Manifesto for an Open Future

This is a little project I've been working on that attempts to propose a clear vision for the open future. Ideally, this would provide a sort of "north star" for myself and others as we look at how to collaborate more effectively both inside and outside the software world, and as we move into a future defined by collaboration rather than competition.

The meat of it is the "Manifesto for an Open Future.fodt" file. This contains the full text of the manifesto. Eventually, I hope to create a PDF and/or website based on this text, or contribute to one that may already exist.

Also, I would welcome any help in developing these ideas or materials related to them!

Primary Points

Definition: I've proposed that an "open" world is one in which uninhibited collaboration and access to data, information, products and services is inherently valuable.

I've used this wording in an attempt to indicate that this future requires no mandate -- rather, it's a future that naturally follows from the cultural trends we're seeing today: The emergence of the "Benefit" economy, increasing emphasis on collaboration and transparency, increasingly complex challenges that we won't be able to confront individually, and a tendency toward more democratic and distributed methods of productivity (i.e., "centralized decentralization").

Using this definition, it would follow that in an open future:

• Transparency is a given in all sectors, public, private and social. That includes financial transparency, but also transprency in strategy, execution, supply chain, and product development, among other areas. This level of transparency would effectively apply open-source principles to non-software fields.
• Goals are "external" or "community-focused" rather than "internal" or "personally-focused". In other words, products and services are rendered with the intention of benefitting the community first. The transfer of money, then, becomes a means to that end. This principle is strong in the FLOSS movement, and has some precedent outside the software world, too, in the form of B-Corps and L3Cs. This is what I've termed the "Benefit" economy, and it's an important building block in an open future.
• Collaboration is natural and easy. If we value uninhibited collaboration, etc., we will focus on the construction of virtual infrastructure that makes it easy to execute. Furthermore, given that we are aligned around "external" or "community-focused" goals, collaboration, rather than competition, becomes the obvious tactical choice, since organizations that compete in such an environment would find themselves pitted alone against organizations that collaborate, and this is a losing proposition.
• We will create ways to effectively "deduplicate" projects. Instead of Asana and Basecamp, for example, we will have the Asana UI and the Basecamp UI, both built on top of a an open core that's collaboratively developed and allows for an infinite number of other interfaces to participate.