Review (Guest): The Open Source Everything Manifesto at Spirituality Today

The Open-Source Everything Manifesto by Robert David Steele

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.

Our Review

The term Open Source refers to universal access to a product or services core design or primary features. Without Open Source there would be no Internet in the way that we currently enjoy it for it is in digital publishing and information sharing that Open Source has been such a powerful force for change.

It is clear that by opening up access to information of any type the whole of society benefits rather than just a few elitist or protected individuals/corporations. However, this is only one of many benefits that this model creates. Other advantages include the creation of collaborative units, the infusion of more creatively inspired ideas and the rapid deployment of solutions to problems.

In his book The Open-Source Everything Manifesto author Robert David Steele argues the case for the expansion of Open Source networks throughout all of our modern institutions including corporations, banks and most importantly governments.

As an ex-member of the US security services himself he understands the inherent problems and dangers of trying to operate effectively and efficiently in areas such as intelligence gathering.

Disillusioned by the utter waste of time and money as well as the futility of enforcing foreign policies based upon compartmentalised and selective intel he decided that there had to be a better way to running large-scale infrastructures.

He saw the immense success that the IT-based Open Source communities had enjoyed with such operating systems as Linux and software such as Open Office as well as the web-based Content Management Systems such as WordPress and Joomla – both of which are based upon open and collaborative development.

Completely disillusioned by the large-scale corruption of US and worldwide banking institutions Robert began to earnestly promote his ideas of Open Government as a way in which he believed integrity and accountability could be returned to the larger society.

From these concepts Robert believes that a more democratic form of governance can evolve along with systems of information gathering that disseminates power to all levels of society.

In The Open-Source Everything Manifesto the author explores in depth his philosophy regarding the need for a complete overhaul of all of our systems of governance. These, he believes, would not only benefit the currently dominant Western powers but would strengthen and help to empower the developing nations.

With the extensive use of diagrams the theories that he presents in this book on such issues as holistic thinking, ecological rebalancing and citizen-empowerment are developed with reference to the core principle that openness and honesty can return our societies to a condition of health and self-renewal.

Summing Up

In reading this book I found it refreshing to read such a powerful and all-encompassing approach to the eternal problem of hierarchy and how so few people are currently determining the destiny of so many individuals on this planet.

This is a book by an author who is clearly very passionate about the Open Source concept and how he can see it working in all areas of our lives. The book, on occasions, does suffer from being a little overly-complex in its proposals given that the basis of his arguments form an essentially simple core principle.

Despite this ‘The Open-Source Everything Manifesto' carries the reader along at pace with its personal accounts of the immense work that the author has done in trying to promote his ideas to a somewhat skeptical world. To many of us in the domain of spiritual-regeneration of our planet these ideas appear obvious and natural but to those indoctrinated by the idea that hierarchal, rule from the top down, systems of control are the only way this book will appear extremely heretical.

This is a book that invites a follow-up – a successor that expands upon the practical implementations of the Open Source paradigm throughout every area of our lives. There is no doubt that the books' proposals are surely going to be the most challenging to our current religious, governing and financial institutions who if they do not wake up and take serious account of Robert Steeles' ideas might find their empires not just crumbling but leveled overnight.

Sometimes the smallest things pack the greatest punch and in The Open-Source Everything Manifesto by Robert David Steele the reader is presented with some powerful body blows. Whether we choose to regain our composure by accepting his ideas is up to each of us but there can be little doubt that the Open Source concept is changing our World little by little and this is a superb expose of just where those changes might lead us to.

A highly recommended read!

Our Rating