SHORT URL: https://tinyurl.com/Steele-Gnomedex
Graphics, Script, Downloadable Brief Below the Fold.
CORRECTED 2016–2-24
PPT (55 Slides with Notes): Open Everything 4.4
Secrecy and Openness have been at war since time immemorial. We still need some secrecy, but the battle over which should rule is over.
We won. We are at that special moment in the battle when we know we have won, and the other side does not quite realize that we are, as Jeff Bezos said to TED, at the very beginning of a new age of innovation and I would add, of connection.
I was told you’d be asking if I did not include this, so here it is. I am not your normal bear. Very much an odd duck, one reason I feel so good being with hackers and bloggers.
Here’s the outline. I’ll put our context out as four reforms in need of openness, and the Open Source Agency I propose in my latest book, then discuss, in turn, a number of opens, the state of the world, the global information war,
By the end of this briefing you will have a better grip on reality and what we all need to do to create infinite stabilizing wealth around the globe.
I’m going to go fast, you can download the brief later to read all the words I have in Notes format but may not necessarily use.
I see real signs of both emergence and convergence. It is unfortunate that key personalities at Amazon, CISCO, Google, and Wikimedia do not seem to play well together.
All this is swirling around us. With a tip of the hat to Nat at O’Reilly, Open Source is Darwinism while proprietary malware and secrecy are Intelligent Design that is not so intelligent.
We need open standards and open metrics.
Openness is resilience, sustainability, strength.
My brief is going to be complicated. Here is the simple summary.
Not here to criticize the $60 billion a year in waste as much as to mobilize the open world to be all it can be.
If you take nothing else from my presentation, remember these four points:
- Civil Affairs
- Bloggers
- Bottom-Up
- Be the answer.
The US Government spends $60 to $70 billion a year on the 5% they can steal. It costs $1.2 billion a *week* to keep the President “informed” with secret sources and methods.
Our military budget of $700 billion a year is relevant to only 10% of the threat, the state threat, contributing nothing to waging peace.
Self-Rule by Transpartisan Transparency is “Our Deal,” and I believe that we can restore We the People as sovereign, and in doing so, achieve all four of these reforms.
Electoral Reform now is the only big issue in 2008, everything else follows from re-engaging America.
No Notes
I moved this slide from the end to up front to stress to you that there is plenty of money for peace and prosperity.
Medard Gabel built the World Game with Buckminster Fuller, now we want to build the EarthGame so we can all play ourselves with one big difference: we each have access to all information in all languages all the time.
You will be able to blog for peace and for prosperity.
Your mission, if you wish to accept it, is to help create the Earth Intelligence Network.
Make it your own. This is the new printing press, you control what, when, where, and how. This is a non-profit meant to augment human capacity and preserve the commonwealth.
The only strong suggestions I have is that you focus on reality, that you integrate real-world budgets, and that you think about Serious Games with truthful data sets as the next big leap in understanding and blogging in time and space for results.
How people vote, if they vote, depends on whether they have a compelling incentive to vote. The educational system has failed, it is up to you to re-educate and energize the American public so as to save our Nation.
I’ve read Richard Stallman’s book and listened to him speak at Hackers on Planet Earth. He is the embodiment of what Yochai Benkler writes about in Wealth of Networks and the harnessing of the social capital that all of you represent.
Microsoft is part of the problem. They have done some truly great things for industrial-era productivity, but VISTA is scary and they may be losing out to Amazon and CISCO. First-rate marketing is no longer good enough to sell second-rate products, and if Microsoft cannot match Open Office with a full range of Open Tools, then we part company now.
Diane Webb at CIA created the inset version of this in the 1980’s. We still don’t have them because both CIA and Microsoft are medieval bureaucracies. STRONG ANGEL shareware may be a solution, along with Open Office plus.
It’s time to redirect the secret budget, not because of morality, but because of how they are mis-spending $60 billion a year. We can do better at a fraction of that cost. If they cannot adapt, they die.
Amazon and CISCO AON can give us this, Google and Microsoft cannot.
We’re turned the corner. I want Sun and others to buy or invest or partner with these guys and also Waterstone, whose geospatial layers and time series capabilities are 75% ahead of Google Earth, ESRI, and the US Government. If Microsoft were willing to go open source and focus on open source collaboration and analytic software, we sure could use their help in burying Google and restoring privacy, security, and a neutral Internet that creates infinite wealth without the predatory and intrusive aspects of Google.
Computer hardware is the most toxic unrecyclable trash on the planet.
Even CISCO, a very smart company, has not realized that it should standardize its router boxes and re-use them by offering trade-in value.
Hardware is becoming more important than software, both as an innovation arena, and as a curse that will be with us always.
It needs to be open. Tip of the hat to WikiPedia, despite the trolls, on balance it is useful to me for stuff like this.
The governments’ traditional tools for winning the information game are the secret disciplines.
HUMINT tries to recruit a player to predict where the ball will go, and send someone to catch it—or not. SIGINT plants a listening device in the dug-out, trying to overhear plans and intentions. IMINT takes an overhead photo of the field every three days and tries to call the game that way. MASINT sniffs for the ball, and the gloves and when that does not work, asks for ten billion more. OSINT changes the rules: any catch by a member of the crowd is an out, and we offer to buy the ball back at very low cost. That’s how we handle the information explosion—everyone gets to play, and they know we will pay cash or kind when they send us the ball they caught. It is a universal unstructured winning order of battle. It is also adaptable and resilient—an open network.
Jock Gill, a world-class communicator and co-founder of GreaterDemocracy.org, has an FAQ on Open Spectrum.
He and Margaret Wheatley and others say that we are no longer about critical mass, we are about connecting.
I say we need to connect dots to dots, dots to people, and people to people. Washington still does not understand that this is about real-time horizontal dots and mostly about bottom-up not top-down dot analysis.
If Google were at smart as it thinks it is, it would not be buying wireless, it would be pushing Open Spectrum.
We the People need to own and control both our personal data, and the last mile.
The same shift will take place with money that has taken place with other opens.
We do not need credit and we most certainly do not need to pay banks interest on money they invented without any basis in gold.
We can dump the predatory WTO and IMF, and free the poor countries from dependency on Western credits that are not in the best interests of either the giving or the receiving public.
Most importanly, we can implement community and value-based peer-to-peer wealth metrics.
Here are some key search terms. This could be a great project for the blogger community to develop in the sense of helping many others understand and develop this liberating capability around the world.
In my view, the greatest value of open money is that it can reflect community and social values that respect sustainability, true cost, and long-term localized investment.
Why should we allow corporations to loot any commonwealth and transfer assets that are inherently in the commons?
Transparency of all existing budgets, in combination with open money, should end fraud, waste, and abuse. Bloggers have a vital role to play here.
As I said in my opening slide, we have won. The time has come to spread the word, mobilize the apathatic, and MOVE ON.
Michael Linton, Ernie Jacub, and Jean-Francois Noubel, among others, are in the forefront.
As a side note, I commend to you my list of books on Transpartisanship at Amazon, and especially the book, Escaping the Matrix.
Cass Sunstein in Infotopia, Lawrence Lessig in various books and web movies, Yochai Benkler, a few others, have clearly documented what one writer calls Wikinomics.
A couple of important things are happening that give me hope.
- The people now have a digital memory. Look for retrospective impeachments of government officials who are now known to have sold out the public interest back in the 1970’s.
- Networking has restored power to the aggregate and taken away many of the advantages of secrecy, cult and gang membership. Reciprocal altruism is alive and well.
Trolls and free riders are still a problem. I anticipate that a combination of karma points, non-violent demerits, citation analysis at the paragraph level, and Open Money, will take us forward faster than we can imagine right now.
We cannot harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth without completely open but also secure networks.
Google is open but not secure.
CISCO AON is secure but not open.
Most of the world is in Quadrant I, internal data mining. You are all in Quadrant II. My clients are in Quadrant III and we created a non-profit to help everyone else get there. A handful of countries, e.g. Singapore and companies. e.g. Robert Buckman, are in Quadrant IV.
George Soros is best known for this concept in modern times, but it goes back to Karl Popper and others.
The critical point here, and I favor Chomsky and Vidal on this matter, is that if you lose sight of civil liberties and morality, you become a state terrorist.
The United States of America is guilty of two centuries of genocide against the Native America, virtual colonialism, unilateral militarism, and predatory immoral capitalism. What has been done in our name are war crimes, betrayals of the public trust, and treason. We need to get a grip, as Francis Lappe Moore says in her next book.
There are 27 secessionist movements in America, because the the federal government is broken beyond repair. It cannot be fixed, it must be displaced by networked constant participatory democracy.
You can take the lead. BLOG THIS.
No Notes
I am going to forego political commentary to focus on the substance of this brief, but I will say just one thing:
“You may not be interested in reality, but reality is interested in you.”
I co-founded the Earth Intelligence Network because the federal government has failed the intelligence test, and state and local and non-governmental organizations don’t know how to do public intelligence or reality-based budgeting.
Helping your respective neighborhoods and countries get in touch with reality could be the Blogger mission of the century. You are all “intelligence minutemen.” Brains, not guns, rule.
Howard Bloom issued a memorandum a while back on “War as Deception” and he reminds us that Iran is the descendant of the Persian Empire. These are smart, clever, patient people.
I am not going to get into who shot John, who’s to blame, I will just emphasize that we are on the verge of a nuclear war in the Middle East because We the People have either not been paying attention, or have accepted what one book calls Weapons of Mass Deception.
This is not about who’s right or wrong, this is about “are you paying attention?” or in the case of bloggers, since we know you are, the question is, “what are you doing to increase public attention to vital issues and alternatives?” We’ve already established that the US Government walked into this blind, what can bloggers do to provide a service of common concern to the public by blogging public intelligence on any given issue?
There are 5,000 distinct racial, ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups are lumped together into only 189 nation states. We got it backwards—instead of sovereign states we should be sovereign peoples, with bottom up “home rule.”
Darfur is but one of over 15 genocides taking place today. There have been over 70 major genocides in history.
This is important because the federal government is an industrial-era bureaucracy and it is inept. Only a networked “Smart Nation” can connect, adapt, and prosper, and one of the things it will do is respect Home Rule and neighborhoods, tribes, and ethnic groups.
These ethnic conflicts tend to coincide with conditions of severe deprivation.
Note the red line—some of the worst water scarcity and some of the worst ethnic conflicts are along the Russian borders with both the Islamic states of Central Asia, and the Chinese state.
Water scarcity is a national security threat that does not receive enough attention. We are being actively deceived by cities in the South and West that know they might not be viable in the future.
I think of bloggers as the Paul Revere’s of our time, digitally sounding the alarm, making sense, connecting dots. Bloggers can both discern, and disseminate.
The month in which secret meetings were taking place with Enron and Exxon, WIRED nailed it with a cover story on a two-way energy grid, localized energy, and a wide variety of alternative energies.
The good news is that IF we localize agriculture, demand green recyclable products, eliminate chlorine and most plastic waste, and get smart at the LOCAL level, we can move the Nation and the world. Waste can become energy. Water is actually capable of produced a closed system perpetual energy generator. The thermal differences in the ocean are being tapped today for power.
The instability of the world is relevant to our homeland security because it spawns migrations, criminal activity, and disease as well as terrorism, all in part influences by climate change as well as corruption.
There are roughly 32 complex emergencies involving over 20 countries that are considered to be “failed states.” We have millions of refugees, millions of starving people, millions of people subject to plagues and epidemics.
The USA is very nearly a failed state.
I am not going to belabor these.
What is important to note about these are two facts:
80% to 95% of all relevant information about these threats is not secret—it is open source information.
The US government is ignoring eight of these threats and doing a very bad job on the two it “likes”: proliferation & terrorism.
We are doing nothing of significance in the area of multinational information sharing. That is my focus of effort in the near term, after energizing Amazon.
Here you need to know two things:
First, neither the executive bureaucracy nor the Congressional committees receive classified intelligence support in any of these areas, nor do they know how to do open source intelligence. They excel at staffing policy that benefits those who have bribed them.
Second, we have to address all twelve policies holistically. They are all connected.
Here I simply want to emphasize that nothing we or the European Union do in the next ten years matters in isolation.
Even if we are both perfect from tomorrow, unless we can create a World Brain that is able to help all eight of the other players adapt, innovate, and nurture the emergence that Paul Hawkin writes of in Blessed Unrest, we are toast.
Unless we can provide free education and on demand answers via cell phone to each of the five billion poor, so they can create unlimited wealth, we are toast.
How we treat Africa is critical to the future of mankind.
I developed this slide in the mid-1990’s at the Marine Corps University. It got circulated bit never got traction because the mind-set is such that one Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said “Real men don’t do Operations Other than War.”
We used to be good at Big War, Not any more.
We deal very poorly with these other three threat types because the Pentagon has the money and they only want heavy metal.
At the same time, I developed this approach to dealing with our needs. I call this strategy the 1 plus triple i, for being able to do one big war and three lesser “engagements” simultaneously instead of the traditional Pentagon focus, two big wars, ignore all else.
Colin Powell should have been given $100B the day after 9-11, and told to wage peace. Instead we have destroyed two nations and created vastly more terrorists and insurgents than existed prior to 9-11. We have also bankrupted the Nation’s blood, treasure, and spirit.
If I can help you in any way, let me know. Every person needs to be a collector, producer, and consumer of public intelligence or decision-support. There are free training materials at oss.net, the short cuts are forward slash BASIC and forward slash LIBRARY.
You can subscribe to the free daily RSS feed, the free weekly executive report, and now, you can read the Forecast for each at a Wikipage within The Transitioner, and discuss or document.
Ideally, at some point each zip code will have a Local Intelligence Officer, an LIO, who creates this kind of report for their zip code, and works with others to post budgets and local reality so we can get to transparent accountable reality-based self-governance at every level across every issue.
Amazon, not Google, is positioned to be the hub of the World Brain, the service of common concern that integrates social networks, sense-making tools, and unlimited access to substance—all information in all languages all the time.
See the entire brief in multimedia at www.oss.net forward slash AMAZON for the slides and notes, or forward slash AMAZONTV1 (compressed to 9 minute download) or forward slash AMAZONTV2 (full at 30 minute download) for the 66 minute actual interchange. Times are at 100MB speed.
This is a second slide, just to give you a sense of the comprehensiveness of our discussions.
You can find the actual brief with planned words in Notes format, as well as both a high resolution and a 56K baud optimized video of the presentation and the questions & answers, at OSS.Net in the Archives, in the EIN Library.
Dr. Col Max Manwaring, a brilliant officer and scholar, developed this slide, up to the 6th Generation. With his blessing I am taking us to the next level.
Most governments still have a 3rd Generation force structure, and barely—and I do mean barely—comprehend 4th Generation warfare.
You are digital natives and not yet recruited into the global war of ideas because your government is still ruled by secrecy, still demands control, and still does not “get it.”
It’s time for you to self-organize and create the Earth Intelligence Network on your own behalf.
For the half trillion dollars we have wasted in Iraq, I could have given every single one of the five billion poor a free cell phone, and from abandoned DoD communications satellites, free T-1 connectivity.
The poor do not have 18-22 years to waste on rote learning. We must put all education online free in all languages, and also create a global network of volunteers who can provide on demand answers in 33 languages and 150 other dialects or minor languages via cell phone so the poor can learn as they go while working full time.
I am developing a monograph on war and peace in the digital age, and the bottom line is that both our secret intelligence and our heavy metal military are inside out and upside down.
They are both mammoths neck deep in the tar pit of history, but no one seems to have the courage to declare the Emperor is naked. I’ve done that in five books, but only the really smart people read them, not those in power.
For just $3B a year, I could internationalize US education, provide free on demand learning via cell phone to the five billion poor, support all Congressional jurisdictions and all levels of the Executive, and restore what Thomas Jefferson called “A Nation’s best defense: an informed citizenry.
We have the advantage. Regardless of who is in office, We the People are now paying attention and demanding citizen-centered democracy and moral capitalism.
I am quite certain that Transpartisanship and Electoral Reform can restore the Republic with dignity, liberty, and justice for all.
The future is here now, and it is about bottom-up multi-cultural decisions that are based primarily on shared open sources of information, not secrets, and that focus specifically on achieving sustainable long-term agreement.
Paul Hawkin and his colleagues at the Natural Capital Institute have nailed it. I believe the highest calling for any blogger is the research and posting of “true cost” information about any product or service.
This is all it takes to be a node for the World Brain. I consider Google predatory, and also very insecure. I’m waiting for CISCO Application Oriented Network to allow me to store my personal information in my personal router, under my control, at the same time that we implement Doug Englebart’s Open Hypertextdocument System (OHS) so that we can link at the paragraph level, while allowing all data to carry geospatial as well as reputation attributes. I am trying to get Amazon to offer all eight of these functionalities and unite its authors into global intelligence councils at the same time that if helps its readers organize local Wisdom Councils.
As a former spy, and as one of the founders of the Marine Corps Intelligence Command, I am often frustrated by the obsession that we have with secrecy, and with intelligence. I will tell you what I have learned in the past sixteen years. I have learned that 95% of what we call intelligence is not secret; and I have learned that at least 70% of what we need to know and need to share is not intelligence and not secret. These pie charts depict my view of what is share-able among the seven tribes without any attention to restricted, private, or secret information. We are not going for the green, and we need to.
With this slide I am offering you a strategic perspective on your potential as information warriors. The book “No Logo” has it exactly right—if we all attach ourselves leech-like to a threat, a policy, a player, or to an organization, or product or service or locality, we can use information to clean house.
Ours is a uniquely moral and peaceful endeavor. We also represent mankind’s last hope.
This is my new idea. I have a six page flyer posted in the About section of the Earth Intelligence Network, and would be grateful for feed-back and buzz. We are asking each of 20 foundations and each of ten countries to give us a $25,000 grant this year, and as we prove our value, get that increased to $250K a year.
For that amount of money, and by harnessing volunteers and sharing this as a tool—this is to the digital era what the printing press was to the industrial era—we empower billions of people around the world, in all languages.
This is dangerous because they don’t care what you need, only what you think, so they can manipulate you.
You should worry about Google’s indiscriminate relations with organizations that really don’t care about your privacy. You should also worry about their keeping a copy of everything….forever.
Medard Gabel and the Earth Game are morally and technical superior because he focuses on empowering each person to play themselves, but with access to all information all the time.
For twenty years I have been working toward the concept of public intelligence in the public interest.
Today bloggers and citizen journalists are finally wrestling the truth into the open and the lies into hiding.
I need your help. Grab a copy of the two-page outline of legislation that I have proposed, send it to your Senator, and ask them to co-sponsor the legislation.
I have Senator Webb in mind to lead us all.
BLOG THIS!
You are all, as are Hackers, pushing the edge of the envelope. You have the right stuff. We need more of it.
In my view, up to this point you have been the militia, lurking in the woods and working often alone.
The time has come to organize. I challenge you to do for public intelligence what LINUX has tried to do for open source software.
I love what I do, I need to do more of it.
This briefing is at http://www.oss.net/GNOME [no longer active]
We are, as Jeff Bezos discussed in his lecture to TED, at the very beginning of the innovative era. Before he died, Peter Drucker wrote that we have spent 50 years focusing on the T in IT, and that we must now focus the next 50 years on the I.
With your help, that is exactly what I am going to do:
public intelligence in the public interest.
Thank you.
No Notes
No Notes
Question?
See Also:
Robert Steele – Open Source Answer to Everything? (David Risley
