Collaborative Singularity
General OSE Concepts
The point in history when humans have learned to collaborate. It is a singularity - a unique condition - in that it marks the opposite of Western civilization to date, which relies on competition in its economic system. This competition manifests as the polar opposites - of prosperity for some, and deprivation for many others.
The collaborative singularity can be seen as the opposite of the Technological Singularity - which does not rely on collaboration for its attainment, thus making its outcomes potentially dangerous. The inclusion of collaboration in human enterprise marks a turning point towards benign human development in harmony with both natural life support systems and anthropogenic technological systems.
The collaborative singularity refers specifically to the ability of humans to collaborate. However, collaboration in the OSE sense refers to economically-significant development - ie, re-making the infrastructures of civilization. As such, collaborative singularity is a critical feature of the Open Source Economy. OSE considers the collaborative singularity as the next explicit personal and political evolutionary stepping stone of civilization. The collaborative singularity provides an important point to the completion of Darwinian evolution - a theory that is currently missing the collaborative aspects of change. See Darwin.
Now wait a minute - doesn't open collaboration exist everywhere already? Far from it - in a global sense. It is more about systeming dumbing down of society, as opposed to access to rapid learning - which can be considered synonymous with open collaboration. Here is a discussion on the limited nature of collaboration and its related downward selection pressure upon society:
In Science
- Unfortunately - scientific research is not open - [1]
In Product Development
- The closest may be the Internet of Production Alliance. Unlike OSE, it does not have a protocol for generating design libraries of modular, interchangeable parts, and it has no collaborative product development protocols for Distributed Market Substition - but it's a great effort at showcasing at standardizing open hardware work. The branding is not open source centric.
