolve. In turn, these activity patterns modify underlying structural pathways. For an understanding of how activity patterns arise (physiology) and what they are able to produce and mean (behavior), it is indispensable to have connectome data (neuroanatomy) on all spatial descriptive levels.

On the cellular level of description, light, and electron microscopy are the main imaging tools for mapping neuronal circuitry. Partial and complete connectomes have been mapped in a variety of organisms and structures such as the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (Ward et al., 1975; White et al., 1976), the crustacean Daphnia’s optic lobe (Macagno et al., 1979), cat visual cortex (Binzegger et al., 2004), macaque (Felleman and Van Essen, 1991; Markov et al., 2010), the rabbit retina (Anderson et al., 2011), the mouse interscutularis muscle (Lu et al., 2009), hippocampus (Ascoli, 2010), or Drosophila melanogaster (Cardona et al., 2010; Chklovskii et al., 2010; Hampel et al., 2011).

On the macroscale level of description, diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the main imaging technology employed for mapping the structural connectivity of the human connectome (Hagmann, 2005; Sporns et al., 2005; Sporns, 2011). Magnetic resonance connectomics (Hagmann et al., 2010) is increasingly recognized as a tool for basic and clinical neuroscience. Several methodological advances in image acquisition, reconstruction, and tractography (Wedeen et al., 2008; Johansen-Berg and Behrens, 2009) suggest that automated processing pipelines will make it possible to generate comprehensive in vivo whole brain statistical connectomes.

Despite the big differences in spatial scale and data size, both levels of connectome mapping consist of similar stages. Connectome mapping workflows involve image acquisition, registration and segmentation, data organization and sharing, high-throughput pipelining, analysis, and visualization. Advanced neuroinformatics tools will be required to meet challenges that each stage presents. In this article, we will focus on the development of neuroinformatics tools in the emerging field of macroscale connectomics.

The efficiency of sharing data and source code would benefit if a transdisciplinary lingua franca for programming was available. Especially in the neurosciences, where researchers with varying degrees of scientific knowledge and programming skills meet, a common programming language helps to bridge gaps between theoretical and experimental worlds of investigation. Moreover, the programming language must be high-level, cross-platform, easy-to-learn, and have a large number of scientific libraries available. In recent years, Python¹ has become a viable alternative to Matlab, Java, or C++. More and more, Python is becoming the language of choice in scientific computing communities (Oliphant, 2007; Langtangen, 2009). Python is a free, open source, cross-platform programming language with a rapidly growing number of high-quality scientific libraries and interfaces to legacy code. A special-topic issue on “Python in neuroscience” in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, and a number of publications (Kinser, 2008; Spacek et al., 2008; Davison et al., 2009) give an indication of the significance of the Python programming language.

Due to improved data acquisition methods, it is now possible to acquire large multi-modal datasets in projects involving thousands of subjects. For instance, the Human Connectome Project² is currently underway and collects Diffusion MRI, fMRI, EEG, MEG, behavioral, and genetic data in a cohort of 1200 healthy subjects. In such large-scale projects, the neuroinformatics challenges of data handling, sharing, and analysis become unnecessarily difficult without common infrastructure and data format standards. Due to their longer tradition, in the fields of volume-based and surface-based analysis in neuroimaging, standardized data formats have already been established such as NIFTI³ for volume-based data and GIFTI⁴ for surface-based data. Importantly for MR connectomics, no common format for network-based data yet exists. To approach the task of specifying such a format for connectivity-related neuroimaging data, the Connectivity InFormatics Technology Initiative (CIFTI) was launched. Furthermore, a dedicated program of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF⁵) on standards for data and metadata sharing was established.

For data management and sharing of large and multi-faceted datasets, a flexible data format is necessary. The key requirements of such a flexible data format under the macroscale connectomics perspective are severalfold:

⊳ A standardized container format for raw and processed multi-modal datasets that is based on common neuroimaging data formats, extended by a standard format for network-based datasets.

⊳ A minimal set of required metadata that can be extended flexibly by user-defined metadata, and that allow easy sharing of data and metadata across collaborating groups.

⊳ The possibility of relating different data modalities to each other.

⊳ An interface to database infrastructures.

⊳ A mapping to an object model in common programming languages.

⊳ To enable the storage of behavioral data.

⊳ To enable the storage of provenance information such as processing scripts and runtime environment

⊳ The ability to link data and concepts to semantic frameworks.

⊳ To enable easier data visualization (Benger, 2009) and analysis.

To establish a novel data format, it must come with appropriate libraries for reading and writing. Only when it is possible to easily read, modify, and save data in the new format, does it benefit the researcher who wants to focus on analysis and visualization. There exist many standard formats for the different data modalities, but no one has yet tried to combine these multi-modal datatypes into a single format.

Complementary to common data formats, investigators in the field of macroscale connectomics will require interactive research and development environments for data analysis and visualization. An optimal solution would be an integrated neuroinformatics environment based on Python. It would need to provide a graphical user interface (GUI) with extensive libraries, an interactive scripting shell and built-in script editors with code-highlighting and debugging functionality. Graph analysis libraries are required to unravel the complex brain network organization of structural and functional systems (Bullmore and Sporns, 2009). Furthermore, such a macroscale connectomics research environment needs to support an interactive mode of analysis and visualization of multi-modal datasets. Scripting interfaces provide the required flexibility to allow the implementation of a variety of multi-modal data exploration and data mining strategies in an interactive way (Akil et al., 2011). The environment needs not only to provide a methodology to automatically perform elementary functionality, but also guidance for the performance of more complex analysis and visualization tasks. Moreover, a modular software architecture fosters contributions by the open source research community. Open interfaces facilitate the reuse of a diversity of tools and external libraries that the connectome researcher can draw from.

We used the Python programming language to develop the free and open source Connectome Viewer Toolkit. We specify the Connectome File Format (CFF) as a container data format for multi-modal neuroimaging datasets, specifying a connectome file. We present the Python-based Connectome File Format Library (cfflib) for data manipulation and data sharing of connectome files. The Connectome Viewer provides a framework for interactive visualization and analysis of connectomes and multi-modal datasets. We will illustrate the application of the Connectome Viewer Toolkit on Diffusion MRI datasets processed by the Connectome Mapper. The Connectome Mapper is a Python-based tool that currently implements structural connectome mapping. Figure 1 summarizes the general connectome processing workflow for structural and functional data. It highlights the use of the Connectome Viewer tools presented in this article.

FIGURE 1

Figure 1. General processing stages of a connectome workflow. The Connectome Viewer Toolkit currently supports the workflow highlighted in yellow. Mapping streams for structural data, such as the Connectome Mapper, or functional data may converge to a connectome file and can be further managed, analyzed, and visualized with the Connectome Viewer. Connectome files may be reused in other frameworks for analysis and visualization tasks.

Citation: Gerhard S, Daducci A, Lemkaddem A, Meuli R, Thiran J-P and Hagmann P. (2011, June 6). The Connectome Viewer Toolkit: An open source framework to manage, analyze, and visualize connectomes. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 5:3. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2011.00003

Tags: The Connectome Viewer Toolkit, open source, framework, manage, analyze, visualize, connectomes, connectomics, connectome, neuroimaging, python, multi-modal data, data management, network analysis, visualization, brain, mapping, imaging, neuroscience, neuroinformatics

Richard Poynder and Silke Helfrich Discuss "The Commons" as an Emerging Paradigm

This conversation comes from The Commons Blog - which appears to mostly be in German, but this article/interview is in English. It seems that Europe is much farther along in the idea of a Commons than is the US, but then we are about individualism and private ownership. We can do the Commons in digital culture, but unlike Europe, we are not likely to move into a material manifestation any time soon. And it remains to be seen how well they will do it.

From where I sit, it seems we will have to move into and through Social Democracy in the US before the groundwork for a Commons can be established here in any serious material sense - and I don't see that happening any time soon. So we need to work to build a digital commons as much as we can with the hope that digital culture will continue to overtake material culture in relevance (at least for some of us).

Where it matters most to me is in open access publishing of research - government funded research and knowledge should not be restricted to those with the most money to buy access. The next most important area for me is open practice, where individuals share their meditation, fitness, personal growth, or integral practices - openly and honestly.

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation and Wiki, is one of the organizers of the International Commons Conference, for which this interview is a bit of promotion. For the best info around on the Commons and P2P, check out Bauwens' site.

The Commons – a paradigm gaining political relevance

7. Oktober 2010 — Silke Helfrich

Introduction

As more and more of the world’s population has gained access to the Internet so a growing number of free and open movements have appeared — including the free and open source software movements, free culture, creative commons, open access and open data.

Once these movements became widely visible — and successful — people were keen to understand their significance, and establish what, if anything, they have in common. Today many observers maintain that they share very similar goals and aspirations, and that they represent a renaissance of “the commons”.

There is also an emerging consensus that, contrary to what was initially assumed, this renaissance is not confined to the Internet, and digital phenomena, but can also be observed in the way that some physical products are now manufactured (e.g. by advocates of the open source hardware movement) and in the way that many are now recommending the natural world be managed.

For instance, argue self-styled “commoners”, when local farmers establish seed banks in order to preserve regional plant diversity, and to prevent large biotechnology companies from foisting patent-protected GMO crops on them, their objectives are essentially the same as those of free software developers when they release their software under the General Public Licence: Both are attempting to prevent things that rightfully belong in common ownership from being privatised — usually by multinational companies who, in their restless pursuit of profits, are happy to appropriate for their own ends resources that rightfully belong to everyone.

Once understood in this broader context, commoners add, it becomes evident that the free and open movements have the potential to catalyse radical social, cultural and political change; change that, in the light of the now evident failures of state capitalism (demonstrated, for instance, by the global financial crisis) are urgently required.

Larger movement

In order to facilitate this change, however, commoners argue that the free and open movements have to be viewed as component parts of the larger commons movement. In addition, it is necessary to embrace and encompass the other major political and civil society groups focused on challenging the dominance of what could loosely be termed the post-Cold War settlement — including environmentalism, Green politics, and the many organisations and initiatives trying to address both developing world issues and climate change

But to create this larger movement, says Jena-based commons activist Silke Helfrich, it will first be necessary to convince advocates of the different movements that they share mutual objectives. As they are currently fragmented, their common goals are not immediately obvious, and so it will be necessary to make this transparent. Achieving this is important, adds Helfrich, since only by co-operating can the different movements hope to become politically effective.

To this end Helfrich is currently organising an International Commons Conference that will bring together over 170 practitioners and observers of the commons from 34 different countries.

To be held at the beginning of November, the conference will be hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin.

The aim of the conference, says Helfrich, is to spark “a breakthrough in the international political debate on the commons, and the convergence of the scholars studying the commons and the commoners defending them in the field.” Helfrich hopes this will lead to agreement on a “commons-based policy platform”.

What is the end game? Nothing less, it would appear, than a new social and political order. That is, a world “beyond market and state” — where communities are able to wrest back control of their lives, from faceless, distant government, and from rootless, heartless corporations.

As Helfrich puts it, “the essential ideals of state capitalism — top-down government enforcement and the so called ‘invisible hand’ of the market — have to be marginalised by co-governance principles and self-organised co-production of the commons by people in localities across the world.”

The interview begins …

RP Why did you become interested in the commons?

SH: I was born in East Germany, and when the wall came down in 1989 I was 22 and had just finished my studies. Then I lived for more than eight years in El Salvador and Mexico, both of which are extremely polarised countries so far as the distribution of wealth is concerned.

So I’ve experienced two very different types of society: one in which the state is the arbiter of social conditions, and the way in which citizens can participate in their society and, after 1989, one in which access to money determines one’s ability to participate in society.

It has also always been my belief that democracy should involve much more than simply having free elections and then delegating all responsibility to professional politicians. We need to radically democratise the political, social and economic sphere — and we need a framework for doing so which is beyond both the market and the state. That, in my view, is precisely what the commons is all about.

RP: Can you expand on your definition of the commons, and the potential?

SH: The commons is not a thing or a resource. It’s not just land or water, a forest or the atmosphere. For me, the commons is first and foremost constant social innovation. It implies a self-determined decision making process (within a great variety of contexts, rules and legal settings) that allows all of us to use and reproduce our collective resources.

The commons approach assumes that the right way to use water, forests, knowledge, code, seeds, information, and much more, is to ensure that my use of those resources does not harm anybody else’s use of them, or deplete the resources themselves. And that implies fair-use of everything that does not belong to only one person.

It’s about respect for the principle „one person — one share“, especially when we talk about the global commons. To achieve this we need to build trust, and strengthen social relationships, within communities.

Our premise is that we are not simply „homo economicus“ pursuing only our own selfish interests. The core belief underlying the commons movement is: I need the others and the others need me.

There is no alternative today.

RP: Would it be accurate to say that the commons encompasses components of a number of different movements that have emerged in recent years, including free and open source software (FOSS), Creative Commons, Green politics, and all the initiatives focused on helping the developing world etc.?

SH: That’s right.

RP: Has it been a natural process of convergence?

SH: From a commoner’s perspective it is a natural process, but it is not immediately obvious that the different movements and their concerns have a lot in common.

RP: How do you mean?

SH: Let me give you an example: When we started to work on the commons in Latin America about six years ago we were working mainly with the eco- and social movements, who were critical of the impact that globalisation and the free trade paradigm were having. A colleague suggested that we should invite people from the free software movement to take part in our discussions.

While we did invite them, our first thought was: What does proprietary software have in common with genetically modified organisms (GMOs)? Or, to put it the other way round, what does the free software movement stand for, and what could it possibly have in common with organisations fighting for GMO free regions? Likewise, what could it have in common with community supported agriculture (CSA), and with movements devoted to defending access to water and social control over their biotic resources?

But we quickly realised that they are all doing the same thing: defending their commons! So since then we have become committed to (and advocate for) the „convergence of movements“.

RP: For those who have been following the development of the Internet much of the debate about the commons has emerged from the way in which people — particularly large multinational companies — have sought to enforce intellectual property rights in the digital environment. In parallel there has been a huge debate about the impact of patents on the developing world — patents on life-saving drugs, for instance, and patents on food crops. But seen from a historical perspective these debates are far from new — they have been repeated throughout history, and the commons as a concept goes back even before the infamous enclosures that took place in England in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries.

SH: That’s right. So to some extent we are talking about the renaissance of the commons.

And the reason why free software developers are engaged in the same struggle as, say, small farmers, is simple: when people defend the free use of digital code, as the free software movement does, they are defending our entitlement to control our communication tools. (Which is essential when you are talking about democracy).

And when people organise local seed-banks to preserve and share the enormous seed variety in their region, they too are simply defending their entitlement to use and reproduce the commons.

In doing so, by the way, they are making use of a cornucopia — because in the commons there is abundance.

RP: Nowadays we are usually told to think of the natural world in terms of scarcity rather abundance.

SH: Well, even natural resources are not scarce in themselves. They are finite, but that is not the same thing as scarce. The point is that if we are not able to use natural collective resources (our common pool resources) sustainably, then they are made scarce. By us!

The commons, I insist, is above all a rich and diverse resource pool that has been developed collectively. What is important is the community, or the people’s control of that resource pool, rather than top-down control. Herein lies the future!

That is precisely what awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom in 2009 was all about [On awarding the Prize, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences commented: “Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatised”].

It is also what the Right Livelihood Award [the so-called Alternative Nobel Prize] — is all about.

RP: Ok, so we are saying that a lot of different movements have emerged with similar goals, but those similarities are not immediately obvious?

SH: Correct. So it is important to make them transparent. The global movement of commoners today is eclectic and growing, but fragmented.

For instance, we can see a number of flourishing transnational commons movements (e.g. free software, Wikipedia, open access to scholarly journals etc.) — all of whom are from the cultural and digital realm, and all of whom are based on community collaboration and sharing.

Many other commons projects, however, are modest in size, locally based, and focused on natural resources. There are thousands of them, and they provide solutions that confirm the point ETC’s Pat Mooney frequently makes: “the solution comes from the edges”.

Right now these different groups barely know each other, but what they all have in common is that they are struggling to take control of their own lives.

Taken together all these movements are actually part of a big civic movement that is about to discover its own identity, just as the environmental movement did some 30 or 40 years ago.
Co-operation is the best way for them to grow and become politically relevant. So the goal should be to persuade the various advocates that they have much to gain from working together.

RP: Would you agree that the Internet has played an important role in the emergence of these movements?

SH: I would. The Internet has been key in the development of global commons projects like free software and Wikipedia, and it greatly facilitates the sharing of ideas — which is key for becoming politically effective.

So the Internet allows us to cooperate beyond the traditional boundaries; and it allows us to take one of the most productive resources of our age — „knowledge and information management“ — into our own hands.

Look at the AVAAZ – campaigns for instance. The number of people they are able to connect to and mobilise is amazing. [In 3 years, Avaaz has grown to 5.5 million members from every country on earth, becoming the largest global web movement in history].

One problem, however, is that many communities who are heavily reliant on web-based technologies are not really attuned to the fact that the more we access these kinds of technologies the more we tend to overuse our natural common pool resources. So I think we need to understand that „openness“ in the digital realm and „sustainability“ in the natural realm need to be addressed together.

RP: Can you expand on that?

SH: We need more than just free software and free hardware. We need free software and free hardware designed to make us independent of the need to acquire a constant stream of ever more resource-devouring gadgets.

So instead of going out every three years to buy a new laptop packed with software that requires paying large license fees to corporations, who then have control over our communication, we should aim to have just one open-hardware-modular-recyclable-computer that runs community-based free software and can last a lifetime.

This is quite a challenge, and it is one of the many challenges we will be discussing at the International Commons Conference. One of the key questions here is this: Is the idea of openness really compatible with the boundaries of (natural) common-pool resources?

RP: What is the overall objective of the International Commons Conference?

SH: To put it modestly (SMILE), the aim is to achieve a breakthrough in the international political debate on the commons, and a convergence of the scholars who are studying the commons and the commoners who are defending them in the field.

We believe that the conference will foster the planning and development of commons-based organisations and policy, as well as their networking capacity. And we hope that by the end of the conference a set of principles and long-term goals will have emerged.

The whole endeavour (or should I say adventure? SMILE) will surely contribute to what my colleague Michel Bauwens — co-organiser of the conference — calls “A Grand Coalition of the Commons”.

RP: I note that there is no dedicated web site or pre-publicity for the conference. And it is by invitation only. Is that because there is not yet a fully articulated consensus on the commons and its potential?

SH: No, we have a much better reason: There has been no need for pre-publicity for the conference. On the contrary, as I frequently find myself having to explain to people, the response to our first „save-the-date-call“ for the conference was so overwhelmingly positive that we quickly realised we would be fully booked without any publicity. And in fact we are now more than fully booked.

The conference is by invitation only because we designed the conference programme for those who are already very familiar with the commons, be it through analysing the commons or through producing the commons. Consequently all our participants are specialists. Indeed each one of them would be qualified to address a keynote to the conference.

In other words, what we have designed is a networking conference for commoners from all over the world — and over 170 people from 34 countries have registered. That is quite an achievement, and has only been limited by the availability of space and resources.

I hope, however, that we’ll have a real World Commons Forum within a year or so (SMILE).

Window of opportunity

RP: Do you think the current global financial crisis has opened a window of opportunity for „commoners“, as they refer to themselves?

SH: I think so. The current crisis (which is not just a financial crisis, by the way, but multiple crises) graphically demonstrates that we cannot leave policy issues to the politicians, money-related issues to the bankers, or our commons to the market or the state. It’s ours!

It also showed quite clearly that the game is over. What is required is not simply a few new rules to allow a further round of the same old game, but a totally new framework; one that forges a new relationship between commons, state and market.

RP: What would this new relationship look like? Is the commons in competition with the state and the market, or do you see it working alongside these two key power brokers?

SH: For me the phrase "a commons beyond market and state" does not necessarily mean without market and state: Commons conceived of as complex systems of resources, communities and rules need very different governance structures. Indeed, some of them will be so complex that a certain governmental institutional structure will be needed — what one might call a Partner State.

One thing, however, is key: the people who depend on these commons for their livelihood and well-being have to have the major stake in all decisions taken about their commons.

Clearly, corporations, companies and co-ops will always meddle with the commons. And whatever they produce they will need our common pool resources as raw material. So the question we need to ask is: what do these players give back to the commons? We cannot allow them to just draw from the commons. The basic principle should be: Whoever takes from the commons has to add to them as well.

In other words, these external agents must not be able to do whatever they want with collective resources. Exclusive, exclusionary private property rights in the commons cannot exist — as outlined in the Commons Manifesto published on the Heinrich Böll Foundation web site.

RP: Would it be accurate to say that the commons is not just a new political and social movement, but a new intellectual framework for understanding the world, and perhaps a catalyst for a new post-industrial social order?

SH: We are not necessarily talking about a post-industrial order, but it is my conviction that a commons paradigm has to be based on the vision of a post-fossil fuel order.

Nor is it even new — as we agreed earlier. I would say it is an old intellectual framework, but one that has to be constantly re-appropriated from below and “modernised”.

But yes, it’s a framework for understanding the world. And it opens minds for finding creative, collective, practical, and institutional solutions to two pressing problems at the same time. That is, the environmental challenge we face and the social problems we face.

RP: There is a school of thought that says the environmental challenge can be solved by the market.

SH: Yes, but I don’t agree. For example, we cannot simply resolve the ecological crisis by charging more and more for energy (i.e. introducing a market-based incentive in order to lower consumption) — because that is not a solution for the poor.

This reminds us that the essential ideals of state capitalism — top-down government enforcement and the so called „invisible hand“ of the market — have to be marginalised by co-governance principles and self-organised co-production of the commons by people in localities across the world.

FURTHER READING

The Commons Manifesto in English, and in German

A German language news website on the commons

A German-language downloadable copy of To Whom Does the World Belong?

A review of To Whom Does the World Belong? By Alain Lipietz

The commons as a common paradigm for social movements and beyond (English)

Web of life (English)

Commons: The network of life and creativity (English)

Interview in taz: Gebrauch Ja, Missbrauch Nein (German)
Wovon wir alle leben (German)

Report with Rainer Kuhlen, Wolfgang Sachs and Christian Siefkes Gemeingüter Wohlstand durch Teilen (German)

Tags: Richard Poynder, Silke Helfrich, The Commons, Emerging Paradigm, free software, open source software, movement, free culture, creative commons, open access, open data, culture, Commons, P2P, open source, open practice, seed banks, failed capitalism multinational corporations, global financial crisis, International Commons Conference, state capitalism, top-down government, Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation, co-governance principles, self-organized, co-production