Gerry Gleason's Vision

Gerry's zen head slap re: "plans" for a better world,

There is no one big idea or plan to build this vision, it will take commitment and energy from many.  For me to say, "I have the plan, lets go build it", disrespects the open processes that are the essential ingredients.

What is Your Vision of a Better World?

Sharing the world's bounty rather than competing to consume it.     

What are the conditions needed to realize it?

It starts by sharing knowledge because it is the most non-rival of goods.  The Open Source and Commons-based peer production models need to be funded.  There are many people with the knowledge and talent to make this happen, but few of them can just volunteer the kind of dedicated effort it takes to build serious systems.  You build a commons with philanthropic and investment funding, and each commons becomes a productive economic ecosystem.

In the long run, we need to have educated citizens globally, so I would say that first basic literacy and then digital literacy will be an essential foundation.  The physical networks are easy enough to build once communities reach the threshold with literacy to desire and effectively use the tools of digital literacy.

Citizens meeting in Open Space to design and build The World We Want.  There is no single answer, but we can work together to find a workable consensus.  We need to repair and build anew the trust and toleration that has been damaged in the playing out of the politics of fear.

What are the obstacles?

Economic injustice and the oppression of the status quo.  The dominance of the market where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I won't try to match Ted's descriptions of the internal obstacles.  At least we can work to overcome those, but few of us are as aware of those as my friend Ted, so the question becomes how do we become aware of what we are blind to?  The greatest obstacle is our blindness.  The fish is not aware of the water he swims through; we only know the economic systems and conditions we were born into.  It has been generations since there was a functioning Commons of any sort, and the economics of fear and scarcity has become the order of the day.  We no longer have faith that community ties can overcome private greed.

Based on your experience, what parts of the vision are realistic and what ideas, strategies and plans can make it so?

Yes, although I would say the crisis has not yet been bridged.  The way I see the future is that humanity is at a crossroads.  We can either figure out how to live in truth and with compassion and share the earth equitably, or we can suffer a range of dismal and bleak outcomes that having children out of despair for the world my generation will be leaving them.

There is no one big idea or plan to build this vision, it will take commitment and energy from many.  For me to say, "I have the plan, lets go build it", disrespects the open processes that are the essential ingredients.  I could map out the people and ideas that I have found, but what we really need is more and better tools for sharing social maps of talent and projects so that the necessary bridges and connections get built into the network.

Along the way I have also found a number of processes that are effective in collaboration and coordination.  Open Space Technology and a number of related processes demonstrate the effectiveness of a self-organizing process to facilitate collaborative work.  The Humanist Movement is an exemplar of building a large network without hierarchical controls.  (Ted can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems they have an organizational hierarchy which is more about growth and communication structures than control.)  Many of the important projects are still at the foundation stages, so they have many more questions than answers.

The future is taking shape right now, and we still have the capacity to influence the way that it unfolds.

Comments

[Phil Cubeta]

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