Wings for Wisdom

This thread is made to discuss the basic idea of Wings for Wisdom.

What you think of it (is it good or absurd?, is it possible?), how can it be improved (your criticism and suggestions), and what kind of actions are needed to bring the idea into reality.

Don't be shy and let all your thoughts burst out.

Oups, sorry, I meant the article "Wings for Wisdom, the Idea" at
http://www.wiserearth.org/article/b3a22d4d18324ceecd7c7eb81b151002/group/wings_for_wisdom

That's a very good point Curt.

The "free" I origionally meant was exactly that, anyone can read the book, at the very least the digital version of it, at no cost (provided that they have access to an internet connected PC and can afford the connection cost).

To solve this problem, actually I have another idea I'm brewing to complement Wings for Wisdom, which is about making libraries available through out the world for every neighbourhood of say, 1000 households. Within those libraries are internet-connected PCs. Users of the library can request the library to print out the book for lending at a cost. This way, a book will only be printed when someone will actually read it, and when it's printed, the hard copy of the book will be maintained by the library for other patrons to read (also at a cost). This solution would also solve the "distribution" problem you mentioned, because the cost of the printing will be shared among patrons borrowing and reading each book.

Another thing I had in mind is to use a fraction of the money recovered from lending the book to be sent back to the author of the book. This would be a more direct financial relationship between authors and readers. One library won't matter that much, if we're thinking this on a global scale, that's a pretty big sum to support the work of our best authors.

This is the solution I had in mind for the books we wish to set free, the most important books, of which time delay between writing and wide-ranging readership would reduce our chance in winning the race.

I'm still brewing the idea for the "Libraries for All". Hope I can share it soon with you for inputs and actions. But what I've just described will be one of it's main features. Another main feature would be how those libraries can support the work done by publishing houses (which is critical in complementing the work of authors).

I hope that can answer your concern.

Any more ideas to deal with this folks? or any other questions and suggestions? I think we need to test and refine the idea of Wings for Wisdom before moving into action (advocacy, or financially).

Actually, I want to share with you a little experiment I did last month.

I tried talking to an author of a very important book and his publisher on the idea of Wings for Wisdom with no result. The reaction was dead cold "sorry, we are not going to be able to participate in your project".

Here's the list of questions I put forward to the publisher (after explaining briefly about Wings for Wisdom):

- If a global fund to pay for the free digital release of on of your books is available, how much would it take for you to do so? This is to keep in mind so that the amount should be enough to cover all of the cost incurred in publishing a book (royalty fee, operational, distribution, future growth of the company, etc) during it's copyright
effective term.

- If the fund is available, would it be a good reason for your company to set free one of your book? Would there be other requirements you would like to be fulfilled? Or is it simply an "absolutely no!"?

- Is there any other negative side effect of releasing the digital version of the book for free other than financial loss?

- And a rather sentimental question: Must you wait for the book to become obsolete and not saleable to set the book free? (like some or even many books in Project Gutenberg which dates back to the nineteenth century)

- Or to put it the other way around, if you believe your book is one of those most important books of all time, or of our time, do you believe that the for-profit copyright system with it's distribution model can educate the widest audience possible fast enough? (keeping in mind the rise of the internet around the world to cheaply or freely distribute the book).

Any thoughts on this folks? Where I might have gone wrong, or where Wings for Wisdom may just be a bad idea? Especially if you have experiences with the pubilshing world.

> I tried talking to an author of a very important book and his publisher
> on the idea of Wings for Wisdom with no result. The reaction was dead
> cold "sorry, we are not going to be able to participate in your project".

I think we have to advance the concept of "eminent domain" aka "compulsory purchase" to cover intellectual property. The idea being that the owner of the property be required to sell to the government or possibly to a non-profit purchaser at a reasonable price. The top 300 copyright protected books at a reasonable price would not be that expensive on a global scale. Or I think not. My guess is that it would run less than a million USD per book on average. Do we have a way to discover this number? The indirect economic value to the world of freeing up these books would be much greater (imho), and the direct educational value incalculable.

Looks like this idea is out there big time already. A google seach on "eminent domain" "intellectual property" has almost a million hits.

Hey, all:

This is an excellent idea, for several reasons. Just knowing what others in the field regard as valuable is very useful. Seeing these titles suggest many books yet to be read, and soon. Opening up and freeing up the power of words in a time of crisis, to help speed solutions and avoid some of the almost otherwise inevitable consequences, is a real urgent reason. Focusing attention on the most useful writing has a down side, since others are watching what we do and say, but preempting them with information may be among the best weapons we could imagine. The "memory hole" is not unimaginable--you just did.

I find it impossible to suggest 10 titles to be made free, since that would slight 100s of others just as deserving. For me, it is a real Solomon-like trial, in a backwards sort of way. Whom do you free first?

I wonder how the literary world will respond to such a call. The music industry has already fallen on hard times due to the easy access to digital music, so that may be a cautionary tale to book publishers.

Wisdom, as light, is in short supply in many areas, the lights are out everywhere you look, and there are some essentially black holes where no wisdom survives at all, so anything we can do to reverse the trend has real value.

David
Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

More on eminent domain for intellectual property - here is the big picture of corporate dominance that needs to be shifted: - great article posted on Common Dreams.

Only One Reason to Grant a Corporate Charter
by David Korten
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/08/5710/
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=2171

I am going to copy the whole thing here. It speaks in one section about the need to free up information.

Published on Saturday, December 8, 2007 by YES! Magazine
Only One Reason to Grant a Corporate Charter
by David Korten

This is an expanded version of a presentation given to the Summit on the Future of the Corporation, Faneuil Hall, Boston, MA, November 13, 2007:

It is fitting that we hold this conversation on the future of the corporation in historic Faneuil Hall, the Cradle of Liberty. Deliberations in this very room more than 200 years ago were the first step on a long walk away from a king named George that launched a new nation and led ultimately to the end of monarchy. May the success of our forbears inspire us in our deliberations on the future of the private-benefit corporation.

The Big Picture

I recall my business school professors many years ago calling us to look at the big picture to identify the systemic cause of whatever immediate problem symptom captured our attention. We would do well to apply this wisdom as we look ahead to the role of the private-benefit corporation in a profoundly troubled 21st century. We must identify the deep systemic causes of the social and environmental crises unfolding all around us-no matter how troubling the resulting conclusions may be. Here is the big picture in brief outline.

1. Consumption: Growth in human consumption resulting from a combination of population growth and growth in consumption per capita is depleting the natural life support system of the planet, disrupting hydrology and climate systems, and threatening human survival.
2. Inequality: Unconscionable and growing concentration of financial power in a world engaged in an ever more intense competition for a declining base of material wealth is eroding the social fabric to the point of widespread social breakdown.
3. Institutional Pathology: The most powerful institutions on the planet, global financial markets and the transnational corporations that serve them, are dedicated to growing consumption and inequality. They convert real capital into financial capital to increase the relative economic power of those who live by money, while depressing the wages of those who produce real value through their labor. They offer palliatives that leave the deeper cause of our potentially terminal environmental and social crises untouched, because they are the cause.

Our future depends on a dramatic cultural and institutional transformation to reduce aggregate consumption and achieve an equitable distribution of economic power.It requires an epic institutional transformation to:

1. Reduce aggregate human consumption.
2. Redistribute financial power from rich to poor to achieve an equitable distribution of Earth’s life-sustaining wealth.
3. Increase economic efficiency by reallocating material resources from harmful to beneficial uses. Examples include reallocation from military to health care and environmental rejuvenation, from automobiles to public transportation, from suburban sprawl to compact communities, from conversion to reclamation of forest and agricultural land, from advertising to education, and from global financial speculation to investment in self-reliant local economies.
4. Invest in the regeneration of the living human, social, and natural capital that is the foundation of all real wealth. This requires reversing the current process of converting the real wealth of living capital into the fictitious wealth of financial capital and accepting the resulting negative returns to financial capital. It may take us awhile to recognize that just as increasing financial capital at the expense of living capital makes us collectively poorer, increasing living capital at the expense of financial capital makes us collectively richer.
5. Accelerate social innovation, adaptation, and learning by nurturing cultural diversity and removing intellectual property rights impediments to the free and open flow of beneficial knowledge.

These are imperatives of the 21st century and it is difficult to identify a constructive role in addressing them for the private-benefit corporation-a term for any corporation chartered solely to serve the narrow and exclusive private financial interests of its investors and top managers.

The Private-Benefit Corporation

The private-benefit corporation is an institution granted a legally protected right-some would claim obligation-to pursue a narrow private interest without regard to broader social and environmental consequences. If it were a real person, it would fit the clinical profile of a sociopath.

The basic design of the private-benefit corporation was created in 1600 when the British crown chartered the British East India Company as what is best described as a legalized criminal syndicate to colonize the resources and economies of distant lands to benefit wealthy investors far removed from the social and environmental consequences. That design has ever since proven highly effective in advancing the private interests of the world’s wealthiest people at enormous cost to the rest.

The private-benefit corporation uses its economic power to privatize (internalize) gains and socialize (externalize) cost. The resulting concentration of wealth creates an illusion that wealth is being created, when the actual consequence is a net destruction of real wealth. It is an institutional form best suited to achieving outcomes exactly the opposite of those we humans must now pursue.

The only legitimate reason for a government to issue a corporate charter giving a group of private investors a legally protected right to aggregate and concentrate virtually unlimited economic power under unified management is to serve a well-defined public purpose under strict rules of public accountability. This defines a public-benefit corporation, which can be chartered as either for-profit or not-for-profit. The private-benefit corporation is an institutional anomaly, a creation of monarchy that properly shares monarchy’s historic fate.

A New Economy

The work at hand necessarily goes well beyond redesigning the private-benefit corporation to hold it accountable for its harms. We need to bring forth a new economy designed to value and nurture life in all its many forms and unleash the full creative potential of the human species to this end. Organization theory suggests that such an economy will necessarily be decentralized, self-organizing, and grounded in principles of cooperation and mutual caring free from the distorting influence of the massive concentrations of centrally controlled and managed economic power the private-benefit corporation makes possible. This suggests a planetary system of self-reliant community-based economies comprised of locally rooted, human-scale enterprises that engage in balanced, rule-based fair trade at the margin.

As with any other segment of public life, markets must have a framework of rules defined and enforced by democratically accountable governments to secure the public interest. The freer the economy from distorting concentrations of economic and political power subject to abuse by the ethically challenged, the smaller such governments can be.

Business enterprise is integral to any economy. Business enterprises, however, may take many legal forms that confer no special rights or privileges beyond those of any natural person and properly limit the concentration of unaccountable economic power. These forms include cooperatives, partnerships, sole proprietorships, and special for-profit corporations with charters designed to balance public and private interests.

Each of these legal enterprise forms is more consistent with the beneficial function of markets than are global-scale transnational private-benefit corporations with internal centrally planned economies larger than the economies of most nations. Breaking up the larger private-benefit corporations into smaller component enterprises either rechartered as public-benefit corporations with clear public purposes or converted to non-corporate enterprise forms is an essential step toward restoring beneficial market discipline and responsible, rooted private ownership.

So where do we look for leadership in the monumental undertaking at hand? As continued denial of the reality of global climate change became untenable, private-benefit corporations turned from denial to an effort to turn the crisis into an opportunity to increase their profits. They are implementing energy cost savings and promoting carbon-trading schemes, ethanol subsidies, government guarantees for nuclear power, coal gasification, carbon sequestration, and other measures that treat symptoms within a business as usual framework of economic growth and financial returns to the already moneyed. Cutting costs through energy efficiency is clearly a positive contribution, but it must go well beyond the easy reductions that produce a quick increase in the financial bottom line.

Private-benefit corporations are not touching any proposal that would limit aggregate consumption or their own power. In its present form, the private-benefit corporation is incapable of voluntarily sacrificing profits to a larger public good. Yet this is exactly what would be required for them to provide leadership in reducing aggregate consumption, increasing equality, and redirecting the economy from producing what is profitable to producing what is needed for healthy children, families, communities, and nature.

Capitalism, which means quite literally rule by financial capital-by money and those who have it-in disregard of all non-financial values, has triumphed over democracy, markets, justice, life, and spirit. There are other ways to organize human societies to actualize the positive benefits of markets and private ownership. They require strong, active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce rules that assure costs are internalized, equity is maintained, and market forces are channeled to the service of democracy, justice, life, and spirit.

Leadership in advancing the deeper institutional changes essential to the human future must come from awakened citizens working from outside the existing institutions of elite power. This work begins with exposing the myths that blind us to the irreconcilable conflict between capitalism and democracy and to the potential of community-centered, life-serving market alternatives based on principles of responsible citizenship, community, and equity.

We are the people to whom the founders of our nation referred to as “We the People.” We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

David Korten is author of The Great Turning and When Corporations Rule to World. He is chair of YES! Magazine, where he writes frequently on issues of corporations and creating a living economy.

Hi Roger,

Thanks for dropping in your thoughts Roger. My apologies for not responding to it earlier.

As for the traction thing, I've tried to browse people within certain AoF that's relevant with Wings for Wisdom (W4W), namely "Access to Education", and actually managed to get a few of them join the group. However, not specific to W4W, but general to WiserEarth, is the fact that we currently have insufficient dynamics going on between the current 8000 or so users. And most users, just sign up, edit their profile, and never came back to WiserEarth for a long time (months).

Therefore, I decided to put off my activities in W4W, and shift my effort at making WiserEarth as a whole to be more attractive, usable and beneficial for users. I was quite busy setting up the WiserEarth Editors Group and improving the AoF taxonomy the past two months to help toward that end.

Check it out here if you're interested:
- WE Editors Group @ http://www.wiserearth.org/group/WiserEarthEditors (not made public yet)
- What If We Use the Earth Charter as a Guidance for the Taxonomy of WiserEarth's Areas of Focus? @ http://www.wiserearth.org/article/f1800201c074b24c9c18cb1e8275e9c6

Once we have enough active users, at least 100k, coming from diverse backgrounds with diverse interests, I think we will have a much more fertile soil to plant and grow our ideas Roger.

However, I did plan though, on regularly updating the "Projects Around the World on Setting Books Free" so that at least W4W will regularly come out on top in the Groups listing (which by default, is based on recent activity). Guess I'm not much of a multi-tasker.

But thanks for your excellent pointer on David Korten's article. I've read many of his work, but haven't found a point specifically addressing the need for a freer access to wisdom ("beneficial knowledge" in Korten's words) such as the one below:

"5. Accelerate social innovation, adaptation, and learning by nurturing cultural diversity and removing intellectual property rights impediments to the free and open flow of beneficial knowledge."

I noticed that GA is beginning to pick up traction within WiserEarth. Congratulations for your effort Roger. I will make sure that I learn from you on this. Or maybe you can share them here now?... pleaaasseee... :D

In the mean time, I'll try to update the mentioned wikipage regularly, and try to invite more users into W4W, while concentrating my effort on improving WiserEarth via the WiserEarth Editors Group.

Thanks again for believing in the idea of Wings for Wisdom Roger. Though I'm putting in more or less on hold at the moment, I'm still far from giving up on it myself.

Best wishes,
Bowo
# A thought of inviting Mr. Korten himself to join WiserEarth and join this group came up, which I'll surely do in the future when we have a bare minimum dynamics going on within the group. Thanks again Roger!

One other thing - if the font sizes on WE were increased one level, I think that would help. Lawyers use "fine print" in the expectation that no one will actually read it. Just a suggestion to help get WE off the ground.