* The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust. By Robert David Steele. Evolver, 2012.
We presented Robert Steele’s book 2 days ago. Here are further excerpts, including the full introduction from the book, in Scribd format.
On Integrity:
From chapter 5:
1.
“In the twenty-first century, intelligence, design, and integrity comprise the triad that matters most. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is the non-negotiable starting position for getting it right, and this is crucially important with respect to the sustainability of the Earth as a home for humanity.
Integrity at the top requires clarity, diversity, and balance.
Integrity can be compounded or discounted. It is compounded when public understanding demands political accountability and flag officers ultimately understand that they have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, not support the chain of command. It is discounted when flag officers are careerists, ascribe to rankism, and generally betray the public interest in favor of personal advancement.
Universal access to connectivity and content is a means of accelerating both public access to the truth and the power of the public to offset “rule by secrecy,” which inherently lacks integrity at all levels.”
2.
“Every major segment of our society–academia, civil society [including labor unions and religions], commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit–is currently suffering from epidemic lack of integrity, which only gets worse at large scales of operation, leading to implosion from corruption of intelligence and information-sharing.
. . . . . . .
For many years I though that our elected representatives had been corrupted by corporations, and more recently, by banks (or I should say, the people who use these structures as veils for their own unethical accummulation of profit). I was in error. As we now know from numerous cases, the most blatant being that of former Congressman Randy Cunningham, it is more often the elected representative who have been shaking down banks and corporations in order to fund their own ambitions to remain in power and to profit at the expense of the people.
. . . . . . . .
This manifesto is a political and intellectual “call to arms” for carrying out a non-violent revolution that restores the sovereignty of We the People. With Oath Keepers gaining ground among law enforcement professionals, and Ron Paul receiving more support from veterans than all other 2012 Presidential candidates combined, it’s possible that the police and military can come together with labor, Occupy, the Tea Party, and Independents to achieve electoral reform and then intelligence, governance, and national security reform.”
3.
“All the kum-ba-ya in the world and all the micro-issue think tanks and advocacy groups are ineffective because they lack a strategic analytic model, a process for doing intelligence so as to do informed activist democracy, and a call to arms that brings us all together centered on taking back our government or routing completely around it.
. . . . . . . . .
The “magic” of panarchy is that it combines the wisdom of the crowd, smart mobs, here-comes-everybody “cognitive surplus” and “collective intelligence” (two different concepts) with evolutionary/revolutionary process–they cycle of growth, stasis, break-out, and regeneration with innovcation. As an inherently open-source everything system of systems, panarchy exposes fraud, waste, and abuse; eradicates corruption, and in the ideal–at full operational capability–creates infinite wealth in the form of a prosperous world at peace.
. . . . . . . .
Lies are like sand in the gears of a very complex, delicate machine. Lies steal from the commonwealth. Lies kill. Lies are a cancer on the body of humanity. Integrity is not just the opposite of lies–integrity is the restoration and maintenance of the whole. Integrity is the cosmic mix of transparency, truth, and trust that creates heaven on Earth. Panarchy is heaven; resilience is the Earth and its humanity in a state of balance.”
On Whole-Systems Thinking
From chapter 6:
1.
“The evolution of evolution is a transition from unconscious to conscious choice.
– – – – – – – –
In order for us to live within this finely balanced constellation of complex systems, in order for the Earth to show resilience and last for centuries into the future as an environment for human life, we have to embody three things: a respect for Earth systems and their details in balance; a commitment to discovering and sharing the truth and only the truth at all times about all things; and a commitment to doing no harm.
– – – – – – – –
No amount of money is going to prvent catastrophe. Absent a commitment in creating a culture of attention and interoperability and information-sharing, we will create our own catastrophes each time we are challenged by what could have been nothing more than a localized disaster.”
2.
“In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainer concludes that if we are to achieve sustainability and resilience, we must nurture at all levels across all boundaries a culture that elevates “problem-solving” as well as the ability to think strategically–an understanding that everything is connected and that getting a grip on the facts of the matter across all boundaries is an essential first step toward conceptualizing workable solutions to complex challenges.
Truth–the combination of intelligence and integrity as well as transparency–is the foundation for both understanding and eradicating these threats, while moving as quickly as possible toward what should be the human mantra toward the Earth and all species, “First, Do No Harm.”
. . . . . . . . .
David Keys, author of Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization, tells us that natural catatrophes are treated as remote and improbable until they actually occur. Only those civilizations that plan ahead and are well-organized can respond to disasters as they happen, thus reducing the severity of draught, famile, or other challenges.
What he does not focus on, covered very ably by Ted Steinberg in Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disasters in America, is how systemic corruption among the elites increases the damage caused by natural disasters, as little flexibility or resilience is built into systems designed to reward the few. People are persuaded or allowed to occupy floodplains and other areas prone to disaster; land speculation runs rampant with local government and insurance company complicity; intermediate measures suc has levees are built at public expense. When it all comes crashing down, as with Katrina over New Orleans or the increasingly regular Mississippi River flooding, the rich walk away with their high risks having been amortized, which the poor and minority communities are ruined.”
3.
“Even before the digital information explosion, the rapid expansion of scientific, social scientific, and humanities knowledge led to the fragmentation of academic disciplines, and then increasing fragmentation as sub-disciplines developed. Figure 14 depicts how little of the knowledge can be accessed via online search, the default option for all too many people. Add 183 languages in which knowledge is created, and the Babel factor is a multiple order of magnitude worse than a quarter century ago.
. . . . . . . . .
There is one other fragmentation that must be addressed. I call them “the eight communities of intelligence” that do not share information with one another in any coherent manner, illustrated in Figure 15. I use a figure, having listed these communities briefly above, because I want to illuminate two points: that they all share a “green” information commons; and that there are outer rings of yellow, orange, and red “restricted information information that demand security and privacy.
Each of these communities have vital original data, information, and analytical insights on any given issue. They are not trained, equipped, organized, nor culturally disposed to share information they have, not even within their own community.
. . . . . . . . .
The fragmentation of knowledge is much worse than this. When you look at data in context–what we should be able to do with all information in all languages all the time–we immediately see many more divisions in terms of time, space, discipline, and domain.”
Read the Introduction by Robert Steele: