Florian Mueller, the founder of the award-winning
NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has published his memoir-style book,
"No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European
Union", on the Internet.
On 377 pages, Mueller tells the story of the legislative process
that ended in July last year with a landslide vote of the European
Parliament against a proposal for a software patent directive.
This is an excerpt from the introduciton to the book by Florian Mueller, chronicling the events leading up to one of the most siginificant legislative decisions in European law this decade and of immense impact to our industry.
"On July 6, 2005, the world of politics turned upside down. Big money was dealt a blow.
The European Parliament threw out legislation that the world's largest
IT companies badly wanted. Under the pretext of protecting inventors
against plagiarists, it would have handed those giants sweeping powers
over Europe's high-tech markets. An electronic roll-call vote thwarted
the wicked plan in a matter of seconds, but that decision was preceded
by years of intense fighting."
Readers of this blog will be aware
I follow this - I'll never forget that later that day following my post to the blog we suffered the london bomb attack and lost
Colin Morley.
Anyhow, I highly recommend you read
this book.
One of the areas that has kept my interest and curiousity in recent years is that of collective consciousness. Having seen the power of online portals and how they improve collaboration it was fascinating to see how these web presences evolved - document sharing, forums, text chat rooms, blogs, wikis for example becoming mainstream and accessible to the online community / global village through proprietary,
free and open source software.
During this phase of portal evolution the value of search emerged - then came the revolution in participation architectures and tagging - otherwise
known as folksonomy.
Recently Ray Kurzweil was
featured in the news regarding the concept of the singularity. If you're not familiar with the Singularity then
this link should help. Until such time as artificial intelligence develops powerful empathy there may be a growing requirement for a collective human consciousness in the community, geographic and non-geographic regions, societies, organisations and associations.
Leveraging the thought-leadership of
George Por's
community-intelligence I'd like to see a standard emerge for exchanging 'consciousness' between Communities of Practice.
My ideas have meandered over the years (
please note I no longer participate with this organisation) but I'd like to see some sort of working group, at
OpenBC for instance, establishing open standards around this type of thinking. OpenBC is slowly acquiring the participation of some of Europe's most promising entrepreneurs and technologists who would be fundamental to achieving a European Collective Consciousness.
Once that has been achieved then we could look to see how that could scale to a peer to peer model of consciousness between communities of practice. A model that would follow would be of an organisation's various CoPs creating a shared consciousness and in turn this consciousness would be accessible via strategic partners.
OpenBC, itself, could be that organisation, so could Google, Microsoft and others.
This is not another expert system, nor a search engine, portal or social network, nor is it an attempt to usurp
RSS and/or
RDF, the driver of much integration and interaction between disparate data on the web, in fact I'd anticipate it would create vocabularies of RDF though. What this would be is a modular real-time mind that would be integral to decision making and deliver significant risk mitigation and impact awareness during the
process of decisioning connecting the tangible with the intangible - powering automated decisioning with collective empathy - something that would help e-Government govern better for example.
What follows from this, for the commercially minded, is micro-transactions and their inherent value: how would you easily and comprehensively value transactions of consciousness? Once again the theme of
taming complexity emerges from this requirement.
I'd love to hear your views on this, learn about groups you'd think would be worth checking out and also links to any content you feel would support these enquiries.