As powerful economic, ecological, and social imbalances work themselves out in and around our lives, we face some pretty hard times – some of us already, some of us more than others, most of us increasingly. Each of us hopes we can ameliorate the impacts on ourselves, our communities and the people and things we care about. In addition, some of us seek to creatively channel the energies of crisis and catastrophe in ways that over time will make the world a better place. But in any case, chances are high that hard times will be more frequent for most of us in the coming decades.
Recently I've run across the work of two women – Rebecca Solnit and Roz Diane Lasker – whose perspectives on crisis and catastrophe offer insights and tools for hope.
Activist writer and journalist Solnit's book A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL: THE EXTRAORDINARY COMMUNITIES THAT ARISE IN DISASTER – a book I cannot recommend highly enough – tells vivid stories from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the September 11th attacks, and Hurricane Katrina's battering of New Orleans, among other disasters. She describes how grassroots acts of effective engagement, heroism and sacrifice, and emergent communities of mutual aid are by far the most prevalent responses to localized collective tragedy. Despite news reports to the contrary, these positive grassroots responses are far more prevalent than mass panic and crime and often far more effective than official intervention – an assertion backed by fascinating sociological research. She shows how official relief and government engagement can help a community's self-organized response but, alas, all too often undermine it. Occasionally official reactions result in even more extensive suffering and destruction than the original calamity, which itself may have been caused in part by the misguided or self-interested activities of governments or corporations. (The actual exploitation or engineering of disaster for profit and power is explored in another book, Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM.)
The Open Source Everything Project would be one of the key mechanisms by which Foundation initially promotes the precepts of a Post-Industrial culture. It would also be an eminently practical resource for its business and community development.
The basic objective of the project is to establish a web site and associated media to host a vast and perpetually evolving archive of Open Source plans and instructions for the fabrication of the full compliment of artifacts on which a contemporary western standard of living is based. Media, including web sites, focusing on the subject of DIY fabrication are, of course, nothing new. However, there has generally been an avoidance in this field of project designs for practical useful artifacts that might compete directly in performance and economy with the products of commercial industry. Traditionally, DIY has been about the revival of antiquated labor-intensive craft techniques which, although culturally valuable, do not allow for the production of economically competitive artifacts and thus have little progressive social impact. Currently, a new DIY movement with a distinct culture derived from that of the personal computer hobbyist culture has emerged. This new movement is embodied by web sites such as the famous MAKE blog where readers are encouraged to contribute their own project instructions and photos for the fabrication of novel artifacts. MAKErs are pioneering a progressive new attitude toward technology and the products of industry, but while much of the language used and ideals embodied by this new community express a Post-Industrial sensibility, very few of the artifacts that MAKErs contribute to their community have any practical purpose. They are predominately hacks of existing commercial products intended mostly for short-lived amusement or to exploit features the manufacturers had overlooked or tried to lock-out in some way. Nowhere on the MAKE blog will you find plans for an actual functional and economical refrigerator made from scratch.
I've written about Open Source Politics, Open Source Activism, and Open Source Journalism. Open Source software is taking over our desktops at the expense of monopolistic Microsoft (get Firefox!). Television is getting in on the act. Shows like American Idol let the public be the judges, not three has-beens sitting on a judge's table. Al Gore's new network, Current, is predicated heavily on an open source model — with a great deal of programming produced by its viewers.And corporate America is catching on.
Consider this: in just a few short years, the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia has made closed-source encyclopedias obsolete ā both the hard-bound kind and the CD-ROM or commercial online kind. Goodbye World Book and Brittanica.
Sure, these companies still exist, but their customer base is rapidly shrinking as more and more people would rather go with Wikipedia ā itās free, itās easy to use, and itās much, much more up-to-date.
This is but one example of how the concept of open source has changed our lives already. Over the next 10 years or so, weāll be seeing many more examples, and the effects could change just about every aspect of our lives.
The open-source concept was popularized through GNU and the GPL, and it has spread ever since, in an increasingly rapid manner. The open-source OS, Linux, has been growing in users exponentially over the last few years, and while it still has a ways to go before it can challenge Microsoft or Apple, it has become a viable and even desirable alternative for many.
Open-source alternatives have been growing in number and breadth: from office software to financial software to web and desktop utilities to games, just about any software you can think of has an open-source alternative. And in many cases, the open-source version is better.
Now consider this: the open-source concept doesnāt have to just apply to software. It can apply to anything in life, any area where information is currently in the hands of few instead of many, any area where a few people control the production and distribution and improvement of a product or service or entity.
Joel West, Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Open source software is now ābusiness as usualā in the mobile industry. While much attention is given to the importance of open source licenses, we argue in this article that the governance model can be as necessary to a projectās success and that projects vary widely in the governance models ā whether open or closed ā that they employ. Open source governance models describe the control points that are used to influence open source projects with regard to access to the source code, how the source code is developed, how derivatives are created, and the community structure of the project. Governance determines who has control over the project beyond what is deemed legally necessary via the open source licenses for that project. The purpose of our research is to define and measure the governance of open source projects, in other words, the extent to which decision-making in an open source project is āopenā or āclosedā. We analyzed eight open source projects using 13 specific governance criteria across four areas of governance: access, development, derivatives and
community.
Our findings suggest that the most open platforms will be most successful in the long term, however we acknowledge exceptions to this rule. We also identify best practices that are common across these open source projects with regard to source code access, development of source code, management of derivatives, and community structure. These best practices increase the likelihood of developer use of and involvement in open source projects.
Collaborations and partnerships are gradually forming nation-wide to combat money in politics, specifically against the Citizens United supreme court ruling in 2010. A directory of many of them can be found at United4thePeople.org (not all listed have the same agenda).
Independent offshoots pertaining to the pursuit of money out of politics have involved stamping money with custom-made designs with messages:
“get money out of politic$!”
Ā “the system isn't broken, it's fixed”
“corporations are not people, and money is not free speech”
Phi Beta Iota:Ā Defacing currency is a crime in the USA.Ā An excellent summary with applicable passages from the law can be found at Google Answers, here (for “coin” but not cotton currency). While this is an important demonstration of public loss of faith in government (and promoting a 28th Amendment to the Constitution), getting money out of politics is not the problem.Ā There is nothing wrong with the USA that cannot be fixed simply by restoring the integrity of the electoral process and hence of the government.Ā Complete information on how to do this is at We the People Reform Coalition.Ā With respect to money itself, local communities should be doing everything they can to eliminate landlords using eminent domain as needed, and moving all money from all local stakeholders into local banks.
