Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE):
Creating the Academy, Economy, Government, and Society of the Future
Robert Steele
ABSTRACT
I have decided to focus on the possibilities of integrating True Cost Economics, Holistic Analytics, and Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE). This concept is human-centric, rooted in advanced digital information management including new concepts for embedded intelligence and big data at a world brain scale, and is a commitment toward enabling and empowering social enterprises within a national and international collaborative economy meant to serve the 99%. I present here my preliminary findings my hope that a hub might be created in London or New York City, with mirrors in China, India, and elsewhere as interest is generated and funding acquired. Among the products of this new endeavor would be an OSEE analytic toolkit and OSEE big data cloud able to do exascale near-real-time processing, the full integration of OSEE into the varied scientific and engineering disciplines being taught at all universities and – eventually – a School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance and a World Brain Institute as well as a new PhD/DBA degree in integral business and economic decision-support to open source everything processing and production. As the City of London and E.J. Rothschilds advance the concept of “inclusive capitalism,” I venture to offer a solution that addresses their concerns while making possible the creation of a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all, without waste.
AUTHOR
Robert Steele is the lead architect and writer for the OSEE initiative. Chief Executive Officer of the accredited US non-profit, Earth Intelligence Network, he has spent the past quarter-century championing first Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and now OSEE. MPA University of Oklahoma MA Lehigh University, Diploma Naval War College USA, AB Muhlenberg College.
Table of Contents
State of World. 3
The End of the Industrial Era. 4
Emerging Economic Concepts and Practices. 6
True Cost Economics in Earnest 9
Holistic Analytics – Multidisciplinary, Multilingual, Multilevel 10
Open Source Everything. 11
Embedded Intelligence. 13
The Way Ahead. 14
A New Knowledge Paradigm.. 15
Open Source Analytic Toolkit 17
Big Data Obstacles and Opportunities. 18
Waste – the Near Frontier 19
Human-Centric Values-Based Society. 20
The Collaborative Economy & The Social Enterprise. 21
Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance. 22
Creating the World Brain. 23
A New Discipline – the PhD/DBA in Embedded Open Source Intelligence. 25
Unifying the Eight Information Communities or Networks. 28
Conclusion – Next Steps. 29
Bibliography. 30
Table of Figures
Figure 1: Ten High-Level Threats to Humanity. 3
Figure 2: Twenty Global Programs. 3
Figure 3: Eight Forms of Organization or Information Network. 4
Figure 4: Evaluating All-Round Mutuality Between the Enterprise and All Others. 7
Figure 5: The Open Source Everything Innovation Hub Concept & Sought-After Effects. 8
Figure 6: Representative True Cost Information for a Single Product 9
Figure 7: Fragmented Web of Science. 10
Figure 8: Analytic and Knowledge Management Deficiencies. 10
Figure 9: Selected Elements of the Open Source Everything Ecology. 11
Figure 10: Enhanced Approach to Embedded Intelligence. 13
Figure 11: Context for Multidisciplinary Multilingual Whole Systems Analytics. 14
Figure 12: Grand Strategic Design for Integral Education, Intelligence, & Research. 15
Figure 13: Proposed Integrated Open Source Analytic Workstation Elements. 17
Figure 14: Computing Paradigm Shift Demanding Open Source Response. 18
Figure 15: Human Stakeholders in the Sustainable Enterprise. 20
Figure 16: Human-Centric Holistic Mind-Shift 20
Figure 17: Industrial versus Indigenous (Restored) Decision Processes. 22
Figure 18: Elements of the School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance. 23
Figure 19: Eight Information Networks Empowered and Unified by Open Source Everything. 28
State of World
I consider the Earth – and humanity at large – to be extraordinarily resilient. I am optimistic about the future in part because my proposals – if implemented by a multiplicity of nations and publics – will enable all of us to focus on creating a future that works for all, instead of going through the motions of forecasting a future in which all of the negatives persist without substantive challenge.
Here I will provide just two points of reference: the ten high-level threats to humanity as identified by the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004) and the twenty global problems identified by Jean-Francois Rischard, then Vice President for Europe of the World Bank (2003).
Ten High Level Threats
These are the ten high-level threats to humanity. They are in priority order. They are useful as a means of measuring the degree to which any particular government’s policies and programs are relevant to protecting their respective populations and promoting prosperity.
01 Poverty
02 Infectious Disease
03 Environmental Degradation
04 Inter-State Conflict
05 Civil War
06 Genocide
07 Other Atrocities
08 Proliferation
09 Terrorism
10 Transnational Crime
Figure 1: Ten High-Level Threats to Humanity
These ten high-level threats are also a helpful starting point for any university, government, or other organizations seeking to be genuinely multidisciplinary in its strategic, operational, tactical, and technical processes and programs.
Here below are the twenty global challenges in three groups as devised by Jean-Francois Rischard.
Group 1: Sharing Our Planet
· Global Warming
· Biodiversity & Ecosystem
· Fisheries Depletion
· Deforestation
· Water Deficits
· Maritime Safety & Pollution
Group 2: Sharing Our Humanity
· Poverty
· Conflict Prevention
· Education for All
· Infectious Diseases
· Digital Divide
· Natural Disasters
Group 3: Sharing Our Rulebook
· Reinventing Taxation
· Biotechnology
· Global Financial Architecture
· Illegal Drugs
· Economic Competition
· Intelligence Property
· E-Commerce
· International Labor & Migration
Figure 2: Twenty Global Programs
There have been many other important contributions (Ahmed 2010, Brown 2009, Glenn 2014) but for my elementary purposes, these two very informed and widely-accepted summaries of the state of the world and our shared challenges will do. My intent is to devise an academic program useful to governments, banks, corporations, and other organizations – to nations and publics as a whole – for rapidly and affordably addressing these challenges intelligently and simultaneously.
The End of the Industrial Era
Charles Mann, in 1491 (2008) is among many who have documented the broad accomplishments of indigenous populations prior to incursions by Western powers. Others such as Philip Allott (2002) have documented the profound negative effects of varied forms of Western colonialism and militarism upon indigenous societies previously in harmony with nature. It is not our intent to focus on the many complaints about capitalism (Perkins 2004, Klein 2008, Taibbi 2011, inter alia). My focus is more on the fundamental divorce of Western forms of organization and information management from reality. While some conflate the industrial era with “the manufacture of evil” and point particularly to wage slavery and the separation of humanity from networks of kinship and trust (Tiger 2000), and others lament the enclosing of the commons and the criminalization of what used to be natural behavior by individuals (Linebaugh 2014), the real issue for me, here and now, is this: to what extent have the primary forms of Western organization met or failed to meet the needs of humanity as a whole?
I identify eight specific forms of organization in alphabetical order.
Academic
Civil Society
Commerce
Government
Law Enforcement
Media
Military
Non-Government
Figure 3: Eight Forms of Organization or Information Network
Here I offer simple snap-shots of generic failure.
Academic. The commercialization of the universities (Bok 2004) along with the perpetuation of a rote system of education intended to create docile factory workers (Gatto 2010) have resulted – in combination with the distortion of economies caused by the export of middle class jobs and the emphasis on financial profiteering (extracting value instead of creating value) – in growing numbers of poorly educated individuals unsuited for disappearing old jobs and unable to create new jobs for themselves. The academic emphasis has been on reductionism and the past.
Civil Society. Labor unions and religions are included in this domain, as well as citizen activist groups. What we see are labor unions that have failed to responsibly represent labor (Dine 2007); religions that have become fragmented and belligerent (Ashby 2006, Lerner 2007); and civil activists that are unable to come together in mass, all too easily splintered or bought off with hand-outs.
Commerce. Lee Iacocca has lamented the disappearance of real leaders, ethical leaders (2008). Despite the heroic efforts of small businesses that comprise the bulk of the commercial sector, the failure of the banks and major corporations that substitute lobbying and government subsidies for commercial intelligence and effectiveness have led to a situation in which financial manipulations have produced appreciations of seventeen times, versus hard asset appreciation of five times (Grieder 2003).
Government. Representative democracy has failed in large part because elected individuals have been self-serving and responsive to special interests rather than their own constituencies, while a usually standard two parties have leveraged their power to block all others from the ballot – in the US, disenfranchising close to half the public (Amato 2009).
Law Enforcement. The LIBOR scandal can be seen as a failure of law enforcement at the strategic level, along with the failure of the US Government to control its own banking community that was able to collapse the economies of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, among others — and of course including the US economy (Taibbi 2011, Taibbi 2014). Given that law enforcement as a concept only works when the majority of the population considers the government legitimate, in the context of an economic and social collapse, this is the most vulnerable of the eight networks.
Media. Many books document the failure of the traditional media, which has abandoned its role as a provider of independent information to the public, and instead become a combination of corporate profit centers (with five major owners across the US media) and co-conspirators with governments intent on lying to their publics. The ease with which the US Administration under Bush-Cheney was able to lead the world to war on the basis on 935 now-documented lies (Lewis 2014) – lies supported by the UK Government – suggests the complete failure of the “mainstream” corporate media.
Military. The US military, spending as much as the next 20 nations combined, is the poster child for expensive inefficacy, constantly losing wars and failing to combat terrorism precisely because it is a heavy-metal military and its budget leaves no money for diplomacy, commerce, or alternatives such as waging peace. The plans/reality mismatch (Spinney 1985) and the constancy of the US military-industrial complex (St. Clair 2005) continue to create a hollow military stretched too thin. As General Robert Scales, USA (Ret) has documented, the US infantry – 1% of the force – takes 80% of the causalities and receives
Non-Government. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart (2008) have documented the failure of the non-government domain, and particularly international assistance. It is now known that out of any given amount – say Sterling 1 billion – less than 20% and often less than 10% and sometimes as little as 1% — actually gets to the village level in Afghanistan or anywhere else. When combined with the poor decision-making and poor spending by governments and corporations, the failure of this element is particularly catastrophic.
Taken together, the failure of all eight of these domains using the Industrial Era approach to information and to management – an approach that neglects the vast majority of the relevant information, much of it locally known and in languages we do not speak – offer us all an opportunity for change.
I believe that the charge to society of these eight failures together is on the order of 50-75% of gross domestic product (GDP).
This is to say, across each discipline from agriculture to energy to health to the military to water, 50% or more of our natural and human and financial resources are being wasted due to poor information and decision practices.
I further believe that advances in embedded intelligence and the adoption of open source everything engineering (OSEE), true cost economics, and holistic analytics, will allow us to devise an alternative academy, economy, governance, and society within which the five billion poorest can aspire to Western standards of living without Western waste. We can, with intelligence and integrity, create a world that works for all.
Emerging Economic Concepts and Practices
For the past half-century financial capitalism has reigned over the affairs of men and been a master of governments, universities, and all other forms of organization. This has led to a diminution of the influence of ideas and those who specialize in education, intelligence (decision-support), and research. This has also had the perhaps unintended effect of severely handicapping entrepreneurship and innovation by mis-directing emphasis toward paths chosen for their short-term financial exploitability, while withholding funds for holistic analytics and true cost economics, the only relevant foundation for achieving sustainable profit – profit that does not externalize costs to others while privatizing profit to an ever smaller segment of society but instead produces ever-increasing sustainable profit for the many.
Now, in 2014 and in the aftermath of a failure of integrity and process in global banking a number of new forms of economy, some in gestation for decades, are emerging to be considered by the lords of banking and the captains of commerce. Of enormous potential is the fact that the City of London and E.J. Rothschilds have themselves coined the term “Inclusive Capitalism” and sponsored a first conference on this topic (Conference 2014). They know they are in trouble. They do not know how to migrate away from their unsustainable position. I can show them the way.
There seem to be good prospects for a favorable hearing in relation to the substance of this proposal to create a banking, business, education, engineering, information management, governance, and scientific alternative that is explicitly intended to protect existing wealth among the 1% while creating infinite wealth among the 99% with an Open Source Everything approach to all disciplines.
Language remains an issue – there is a great deal of confusion, some overlap, and many bits of unclear thinking in relation to varied terms associated with emerging economic practices. Terms include circular (Lovins et al 2014), collaborative (Lowitt 2013, Schwartz 2014), ecological (Daly 2010) ethical (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013) , free (Sirico 2012), gift (Eisenstein 2011), happiness (Anielski 2007, Frey 2010), inclusive (Scott 2013), mutuality (Roche 2014, Badger et al 2014), new (Kelly 1999), open source (Lerner and Tirole 2002, Benkler 2005, Steele 2012), purpose (Hurst 2014), peer-to-peer (Bauwens 2011), regenerative (Tillman, 1996), redemptive (Rinaldi 2014), resilient (Briguglio et al 2006), sharing (Botsman and Rogers 2010, Gansky 2012)), and solidarity (Davidson 2010). Other terms in vogue include cognitive surplus (Shirky 2011), conscious manufacturing (Kutz 2007), direct economic democracy (Boik 2014), social enterprise (Frankel and Bromberger 2013), and the triple-bottom line (Savitz 2013). This is a partial list, merely the most prominent among the descriptors.
I have chosen to focus on the Collaborative Economy as the best over-all term, with Social Enterprise as the organizational manifestation, and our four process elements, Open Source Everything, True Cost Economics, Holistic Analytics, and Embedded Intelligence, as the method. I specifically embrace Mutuality Economics as one of the best-developed foundations for the Collaborative Economy and single out the Mars Family in the USA and the varied contributions to the January 2014 issue of The Brewery (Badger et al) as a most helpful starting point for both researchers and practitioners.
Below I draw on this seminal work to conclude this section on the economic context for my innovative ideas that I hope to implement through as many universities as possible.
Dr. Arlo Brady, Managing Editor of the Corporate Practice at freuds and fellow at Judge Business School, Cambridge University, tells us:
We need to consider how we can breed more ‘hero businesses’ that have a more mutual relationship with their full range of stakeholders – businesses that recognize and act upon the implied social contract as much as any formal commercial arrangements and which accept environmental and civic issues as part of their basic model of trade. These are the businesses that would have thrived in ancient Greece, and will succeed today.
From Philip Dilley, Group Board Chairman of Arup, an employee-owned company, writing under the title of “Putting a premium on value creation over value extraction:”
If capitalism is to continue to be viewed as one of the greatest engines the world has ever seen for reducing poverty and driving innovation, it simply has to be designed to work for, and with, a broader range of social stakeholders and not just in its own self-interest.
From Dennis Nally, Chairman of PriceWaterhouseCoopers International (PWCI), writing under the title “Measuring the impact of a company on society: how to gain an all-round view,” addressing the trust deficit, comes the below graphic.
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Figure 4: Evaluating All-Round Mutuality Between the Enterprise and All Others
The above has been brought together by PWCI personnel based in London under what they are calling Total Impact Measurement and Management (TIMM).
From Dr. Pamela Hartigan, Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School, University of Oxford:
The challenge of innovation in the 21st Century is therefore about reshaping societies to be not only tolerant, but actually welcoming of innovators – particularly of the disruptive kind.
When Mutuality Economics reaches its end-state, the Social Enterprise, the primary purpose of the firm is to do good, with profit as a secondary (but still essential) value (Roche 2014).
The term “social enterprise” is used within the UK and around the world to recognize businesses that are explicitly structured, organized, and led so as to apply the power of business to achieve social and environmental change. In this rendition of the term, financial profit is secondary, and when earned, is generally reinvested back into the enterprise and its social or environmental capacities.
Among the champions to be respected in this arena are Social Enterprise UK, which has published a number of useful guides for local authorities, local enterprise partnerships, and organizations desiring to embrace the Public Services Act.
The below graphic depicts my vision for creating a university-based process that impacts most constructively on the US and UK economies and eventually the local to global economy everywhere.[1]
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Figure 5: The Open Source Everything Innovation Hub Concept & Sought-After Effects
True Cost Economics in Earnest
True cost economics, sometimes also called the “triple bottom line” (Savitz 2013), seeks to integrate not just the well-understood financial costs established by contract and convention, but also the less well defined social and ecological costs. Ecological economics (Daly 2010) is the foundation, still in gestation.
Below is a depiction of some, not all, of the true costs of a single cotton T-Shirt (Liszkiewicz, 2011).
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Figure 6: Representative True Cost Information for a Single Product
When fully developed, the practice of true cost economics will be multidisciplinary in nature, as individual scientific and social scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines develop new means to calculate with precision the inputs such as energy and water that each of their objects of observation consume, and the outputs in the form of toxins and other negative externalities and diseconomies.
It is my hope to develop a standardized process as well as an open database in the open cloud for all potential contributors and stakeholders, such that over time, each discipline within each university – and others including non-profit and for-profit organizations as well as government laboratories – can begin documenting the actual true costs of every product, process, service, and policy.
I have in addition devised a concept for a cellular application that shows the true cost of any item, if available, in easy to understand green, yellow, and red circles, while also suggesting alternatives products with lower true costs, should that be of interest to the consumer. My total offering will be Open in every way, but with legal protection against its corruption or mis-use. I am acutely conscious of the degree to which open access has been tainted by predatory parties. While not addressed in this preliminary overview, I have already given substantial thought to assuring the integration of anonymity, identity, privacy, and rights into the emerging ecology of Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE). My intent is to create a rigorous new architecture that is robust in every aspect.
Holistic Analytics – Multidisciplinary, Multilingual, Multilevel
Below I share a depiction created by Maps of Science (Klavans and Boyack 2007), showing the dysfunctional fragmentation of the varied scientific disciplines and their sub-disciplines. If one adds to this the fragmentation inherent in the separation of those doing research in any of 33 core languages, our point should be irrefutable. Beyond this, we are simply not being serious about research –less than 1% of what is done is published (Stockstad, 2014).
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Figure 7: Fragmented Web of Science
Add to this scientific fragmentation the separation of the humanities from the sciences, a matter of concern to E. O. Wilson (1999), and compound that with the isolation of quantum everything including new consciousness movements, and one has a rather poor representation of what humanity is capable of doing if it were to be coherent to the extent of which we are all capable if we work together.
The analytic situation is worse when one examines specific deficiencies and separations in the process of knowledge management. Here for this preliminary concept I will simply list eight deficiencies and four separations together (Steele 2014, Steele 2008).
Analytic Foundations – Eight Deficiencies
Four Information Separations
Source Diversity
Source Integrity
Processing Big Data
Processing Desktop
Analyst Education & Training
Analyst Outreach
Analyst Access to Decision-Makers
Decision-Maker Integrity
Knowledge Management/Data Mining
Collaborative Work Tools for Sharing
External Information Access Tools
Organizational Intelligence Capabilities
Figure 8: Analytic and Knowledge Management Deficiencies
My total thrust is firmly focused on creating a new gold standard for information sharing and sense-making. Our intent is to elevate individual and collective intelligence qua decision-support across all boundaries, connecting all minds to all relevant information within an open information architecture.
Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE)
Open Source is not, as many assume, simply a legal and technical concept referring primarily to software and increasingly also to hardware, denoting that the software or hardware is freely available and open to both redistribution and modification without substantive encumbrance.
Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) is a meme, a mind-set, and a philosophy of education, intelligence (decision-support), and research. The below diagram is representative.
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Figure 9: Selected Elements of the Open Source Everything Ecology
In commercial terms, OSEE is a means of harvesting the Cognitive Surplus of a broadly distributed, self-motivated network. Of particular note is that OSEE is the only technical approach that is affordable, inter-operable across all boundaries, and scalable toward the 6 billion comprising humanity today.
OSEE is the ethical, intellectual, commercial, and legal underpinning for the emergent new economy that is collaborative, ethical, inclusive, and sharing in nature.
The essence of financial profit within this new economy lies in a mix of free education combined with licensing, services, and the monetization of transactions. OSEE can be licensed in multiple forms using Creative Commons designations, such that the code, to use a software example, is open to modification and redistribution, but cannot be used to collect financial remuneration without engaging the originator. HOWEVER, Creative Commons, while a viable legal construct,is not yet fully established in law or in technology to the extent that it actually protects social enterprises and their intellectual right (Lessig 2014). I have also concluded that the time has come to give every bit of open source code, as part of its documentation, a PayPal-like address and an Application Oriented Network (AON) rate sheet, such that the code can proliferate and eventually send money home, without having a call-back choke point.
OSEE is the underpinning for local to global information-sharing and sense-making, allowing for the efficient harvesting and harnessing of cultural, historical, and linguistically specific information across all boundaries, human, financial, and technical. The term of art for the human aspect is Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2). In combination with OSE, a predominantly technical term of art, the two define a virtual World Brain in which all minds eventually are connected to all information in all languages and domains, all the time and – this is really important – all humans have information tools with which to make sense of it all.
Of note: Computational Science and Computational Mathematics appear to be making possible order of magnitude advances in the near term. Add to this the emergence of credible thinking in relation to FemtoTech Atomic Scale Manufacturing (Garis 2014) and I can perceive both a crisis – are we moving fast enough in advancing our information management concepts and capabilities? – and an opportunity.
We are all fortunate to have had pioneers such as Richard Stallman (2010) laboring for a quarter century to reach this year, 2014, when it has been said that open source finally went mainstream. According to one report (Jurin 2014), albeit focused on the USA, in 2014:
$60 billion saved collectively by US businesses per year due to open source software
50% of all purchases of software will be open source in 5 years
2 million open source projects in 2014 – twice the number in 2012
80% increase in open source venture investment in US from 2011 ($307M) to 2012 ($553M)
$2 billion estimated open source software sales in 2013
1.47 million open source-related software jobs in US by 2018
41.6% of people plan to deploy an open source solution in 1-2 years
Across both government, especially local governments of which there are over 100,000 of them in the USA alone and business, the high cost of proprietary software – both licensing and maintenance – has become a top issue for information managers (Dixon 2014). As one summary puts it, between inherent quality, functionality and ease of deployment on the output side, and new people, new technologies and new economics on the input side, open source software and hybrid cloud offerings are exploding (Deans 2014).
Open Cloud – and specifically OpenStack – is said to have made major gains in 2014, with Oracle relenting and joining, and Hewlett Packard announcing a billion dollar investment to “make its entire portfolio a pure open source play” (Shalom 2014, Deans 2014). We must of course be very cautious about industry claims, since a great deal of what is alleged to be open source turns out to be merely open core – a portion, not the whole, is open source. The validation of offerings in terms of purity of open source, and the identification of gaps needed “true” open source alternatives, remain important. An ability to do this across all forms of information, mechanical, and other technologies could be a world-changer. This is precisely one of my objectives at the engineering level of detail –for the first time there will be a provider of validation and integration for all opens, rather than the existing scattering of opens isolated from one another. We anticipate accelerative value in this service from the university.
It merits strong comment, my objective being full employment for all graduates, that open source is a labor-intensive industry. Free code is a calling card – in the ideal it leads to perpetual employment.
Embedded Intelligence
Embedded Intelligence is characterized as the ability of a product, process or service to reflect on its own operational performance, usage load, or in relation to the end-user or environment in terms of satisfactory experience. This self-reflection is facilitated by information collected by sensors and processed locally or remotely to derive insight. These aspects must be considered from the design stage such as to enhance product lifetime and performance, increase quality of process or service delivery, or ensure customer satisfaction and market acceptance (Centre 2014).
The below graphic combines the Centre original concept focused on the manufacturing aspect, with the new concepts in this paper focused on the decision-support of design aspect.
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Figure 10: Enhanced Approach to Embedded Intelligence
The prevailing approach to EI is that of IBM and its “Smart Cities” concept. This is an example of doing the wrong things righter (Ackoff 2004). Doing the right think would involve adding True Cost Economics as Supply Intelligence, Holistic Analytics as Demand Intelligence, and Open Source Everything as Engineering Intelligence. Taking this approach will, I believe, create a new gold standard for both the emergent discipline of embedded intelligence, and the emerging discipline of integral decision-support. As shown in Figure 5 on page 8, I are going far beyond devices merely talking to one another and feeding industrial era big data concepts. My focus is on a complete re-design of the academy, the economy, government, and society, to embed intelligence in what we build, how we build it, and how we use it.
The Way Ahead
It is helpful, as I begin to outline my preliminary thinking – with responses most earnestly solicited – to remind ourselves that we live in a system of systems world where feedback loops are loaded with useful information, and yet, as shown in Figure 7 on page 10, we are operating in a scattered, badly fragmented and largely incommunicative environment in which there are iron curtains between industries, wooden walls between organizations, and plastic barriers between individuals. Our challenge is to optimize what we can know, when we can know it, and what we can do with what we know, about the below world that we inhabit with some rather deep ignorance persistent on our part.
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Figure 11: Context for Multidisciplinary Multilingual Whole Systems Analytics
While I am capable of championing multidisciplinary education, intelligence (decision-support), and research on our own and in partnership with other universities and external stakeholders in the US and UK, the multilingual and multicultural aspect – including proper discovery, documentation, and integration of historic indigenous best practices, for example in relation to water management – demands that my vision be considered and hopefully embraced by other universities abroad, particularly those in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) as well as potential wild cards such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela in South America; Nigeria and Turkey in the Near East and North Africa, and Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Viet-Nam in the Far East – and of course anyone anywhere.
While I do not address the geospatial factor in this preliminary discussion, it is ever-present in my thinking. I conceptualize an open variation of Google Earth that integrates Crisis Mappers and OpenStreetMap, with a sparse matrix and an open variation of Keyhole Markup Language (KML) such that all information in all languages and mediums can be plotted across time and space henceforth.
A New Knowledge Paradigm
I have concluded that education, intelligence (decision-support), and research are now badly trained, equipped, and organized. Changes must be made. My intent is to make it possible for every government element, every other organization, and individuals, to access information relevant to their mission or interest across all boundaries, while being able to aggregate and exploit that information rooted in geospatial and time-date visualization, aggregated by threat or policy domain, and further separable for consideration at each level of analysis: strategy, operational, tactical, technical.
This graphic (Steele 2014c) is the foundational concept for my new initiative.
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Figure 12: Grand Strategic Design for Integral Education, Intelligence, & Research
This vision integrates all forms of knowledge with particular emphasis on the integration – for life – of education – teaching, intelligence (decision-support to government and business), and research. This restores the primacy of the human being, both as an individual and in community so as to do more with less – ephemeralism – while re-establishing the human as master of comprehensivity and synergetics (Fuller 1982a 1982b 2008). The implementing bodies should fully integrate true cost economics across all disciplines, industries, products, services, and behaviors; a Smart Nation in which all eight information communities are transparent to one another and fully engaged in sharing information and sense-making; and a global creative commons (or World Brain) that enables all minds to access all information in all languages all the time. The four core values are clarity, diversity, integrity, and sustainability, each manifested as shown in the outer ring above.
I believe that education is on the verge of being transformed – Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) have been a wrong turn with their 4% completion rates (McKendrick 2013). I offer an alternative.
Intellectually and morally this innovation reinstates the university as the center – the hub – for society, commerce, and governance, assuring that a majority of the individuals in any given community are afforded the opportunity to continue learning – both free and for fee – over the course of their lifetime.
Put in a more mercenary fashion, and adopting the approach of some medical and scientific career paths, traditional educational degrees will have expiration dates and require annual, repetitive renewal through refresher training and structured engagement with new knowledge relevant to the individual, their employer, and the community at large.
An Open Source Everything Engineering initiative is a means of providing affordable, inter-operable, scalable education for life while striving to double the revenue earning potential of the University as a whole.
Here are four broad implementation ideas.
01 Education & Skill Training for life “one cell call at a time.” This is a mix of free daily prompts to the hand-held device with elementary education or new knowledge, together with clear answers to any question anytime from a mix of volunteers and sponsored call center personnel, as well as on-demand short videos for any skill element in any trade or profession…if none exists, it will be created as needed.
02 Citizen & Executive Decision Support (Commercial Intelligence) “on demand.” Commercial intelligence (CI) or decision-support (DS) require mastery of multi-disciplinary sources and methods, as well as mastery of constantly changing information technologies. For the majority of businesses in any economy, it is neither intellectually nor technically feasible to establish “in-house” capacity. This is a major opportunity for increasing ethical revenue for the university.
03 Hybrid Intelligence. There is an immediate market, local to global, for decision-support to hybrid governance of agriculture, education, energy, health, and water, to name just a few policy areas where the gap between those with power and those with knowledge is now catastrophic. A London or New York City-based School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance could develop new educational constructs, educate cadres of customers, and serve as a consulting enterprise as well.
04 Multidisciplinary Research Over Time and Space. The Center approach is not working. To achieve true multidisciplinary research one must be able to identify all credible voices – both published and unpublished – in all languages, far back in time as well as the most recent. An Open Source Hub that includes an Open Cloud as well as an Open Analytics suite of tools for local to global information-sharing and sense-making makes its sponsor the incontestable center of global knowledge.
05 Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) Platform for Universities, Small Businesses, and Others. Substantial revenue and innovation potential are to be found in the creation of a platform and process for education, intelligence, and research that could be leased to other universities while creating the first truly national – and then international – web of science and social science, humanities, philosophy, ethics, linking all of this to real world actors. My intent is to create a globally scalable open source information technology platform, and a structure for harmonizing multidisciplinary research and data while enabling real-time science and near-real-time exascale computational science and engineering.
Open Source Analytic Toolkit
Consistent with my view that OSEE demands an “all in” approach, one of my first priorities will be to create a completely open source laptop – all open source hardware (Waid 2014), all open source software – with one huge advantage: the world’s first all-source analytic desktop workstation with eighteen long-known but still neglected functionalities in one kit. The below graphic depicts the requirements defined by the Directorate of Intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency as early as 1986, but still not available today in proprietary software, much less open source software (Webb 1989).
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Figure 13: Proposed Integrated Open Source Analytic Workstation Elements
I must stress that the open source analytic workstation is merely a starting point for a much greater open source and multidisciplinary approach to both the treatment of information in all forms and from all sources, and with regard to design, engineering, and sustainable maintenance across all disciplines.
This means that the open source mind-set would be applied from raw data collection to final engineering production of resilience-enhancing innovations. When combined with varied other opens, but most especially Open Cloud, Open Data, and Open Spectrum, startling possibilities appear for affordable, interoperable, and rapidly scalable local to global information-sharing and sense-making.
My intent – working in collaboration with innovators in India and elsewhere striving to create very low-cost laptops as well as free cell phones (OpenBTS[2]) and Open Spectrum or free Wi-Fi – is to enable both on-demand education, the harnessing of distributed intelligence, and the eradication of waste.
Big Data Obstacles and Opportunities
We must begin with the fact that less than 1% of all big data is actually analyzed (Meeker 2014).
Let us add to that the reality that most legacy databases were created in by-gone eras, are non-standard, tend to be heavy, and cannot be ported electronically (the pipes are in the 10MB to 100MB range while the data is in the TB to PB range), and also cannot be accessed for simultaneous processing at most data centers because they lack the excess processing capacity (Arnold et al 2014, Hruska 2013).
Add to this the reality that relational databases were never designed for an era of big data, and the carriers have all been lazy about investing in dark fiber (Newby 2014) and you have digital grid-lock.
21st Century multidisciplinary big data requires a soup to nuts design make-over.
Below is a single graphic (Hruska 2013) illuminating the tsunami of change coming to communications and computing — this is nothing less than an opportunity for an Open Source Hub able to mobilize the full human, financial, and technical resources of a great university and everyone else that it can engage.
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Figure 14: Computing Paradigm Shift Demanding Open Source Response
I believe the Open Source Innovation Hub can sweep past Industrial era obstacles provided we go “all in” across all the opens, and are able to engage economic, government, and social partners in this quest.
Here again I must stress the human factor – in contrast to computers costing trillions to date, the human brain has petaflop and higher speeds, is less than a liter in size, and requires only ten watts of power (Bamford 2002). My innovation hub concept is centered on empowering billions of human brains with OSEE information technology and leveraging OSEE manufacturing tools and processes.
Waste – the Near Frontier
Waste is an educational opportunity and an information management challenge. Waste addressed in a timely and thoughtful manner – this is to say, a multidisciplinary manner with collaboration across all institutional boundaries – can yield savings on the order of 40-50% (Gray 1999, Rhodan 2014, Wilson 2003).
Agriculture. In 2012 there was a spate of attention to the loss of 40-50% of food from its production to its processing to its distribution to wholesale and retail vendors, to the home, and thence into the trash (Gunders 2012, Arumugam 2012). This waste is apart from that associated with water and fuel waste associated with mega-agriculture and inefficient mega-processing, storage, and transport systems, and also excludes the true costs to society of genetically modified foods that range from suicidal to pesticide resistant to being the cause of sterility in test animals by the third generation.
Energy. While it has been known for some time that close to 50% of the energy generated in a centralized and fossil fuel-based system is “spilled” in the process of migrating down to the end-user at the socket level, the cost of renewable energy has not been sufficiently attractive to warrant national-level attention sufficient to overcome the lobbying of the legacy industry. In 2013 based on 2012 data the headline was “US Wastes 61-86% Of Its Energy” (Fischer 2013). As with agriculture, this is strictly waste as defined by the traditional analysis model without regard to externalized costs imposed on society, such as earthquakes and contaminated aquifers from fracking.
Health. In 2008 PriceWaterhouseCoopers conducted an original survey whose findings remain relevant to any multidisciplinary endeavor seeking to address behavioral, clinical, and operational waste in the health industry. Their research concluded that US$1.2 trillion out of US$2.2 trillion – 54% – of every health dollar was waste (Galper et al 2008). Their methodology is a helpful model for rapidly evaluating waste in other policy domains.
Military. The US military is the gold standard for waste in all possible forms (Paltrow 2013). At the strategic level it spends more than then next 8 countries combined (SIPRI 2014), and is used so badly as to inspire rage rather than resolve disputes, at the same time that its waste deprives diplomatic and commercial and informational capabilities of proper funding. In acquisition it is now known to not be able to build effective ships or aircraft, and to have wasted up to 70% of all dollars spent in Afghanistan (Chiaramonte 2014). When one adds elective wars based on 935 now-documented lies (Lewis 2014) – wars that suck the UK and others in – the cost of a military as now equipped and utilized appears catastrophic.
Water. The water cycle cannot be owned, but it can be destroyed. It is the ultimate manifestation of why we must, as a human species, achieve conscious evolution and get a grip on the true cost of our wanton ways with water. We must understand that only 1% of the water on earth is potable; that corporations are consuming 70% of it led by Nestle and Coca-Cola; and that once an aquifer is depleted and fills with salt water, it can never be restored (Steele 2011).
Corruption is waste – as we make all processes transparent, we will begin to eradicate corruption.
Human-Centric Values-Based Society
Although I place great emphasis within this innovation endeavor on information technology as well as the science and engineering associated with applications engineering, manufacturing solutions, and system services, I find it helpful, as the Industrial Era collapses from a lack of ethics and respect for humanity, to emphasize the human factor, human scale, and human values.
It is in this context that I find the Mars Family emphasis on all of the human stakeholders itemized below, a persistent foundation for sustainable enterprise (Mars 1947, Badger 2014).
Consumers
Distributors
Competitors
Suppliers
Governmental Bodies
Employees & Shareholders
Figure 15: Human Stakeholders in the Sustainable Enterprise
I wish to make possible a holistic mind-shift across the academy, economy, government, and society. Below, based on work by Monica Anderson (2010), is a unifying depiction of where I hope to help our community – local to global – can advance, rooted in OSEE, True Cost Economics, and Holistic Analytics.
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Figure 16: Human-Centric Holistic Mind-Shift
Science is – like any artifact – as good as or as bad as the human intentions and human hands that wield the power that science gives. Science is also stunted in the absence of the humanities (Saul 1993, Wilson 1999), of philosophy (Durant 2008), and religion (Kung 2008, Molben 2011). I strive to connect all minds to all information in all forms, confident that the human factor will surprise us time and again.
The Collaborative Economy & The Social Enterprise
The Collaborative Economy
The collaborative economy is defined by Jeremiah Owyang (2013) as the convergence of three ideas: the sharing economy, the maker movement, and the “co-innovation” movement. In relation to a research university focused on community service and enterprise outreach, this translates into an opportunity to fully integrate design, information management, engineering, and each of the disciplines in turn.
Design translates into accelerated production, performance, and adoption. Information management can change the marketplace by changing public understanding of the true cost of specific products, services, policies, or behaviors. Engineering can dramatically reduce cost by rejecting the last fifty years in which the Americans have substituted “cost plus government specification” engineering for the more brilliant engineering that optimizes design to dramatically reduce total costs across an entire life cycle and is repeatable across different mission areas. The simplified designs and shared components characteristic of the Global Village Construction Set are a real-world achievement worthy of emulation across many disciplines. Central concepts in gestation include these four below.
The Social Enterprise
A helpful definition of Social Enterprise is offered by the Centre for Social Enterprise of Canada:
Social enterprises are revenue-generating businesses with a twist. Whether operated by a non-profit organization or by a for-profit company, a social enterprise has two goals: to achieve social, cultural, community economic or environmental outcomes; and, to earn revenue. On the surface, many social enterprises look, feel, and even operate like traditional businesses. But looking more deeply, one discovers the defining characteristics of the social enterprise: mission is at the centre of business, with income generation playing an important supporting role.
The signal flaw in both of the above concepts is their neglect of the three innovations that I propose to bring together in order to accelerate the collaborative economy and the social enterprise.
However good the intentions might be, a lack of intelligence with integrity (Steele 2010) is still a fatal debility. Changing the objective of the enterprise (from pure profit to social good) does not change the underlying information and manufacturing processes in any substantive manner.
As Figure 5 on page 8 shows, I believe that in combination, True Cost Economics, Holistic Analytics, and OSEE will help eradicate waste while radically lowering the cost of living (buy