Crowdsource the solution to the student tuition problem!

How do we educate our population? 
Where do we get the resources necessary to do it?

Every society on this planet struggles with these fundamental questions. The education problem evolves in time and as technology advances, as societies change, and we are constantly trying to find better solutions for it. The student tuition crisis in Quebec/Canada is seen as part of this process of finding solutions (although this crisis must be seen within an even larger socio-economic crisis). It is described as a conflict between two social factions who have different views on the problem and who propose incompatible solutions. On one side we have a coalition of student associations, now enlarged by other non-student organizations, and on the other side the Liberal Government of Jean Charest.

The Meta Plan

The Meta Plan (see also the Diigo annotated link- it will save you some time reading) is in essence the Multitude Project.

This is the Meta Plan, the plan for building the We Plan...
We are not disorganized but disconnected. We have self-selected and self-organized and self-lead our prior efforts. We must coalesce these efforts into one global organism. One organism with many parts, and a single purpose.
The plan starts with our common purpose...
There are answers. Many have been working on the pieces for years. We must put these answers together in once place: the We Plan.
Some will work on design for technologies; some on design for social structures; some on the logistics systems required to deliver the people, information, and materials required under the plan, some on the architecture of the Plan itself.
Just as we collectively and continuously build Wikipedia, we will collectively build the We Plan.
The We Plan will be developed both top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. Some will tie the pieces together. Some will flesh out the details of the pieces. The entire Plan will be visible to everyone all the time.
The We Plan will be a living plan.
Together, We will comprise the We Movement.
As the We Movement builds, We will begin implementing the plan. We will find resources. We will make the parts. We will educate. We will build.
We will have a movement with the force to make political change where necessary, to pool resources and knowledge, to stop destruction and looting by the few against the many, to remake the world in the image of our highest dreams.

The world is waking us and coming together!

By AllOfUs

Government as a platform

The multitude stops engaging the government for services and uses the new technology to become the government.

This video is a very good illustration of a thread that runs through the Multitude movement, which is that power relations lose their importance as peer-to-peer coordination and collaboration become possible. The new world will be built on value-based relations!  

By AllOfUs

A deal for the elite.

The Multitude movement has gone beyond the critical mass. We are building alternative ways of creating and exchanging value that escape the systems of control put in place to insure the stability of those in positions of power. The infrastructure of the new world is coming together. It acts as a new vessel that contains masses of disillusioned individuals quitting the actual system for various reasons, from economical to ethical. The metamorphosis process is already under way. It has gone beyond the point of irreversibility.

Moreover, the power of the well-informed and well-coordinated Multitude has already surpassed the ability of those in power to contain us. There are many ways we can destroy the establishment. I hope we'll not go down that path to create chaos, but the possibility is there. It is REAL! See for example:

• I don't pay! How corrupt governments commit suicide by cutting their own veins open.
• How fragile is the system?

I define the point of irreversibility of this massive socio-economic transformation as the point in time after which it becomes impossible for the global elites to oppose the change, to keep the status quo, without taking radical measures that can jeopardize their very existence.

I am now talking to YOU, man and woman who profit from the actual system taking advantage of the Multitude. YOU are now facing the dilemma of choosing between two futures that don’t belong to you. Taking radical measures is NOT the smartest way to go. Help us to develop this new world and you might have a place in it. Push us further back to the wall, keep us hungry and we’ll become radicalized. YOU are losing your ability to lead, save yourselves before your ship sinks.

How?
In case YOU don’t understand what we’re talking about, help transfer resources from the present-old system to the new. Found projects that are going in the right direction. Help those involved in them by providing access to various other resources, adopt our new institutions…

By AllOfUs

The multitude movement limited by the pace of cultural change and of general understanding of open movements

Since the start of the #occupy movement, whenever I had the chance to engage in a deeper conversation about the movement with active members, with journalists, or simply with people passing by the  #occupy Montreal camp, where I was very active, I tried to put the movement in the broader context of what we call the multitude constructive revolution. To my surprise, almost everyone was clueless and probably saw in me signs of insanity, because I was speaking a language they were not familiar with. Only a very few surprised me, being able to absorb very quickly the information I was trying to convey, agreeing with most of it. Those individuals had one thing in common, they were very close to the software world. They understood the influence of the new technology in shifting the balance of power towards individuals and their communities.      

What are the #occupy camps?

The Occupation camps across the world are not just protest sites. They are not just new political spaces. They are in fact embryos of the emergent new world.

They are emergent cities
If you go to the nearest camp you'll find in there everything you'd need to survive, even during a Canadian winter. For example, only two days after it's initiation the Montreal camp had already a health center, a kitchen that fed easily over 500 people the very first evening, a center of communication and coordination, an information and donation center, a political space (where the assemblies take place), a cultural space (where people play drums, dance, paint...), and obviously a housing space. Believe it or not, we even have the protection of the militia (the Quebecois patriots), who put their tent across the street from the main camp, having great visibility over the area.

The kitchen, first day

Multitude movement and its infrastructure

From the forgotten U.S. nation-wide End the Fed movement in 2008 which sparked the TeaParty movement, to the so-called Twitter revolution in 2009 in the Republic of Moldova, to the 2009-2010 Green Revolution in Iran,  to the Arab Spring, to the 15-M movement in Spain, and now to Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Everywhere, the Multitude has made tremendous progress in realizing the liberating power of the new technology and in putting this technology to good use in its struggle for freedom and self-determination.

As we predicted back in 2008

We are now seeing an important transformation in the way social forces organize and oppose each others. This transformation is gradual, as different social factions realize the potential of new emerging technologies, and experiment with them. Science and technology are blind; they serve better the ones who know how to use them. But knowledge about a new tool or method is not everything, social factions also differ in their disposition to receive and integrate the new technology. Their disposition can be related to a cultural specificity, their organizational structure, their leadership, etc. All this plays a role in how fast a group can actualize a new potential. (...) Activists and organizers of social mass movements are starting to think in a radically different way. Networks is the key concept. We are moving towards a highly decentralized form of social movement organization, a very organic and dynamic structure. Read the Balance of Power. 

The Occupy Everywhere movement is the synthesis of all the other movements before it.

Swarm Wall Street: why an anti-political movement is the most important force on the planet

In a post published on Coalition of the willing blog Tim Rayner brilliantly explains the Occupy movement in the US.    

"The protesters in Liberty Square and across the US are engaged in a more serious business than contesting dominant institutions. They are knitting together new cognitive maps based on peer-to-peer strategies and open source ethics and reworking politics from below. (...) All that remains is that the movement finds a way of articulating its power without reducing its intrinsic diversity. If OccupyWallStreet can achieve this, it could literally change the world.
 Read more..."

By AllOfUs

New Economy, New Wealth

This presentation by Arthur Brock is really nicely done. It pretty much summarizes everything. Send it to your friends who think you're crazy...   : )

New Economy, New Wealth on Prezi

By AllOfUs

Takeover - MULTITUDE rise up!

America is on an accelerated path towards tyranny. How do you get from freedom to tyranny? Naomi Wolf thinks it can be done in only 10 steps.

At this moment, many US states are introducing legislation to break down labor unions and to establish a chain of command from the federal and state governmental level to the local level. The attacks on unions are NOT about capitalism vs socialism. Depart from this mentally disabling dichotomy! Think outside of the box! The goal of the elite is to dissolve social structure, to diminish our capability to organize against the establishment. Unions are powerful social organizations which can catalyze massive opposition against tyrannical measures. You might be against labor and socialist ideas, but you must recognize the role of unions in enabling popular descent. Learn from Egypt and Tunisia. We need to fight the tyrants who dress in red AND blue and keep us divided over sterile political ideologies. The Democrat and the Republican parties are the two faces of the same fiat "Federal" Reserve coin.

MULTITUDE build an infrastructure for mass movements, organize, plan and TAKE ACTION!

By AllOfUs

The MetaCurrency Project

You thought money was real... It's just a game!
So why not having our own?


The MetaCurrency Project from alan rosenblith on Vimeo.

Visit the MetaCurrency Project

By AllOfUs

The Wind of Change

Listen to The Wind of Change, narrated by Tibi

See the section The Balance of Power

By AllOfUs

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

This is why the multitude is taking over the economy...

Visit Multitude Innovation, read about the Discovery Network

By AllOfUs

The collapse of the patent system!

US Patent # 6,293,874

I predict a major war between corporations and the multitude over intellectual property rights similar to the copyright war between the multitude and new artists on one side, and the mainstream cultural establishment (Hollywood, Sony etc.) on the other. This war will destroy the patent system as we know it.




SCENARIO

1) We are moving towards a Knowhow Economy NOT towards a Knowledge Economy

• the Internet technology enhances communication, collaboration and coordination , which gives an economical advantage to open and social entities, which in turn means that sharing information and knowledge becomes a better strategy than controlling and going for it alone.
• knowledge becomes slippery, leaky, hard to control, it "wants to be free"
• the model to extract value from society will be primarily based on knowhow, but also on who you know and on how many people you know.

Having the recipe (knowledge) doesn't mean you are able to make (knowhow) the cake!
The world is NOT short on ideas, it is rather short on people who do stuff.

2) We already see the emergence of the open enterprise and of open collaborative communities of innovation. A good source of information is the P2P Fundation.

Creative Commons is on the raise. Creative Commons is a parallel system emerging out of the conflict between the multitude and the mainstream media/culture establishment. The multitude said: fine, keep your junk for yourself, we'll design our own framework for creation and distribution, and we'll create a separate pool of value which we'll exchange based on our new framework.

3) As more and more individuals move towards open standards and Creative Commons, sooner or later we'll have an open community pushing an open "something" on the market, for which there happens to be a patent. People part of open communities usually don't do the boring and painful patent searching to see if their ideas are already protected, they are too busy co-innovating! The company holding the patent in question will try to defend it, because the open community constitutes an economical threat. The conflict will be inevitable because the two practices of commercialization are incompatible.

3) The legal battle: They closed down Napster and they punished individuals caught downloading music for free. But everyone soon realized that it is easier to win the lottery than to be sued for having downloaded a song. They tried all sorts of fear tactics which in the end proved to be unsuccessful. Gradually, the artists themselves started to realize that the open model actually benefits them. New models of remuneration emerged, which were in tune with the new media. But let's go back to our problem, in our case, who is the company going to sue? Suppose that the open community is a diffuse entity with no head office; not registered as a legal entity. Suppose it is just a bunch of passionate scientists and engineers collaborating to find solutions to solve socially relevant problems; an ad hoc, fluid group based on a wiki (this one for example, or this one, or a million others). As a social entity it looks much like the file-sharing community. Moreover, once the open community launches an open "something" as Creative Commons, this thing will be picked up by hundreds if not thousands of other entities around the world, part of different jurisdictions. It will make no sense, economically speaking,  for the company owning the patent to defend it.

This is the flow... A new culture is emerging. Knowledge becomes free. The way we extract value from our knowledge is by our knowhow associated with it. Patents will die! We need to adapt.

See other reasons in this document "Why patenting doesn't make economical sense anymore"



Visit Multitude Innovation, read about the Discovery Network
See SENSORICA, an open enterprise making open hardware. 

By AllOfUs

The WikiLeaks Revolution!

The Multitude Movement will take new proportions if the US Government decides to press criminal charges against Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.

Federal authorities are investigating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange violated criminal laws in the group's release of government documents, including possible charges under the Espionage Act, sources familiar with the inquiry said Monday. The Washington Post

The case will certainly go up to the Supreme Court, sparking a massive social debate on governance. Our philosophy on politics, diplomacy and international relations, secrecy vs access to information and freedom of speech, and many others, will be forever changed .

The cabal behind the Anglo-American empire is damage control mode, instead of taking care of business as usual, projecting their power over the globe. Another important aspect of the new reality, the elites have lost their ability to communicate effectively. Paranoia set's in.... They know now that lies cannot circulate freely anymore, without being exposed in an effective time!  

The Anglo-American empire is in free fall.
The diplomatic cables leak touches the ecosystem of the Anglo-American empire. This historical event unbalances the fragile system of relations set in place and maintained by the shadow government. Even if their puppets in charge of other nations are still at their service, they will find it increasingly difficult to enforce their will on their local populations. The reputation of some US politicians tarnished by these leaks is only a minor problem, which can be rapidly solved by replacing them. The major problem, the one that corporate media doesn't expose, covering it with a pile of diversions, is the ability of the Anglo-American empire to sustain itself, to sustain the very complex and fragile web of relations it is built on. It is imploding financially, economically, and now diplomatically.

 

Visit The Balance of Power 

By AllOfUs

Seth Godin on the tribes we lead

By AllOfUs

ReMade: The Rebirth of the Maker Movement

The multitude movement takes over innovation and production. 

The economy belongs to the MULTITUDE!

ReMade: The Rebirth of the Maker Movement (1st Trailer) from Electromagnate on Vimeo.

By AllOfUs

Better Means, a multitude initiative to production

BetterMeans proposes a very similar model to the Discovery Network.

"The Open Enterprise is a new organizational design. Unlike organizations using traditional management structures, Open Enterprises replace the command and control hierarchy with a meritocracy based on collaboration and open participation.

Organizations that adopt this new organizational structure can make decisions faster and respond quicker to their markets. They look more like living dynamic networks, and less like pyramids. People working in these organizations will have (and feel) more ownership. They’re more engaged in their work, and have the freedom to work on what they want, when they want to. Most importantly this model enables people to once again bring their full humanity – values, beliefs and passions – to the workplace, removing disconnect between organizational and personal values."

Visit Economical Alternatives

Visit Multitude Innovation and the Discovery Network 

By AllOfUs

Michel Bauwens from P2P Fundation

I think I could not articulate Multitude Innovation, nor the philosophy behind my Multitude Project better than Michel Bauwens. 

Crowdfunding Science

What a great example of multitude movement action! Scientific development IS controlled by large centralized institutions for different motives. As in communism with a planned economy, which led to disaster, we are living in a society with planned science, which is moving fast towards disaster. Scientific development and innovation must be open! Regulations must only apply to the use of new knowledge, not to its development.


ANDREA GAGGIOLI AND GIUSEPPE RIVA propose Crowdfunding Science:

We suggest crowd-funding as a possible strategy to cope with the lack of investments in research, as well as to increase democratization in the sciences. Projects seeking funding could be stored in an online repository. Each project would include a description of its objectives, duration, and requested contribution. Investors (either people or funding agencies) could decide which projects to fund. Read more in this letter to Science...  

Andrea further adds:

The closest example of crowdfunding science is Cancer Research UK's MyProjects scheme. Launched in October 2008, MyProjects allows Cancer Research UK donors to search projects by type of cancer and location to find a specific research project to donate money.

See also S.C.I.En.C.E.

SCIEnCE – Share Collaborative Ideas, Enact Cooperative Efforts – is part of the growing movement dedicated to encouraging public sharing of testable ideas. Not just ideas, but plans of action – ideas will be developed into specific, step-by-step proposals via Wiki-inspired community editing. A new system for attributing credit will be used to distribute funding for SCIEnCE projects. The projects outlined by these collaboratively written proposals will be tackled with a cooperative experimental approach. Society will benefit much more from the ensuing scientific and medical progress than any individual could benefit from the prestige of doing it first and doing it alone. 

By AllOfUs