Open Source Everything
Open Source Democracy: Check out this book, Rebooting America, put together by the folks who did the Personal Democracy Forum this summer. It's a collection of essays offering ideas of how to energize democracy in the age of the Internet. My contribution is atypical and maybe less useful than the others, because I argue that the behavior we learn on the Internet is best a metaphor for participatory democracy than its ultimate realizations. But there are entirely more practical and immediate strategies offered by politics and net luminaries from Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs) and Scott Heifferman (Meetup.com) to Newt Gingrich and Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody). Best yet, the entire book is available online here.
Open Source Groceries. At least that's what Open Produce looks like to me. A new grocery store in Chicago that promises sustainable practices, community involvement, and total transparency. "We focus on sustainable food production, whether that be organic growing methods, local production, or efficient transportation. Our company also strives to set new standards of transparency and accountability to the community; everything about our operation, from our financial data to where our produce was grown, will be available on this website or in our store."
Open Source Money There's a lot of books emerging on the use of complementary and local currencies. I got a ton of email on this subject already, from people concerned that I'm referring to scrip or the kinds of currencies used in the US prior to the 1930's. If the brilliant and free Bernard Latier text I recommended was too involved, there's a book I've just been made aware of that looks at some of the more practical implications of creating a community money supply called Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender, by Thomas H. Greco. If you don't have five bucks for the paperback, there's an abridged PDF here.
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"Open Produce" hyperlink appears broken!
thanks for the link to the book; looking forward to reading it.
@1 - I came here to say the same thing.
Caught the headline in my RSS feed; interesting! For a moment, I thought you guys, my friends at Boing Boing might have discovered the Everything Open Source project . . . which is also pretty cool. ;)
There needs to be an effort to open source basic skills, such as blacksmithing, morse code, organic farming, and other skills needed to rebuild civilization.
The undead hordes are coming.....
I agree with #5. I would love to see more access to information/tools for special skills. Open source sewing, canning, blacksmithing, brick laying, welding, plumbing, etc. I would REALLY LOVE to see collectives of people that train each other to do these tasks, round robin style. Skill training/trading is really hard to arrange.
Is it just me or do many of these projects seem to stretch the definition of open source? Like how exactly can the idea of open source be applied to money? To me open source is about the ability for anyone to edit and create the product. If money was able to be edited by anyone it would kind of fall through. Now admittedly I am not that into the open source community or anything so if anyone could enlighten me it would be much appreciated.
Open Produce is at Open Produce. Opening tomorrow at 4PM. The point of Open Produce, at least as the partners have described to me several times, was to remove all the dark and hidden aspects of corporations and replace it with open information--finding out what percentage goes to the farmer, the wholesaler, the retailer, what sort of transport and distance was involved in moving the produce to the store, and other things that we all have questions about when we see a simple fruit at the supermarket. Why not know it all, and empower the consumer?
Geneus says, "Open source sewing, canning, blacksmithing, brick laying, welding, plumbing, etc. I would REALLY LOVE to see collectives of people that train each other to do these tasks."
You're describing the Foxfire books, from the 70's. These books can still be found, used via Amazon; new from the horse's mouth: www.foxfire.org
To me, as long as produce is tied to Organic standards, cannot be OS. It will be truly OS when they allow the using of GM varieties. Why should we avoid such technology? Biohacking can solve a lot of problems, however, if we choose to avoid it, that only will empower corporations like Monsanto.
I am currently at work in a hotel in Prague, Czech Republic, and I was just browsing this site. The site is great, and I just wanted to say that we also have a grocery store (actually more of a farmer's market) near my flat that is attempting to do the same thing as Open Produce, and I think it's a great idea.
#7 geneus
I share your confusion about the use of the term 'open source' in these projects...
The Cooperative Grocery (CoG) out here in the San Francisco East Bay (Berkeley-Oakland-Emeryville) is based on Brooklyn's Park Slope food coop, and like a lot of consumer- and employee-owned cooperatives (another yummy local example: Arizmendi Bakery, spun off of Berkeley's classic Cheese Board Collective), thrives on open sharing of data, business models, powered by transparency, including supporting people creating new businesses along the same line. In many cases the transfer is relational, not transactional, so the supporting web applications may not be pure 'open source.' (particularly in the early phases as these small entities aim to recover development costs, when the perceived number of potential contributors is small).
Let us not forget the open-source office-sharing movement, coworking. Conferences like BarCamps (and other *Camps) and unconferences indirectly based on "Open Space Technology and good old BoFs." And the open-source neighborhood-building movement, cohousing sector of the intentional communities movement, seeding the creation of open-source ecovillages. Not to mention the Beacon Hill Village model for member-created "retirement villages without walls" where neighbors enter into a business (typically nonprofit/NGO) together to provide essential support services so they can stay in their homes longer as they age. Or those old-fangled open-source computer-support cooperatives only somewhat outmoded by the intertubes: users' groups.
Basically, if you scratch the surface of any open, cooperative (or better yet, collective), member-driven movement, where the co-creators/end-users are in charge, you'll find something with significant 'open source' attributes, in many cases predating the term (by up to 2.5 centuries), driven by ethical values of openness. As @Genuus notes, for some of these movements the degree of 'open' and the extent of 'source' sharing varies, but in my experience as a cross-pollinator, they have much to learn from each other and more in common than their differences.
Raines
Full disclosure: I volunteer on the board of FIC, linked above, and professionally consult in the creation of cohousing and coworking neighborhoods plus aging-in-community neighborhoods and BarCamps/unconferences, and helped found user groups (and I'm a CoG member so technically a co-owner but haven't actually shopped there yet), but I'm linking to community sites and wikipedia pages, not my own.
I’m only a bit familiar with some of the issues involved in this movement. I have one question, and that regards security. Is open source everything analogous to monoculture agriculture? Is having open source like planting just one kind of tree? If huge commercial interests use an open source platform, are then more inherently more vulnerable to cyber attack? This brings to mind Charles Stross’s Glasshouse. In that story the “open source” vulnerability causes all sorts of insanity. I think the only answer is AI, and there’s no way AI is going to be open source.
There's also GOOOH (Get Out Of Our House), which is a great idea and an exercise in open and transparent politics.
http://gooohc.sslcert35.com/home.aspx
Don't forget Open Source Ale! Now at the "Free Beer" project... http://www.freebeer.org/blog/
I guess "Free Beer" was just more catchy that "Open Source Ale."
What's the point of "Open Source Democracy"? America is a republic not a democracy, no matter how hard you try to imagine otherwise.
Jeff:
Quite the opposite. Seeds would have to be available to everyone only costing a fee for producing them, no royalties to companies. And, OS projects are free to fork anytime, by any reason. SO, it is totally opposite to monoculture, it encourages hacking of local varieties.
Has anybody here seen the case of the Gujarat cotton farmers?
"America is a republic not a democracy..."
I don't know why people never get tired of repeating this pedantic phrase. So What? When everyone knows what is meant when someone refers to the US as a democracy. Yes, it is a Republic, OK, WE GET IT.
IMO, the USA is a republic with aspirations of being, someday, a true democracy.
Here is also a Open Everything directory with more than 500 open projects annotated, part of the 7,000 page resource base on everything open/free, participatory, and commons oriented at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Open
Michel
Per the note about a free iteration of The Future of Money, I only know of its being available Amazon UK (or eBay!). Which is a drag since the text could be a great navigation guide through the current economic meltdown. Not sure why someone hasn't either put in the time and/or put up the cash to make the text as ubiquitous as possible.
There is a open source farm that is researching and developing full scale village level open source technology which could one day be easily reproduced in any part of the globe:
The blog with most recent development http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/ and the wiki http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
This is as much real and -open source everything- as it can be. Want an open source everything world?
Volunteer and or donate resources.