Carol L. Stimmel and Don Sherwood Olson have received a contract from Taylor & Francis Group of CRC Press to write and edit a book currently titled "Navigating the Knowledge Commons: A Guide to Information Liberation in the Age of Future Tech," which is designed to be the first title in a new series on the topic of The Commons for the publisher. Publication is scheduled for early 2017.
The editors seek authors familiar with the domains of free/libre open-source software, intellectual property issues, patent and copyright law and practice, knowledge commons, and how current and future effects of these areas will influence future technology.
# Motivation
With much hype over the “Internet of Things,” the authors can explore how does this come about when communications protocols, data representations, and the software that makes use of them are still balkanized into a confusing mess of licensed, protected, hidden, non-standard, forms. Are open standards sufficient alone, or do we need open information overall? If the latter, how are corporations incentivized (or de-incentivized) when they have lots of capital tied up in intellectual “property” to join in? What might they lose? What might be gained? How will an enterprise have to change, and how will it be affected? How do formal organizational rules affect culture, and vice versa? These are among the many, many questions we have in trying to argue that a total Knowledge Commons is needed, with governance, management, security, privacy, equity, and utility.
# What You Can Do
The authors welcome any thoughts about the collective benefits of open source and how a knowledge commons either fits into the current paradigm or requires something new or, finally, begs a total avoidance of current structures. What will be the implications for Future Tech with, or without, adoption of an open source model, with or without a knowledge commons?
The goals are to help readers...
* understand how legacy and current intellectual property practice, patent law, an copyright may stifle the search for optimal solutions to the planet's greatest problems. * realize the massive scope of untapped revenue that lies dormant because knowledge is hard-walled into impenetrable silos inside and outside of companies. * learn how to leverage intrinsic value of discovery itself to derive mew ideas and solutions more rapidly and with greater change of success. * articulate how much added value is created by abandoning the intellectual property rights as it frees creative and productive forces to concentrate on their areas of expertise. * lose their fear of the Open Source movement and learn how to engage and give back.
...because the book...
* inspires business leaders and governmental advisors to see the great gains that are possible when obsolete proprietary models are at last jettisoned. * clearly illustrates the process to evolve a business or an agency to be placed best to benefit from the new Open Source culture. * examines the relative costs and benefits of business as usual versus what will dominate the technology in all fields. * illustrates with case studies the broad cultural and societal benefit that comes as a natural byproduct of the new models in medicine, technology, public welfare, and environmental restoration.
# Sample Chapters
1. The Roots and New Implications of the Open Source Movement
2. The Paradox of Incentives
3. The Problem with Intellectual Property
4. Emerging Open Source Models
5. The Role of Human Ingenuity in a Technocentric Culture
6. When Tradition is Rejected: The Tesla Model
7. The Big Guns Go All Open Source: Apple and the other "Evil Empires"
8. An Unlikely Affair: Open Source Cybersecurity Software, Data, and Global Security
9. The Virtual Reality of Open Source Living, Creativity, and Gamification
10. The Practice: How Open Source Communities Incent and Self-regulate
11. The Role of Ethics, Law, and Enforcement in the Commons
12. The Valley of Death: commercialization Issues, Noncooptation, and Nonappropriation
13. How Open Source Allows Creativity to Flow and Changes Business
14. How Open Source is the Future of Sustainability for the Planet, Systems, and Economies
15. A Thought Experiment: The Future Commons of Future Tech
# The Editors
In 2001, Carol and Don wrote a book published by Addison-Wesley as part of their Patterns series titled The Manager Pool: Patterns for Radical Management, which argued for a humane, bottom-up approach for software development team management based on the work in architecture patterns of Christopher Alexander. The authors are looking for writers who share similar interests regarding labor, capital, products, and production, as well as what the future of software development ought to look like, and how this all will affect future technology in general.
# You May Have Already Written It
If you have already explored one or more of these areas, we welcome any past work as eagerly as any new viewpoints you’d like to share.
If you find that you have a particular attraction to a topic, or if you would like to propose something else, please contact either Carol (cstimmel@manifestmind.com) or Don (dsolson@me.com).
Please contact Carol Stimmel for submission guidelines and the contributor’s agreement.
# Contacts
dsolson@me.com (Don Olson)
cstimmel@manifestmind.com (Carol Stimmel)