Joseph P. Jackson III

Enlightenment 2.0: Unleashing the Open Science and Open Source Innovation Revolutions

The 21st century is off to a rocky start, and as economic and ecological crises converge, there is no shortage of dire predictions. On the other hand, politicians and pundits point to the expectation that Science and Technology will let humanity invent its way out of the problems we’ve created. This rosy outlook ignores a deep crisis that has been brewing and could hamstring our innovative capacity when we most urgently need it.

Despite nostalgic myths that Science is the realm of open inquiry, reasoned debate, and the pursuit of objective truth, it has always been politicized, though never to the dangerous degree attained just in the past decade. The viciousness of the fight over embryonic stem cell research, the conflict over creationism, and the politics of climate change are unprecedented new lows.

In the last ten years, a collection of burgeoning movements has begun the herculean task of overhauling the outmoded institutions and worldviews that make up our global scientific governance system. Imagine a vastly accelerated research, development, and commercialization cycle using an entire Open Innovation process from start to finish. In the best case scenario, a virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing shifts toward transparency and collaboration could unleash hitherto untapped reserves of human ingenuity.

Joseph P. Jackson III is a philosopher, entrepreneur, activist, and organizer in the Open Science Movement. His goal is to assist the emergence of a new political-economic paradigm that enables sustainable prosperity for all based on distributed, decentralized, appropriate technologies, fully hackable and modifiable to suit the needs of users.