The Story of (dot) Us

Recently, I started down a path to get a better understanding of open source culture. I wanted to see if the principles can be cross applied to other industries other than IT. Even more interesting of an inquiry is how “open” might fit our sustainability goals. My intuition was red hot on that trail and I was sure I’d find something there. What I’ve found was much more. What I found is a global happening. It was enough for Lauren and me to together take a closer look.

We are still very much on this journey, but the more we learned, the more we realize something very fundamental is shifting. The world around us is transforming. Scientific and industrial revolutions have enabled humankind to look beyond the functional appeals of our environment as we experience the information revolution. We are now looking for better ways together. Our common human experience in civil society has been elevated by the motions of defined, refined, and controlled social improvements. Globally, we have now put in place many process-centric evident-based global civil communities together via the Internet. (For example, Doing Development Differently is carrying on a core principal work doing exactly this with governance. Lauren and I became signatories to their efforts when they launched. Another example is the Open Knowledge Foundation's recent establishment of Open Sustainability - a network to open knowledge and source sustainable developments.)

Our collective consciousness is shifting from assets to knowledge, from scarcity to abundance, from hierarchy to network. We are connecting the dots and drawing up nodes on maps of our human capacity as a whole. This shift from the traditional functional, hierarchical orientation to a process-centric orientation is driven by a demand for efficiency and effectiveness. A primary target of opportunity is to increase information access and transparency. As our collective human experience transitions from hierarchies to networks and from disconnected functional decisions to process-centric development models, we are seeing a reinvention in institutional philanthropy and an emergence of distributed and disruptive social enterprises; both are measurable impact driven. A new generation of free society netizens began to see the world not for its scarcity of resources but for its abundance of knowledge and human capacity to make a difference. They are entering the shared information economy and the global community is beginning to understand the whole is in fact greater than the sum of its parts.

Under pressure, our old market competition model, based in the tragedy of the commons, is being transformed into a new way of strategic positioning to maximize our mutual advantage towards common goals. Put it simply, we are shifting from a labor-based economy to a knowledge-centric global free-marketplace. This has been fueled by the Internet and web 3.0 (collaborative) technologies. It will soon reach a tipping point where even censorship cannot prevent the cascading effects.

I’ve been feeling hopelessly lost for a while now, but the surest way to find a path is to create one. I recently realized that Lauren and I had been trying to create this path with our pathfinder company (BrainBox) that was founded just a year ago. Since then, we’ve applied the process based thinking, impact measuring methodologies, and open source methods, and executed a scaled research study into recycling habits and fostering sustainable behaviors with the City of Cincinnati.

From here, more work is to be done. There is much we want to accomplish. Lauren and I have been working on developing a learning schedule to get to know more about distributed masses' collaborative capacity to solve our sustainability problems, openly.

So. the Story of (dot) Us is only beginning.

/Stay Tuned/

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