Utopias. The Global Village

• Survey of past and present utopian to experiments

• Humans have for ever chased paradise. The utopia. The place that doesn't exist. The quest for El Dorado. Etc.

It's never been reached - but we could say we are getting there. The world is getting better. Violence is decreasing. Technology is improving. But meaning in human lives is somewhat down as we get disconnected from nature and from connection to the natural resources from which all of our prosperity comes.

Our goal is a next honest stab at utopia - by adding one more item to the human equation: cooperation. Specifically - open source economic cooperation.

Cooperation today does not exist in practice. It is abundant in theory only. In reality - corporations - the most powerful institutions in existence - feed governments - and corporations themselves are fed by proprietary research and development, and patents. As much as we have learned in kindergarten that we should share - we don't in practice. Proprietary information, patents, and trade secrets are the norm, and have been so for the last 2 centuries. No new pattern is on the horizon for generic cooperation on the business front - even though Linux has shown the feasiblity of cooperation in producing software.

So with this playing field, we set out on our mission to introduce cooperative enterprise. Meaning freely published, economically significant information that anyone can use to start a business. Cooperatives are not cooperative enterprises to the outside world - they cooperate within, but do not produce freely accessible information that others can use to start a business.

We think that collaborative enterprise - where blueprints for products and enterprises are avialable to all - is the missing link in society's current evolution.

Attaining such a state would mean that people began to appreciate helping everyone in the world - not only their company.

We give a name to this economic model, and live by it: Distributive Enterprise. We feel that it is worthwhile to produce an infrastructure within civilization where such a model could thrive. We are working on building an infastructure where such a model could live.

To this end, we have created the notion of a Global Village Construction Set - a set of the 50 most important industrial machines that can produce a complete economy. And the knowledge base that allows this technology base to create all the products in civilization.

We are about 5% done with the set if we consider economic viability of its products. And to go further, we are building an OSE Campus where we both develop and use these tools. So they become highly replicable.

This is our way to build not only a Global Village to reinvent the world - but a model that can be replicated far and wide.