GDT Environment Foundation

GDT Environment Foundation | Application of the Scientific Method | SM Outcome: Areas of Development and Project | Develpment Ideology; Business Rules | Meetings | Index To Topics | Resources | Wiki Use Help ^(edit)

As it develops, this page (and any subpages) will come to represent the current and future direction of the Global Development Team, including detailed documentation on the long-proposed foundational approach and global role that the GDT expects to play in bringing together a world-class, RBE-centric, community serving & public-facing master FOSS project, providing exceptionally complete support to all projects that form around the global system's approach, which will also be well documented here.

Introduction

The purpose of this project is the establishment of a foundation where upon the Global Development Team can function according to its goals and objectives. This is best understood by reviewing this page, and About the Dev Team, which details these goals and objectives.

A foundation can be defined as the underlying structure where upon something is built, upon which supporting strength and all imaginable needs can be added so as to remain current in the world of Internet Technology. For the GDT, this foundation would be a location with a communication system, and a collection of tools, software, and technologies necessary for the building of the infrastructure that would be needed by a global movement to carry out its activities of directing and implementing the global changes postulated by the movement.

We see that the essence of a successful movement now rests upon the movement's membership, as the various actors of the process, and upon a well-grounded Global Development Team that can build the complete infrastructure for the membership to work in. It is understood that countless activities will translate into action outside the Internet, which the membership will carry out based on its plans and objectives, and the Internet structure is a vital component for this entire process.

Global Developers' Team Mission Statement

The Developers Team's primary short and medium range goals focus on facilitating and innovating a broad scope of intelligent applications and automation tools to further enhance the functionality of the Movement's websites and related communication technologies and projects. This often includes database development, general programming and custom applications for various purposes, but with a strong focus on inter-connectivity. For many projects, the approach will center around a highly modular, adjustable focus, allowing our results to be reused for a variety of team and chapter needs. Long-range goals include the development of the entire community network into the first 'intelligent social-cybernated system' prototype, where all community sites and resources are fully interconnected and as automated as we can make them, given current technologies, as well as the development of a full internal and external FOSS community, where everything we develop and create is then shared freely with the rest of the world. This Team is open for anyone who wishes to contribute. This includes people who are knowledgeable in all web and program developing languages, interface experts, conceptualizers, beta testers, functionality documenters, etc.

Five Years in the Making

The goals and purposes of the Global Developers Team haven't changes since its birth. Yet, as we examine its progress throughout all this time, we find that applications, communication channels, web sites, and activities, which are the driving source of the shape of the foreseen future of the movement, tend to parallel the reality generated by upper echelons of the hierarchy, and below that, the members' interpretation of the goals and purpose of the movement's zeitgeist as manifest by the prevailing projects which seem to primarily focus on the dissemination of information about the zeitgeist of the world. The general ZM's literature, films, radio show, and articles seem to accurately represent the zeitgeist of the world, while the movement's zeitgeist has a sufficiently different texture, as to not completely bind the two perspectives together, hampering the development of a plan to work on the Zeitgeist of the planet. Thus a conflict arises that can only produce a nebulous panorama of the future, and as such it creates a variety of factions within the movement.

The zeitgeist of the world was clear since the birth of the movement and it was clearly expressed and exposed in the movie, "Zeitgeist: Addendum." In it, the solutions were also clearly presented as A Resource-Based Economy.

The split between the ZM and the Venus Project, did not help matters, and itself was a somewhat debilitating blow to both entities and resulted in shifting the purposes in importance and direction. The urgency of moving forward, which was like a floating energy in the air wherever one came to meet, ebbed. The sense of urgency vanished, and the level of activity seemed to decrease.

Now we are going to try to resolve this by talking about creating a foundation for the GDT. But the advancement of the GDT depends not only on the technical personnel and the tools with which to create an infrastructure for the movement, but in a relatively clear panorama in the minds of members everywhere. Otherwise, the only viable products can be predicted to be those that parallel the movement's zeitgeist, and not the zeitgeist of the world.

Therefore, in defining what a technical foundation should be, we must also examine and clarify, or create, the process of how to manage the zeitgeist of the world.

Resource-Based Economy

For a truly global movement to be formed and become the spearhead of world reform, a binding idea should be understood and defined. The Zeitgeist Movement took on the RBE concept presented by Fresco. RBE has the advantage of needing to be defined to anyone first coming in contact with it, thus, reducing misunderstandings that arise through association to existing ideas. On the other hand, little has been discussed to generate a plan concrete enough to where some semblance of a transition can even be imagined.

In the Mission Statement at the Zeitgeist Movement site, the following was written, as of January 2012, and it represents a refinement of earlier wordings:

While intermediate Reform steps and temporal Community Support are of interest to The Movement, the defining goal here is the installation of a new socioeconomic model based upon technically responsible Resource Management, Allocation and Distribution through what would be considered The Scientific Method of reasoning problems and finding optimized solutions.

This "Resource-Based Economic Model" is about taking a direct technical approach to social management as opposed to a Monetary or even Political one. It is about updating the workings of society to the most advanced and proven methods Science has to offer, leaving behind the damaging consequences and limiting inhibitions which are generated by our current system of monetary exchange, profits, corporations and other structural and motivational components.

While fortunately we are in somewhat of a flexible position in that we needn't create the tools that rigidly follow a well-defined plan, we have an even bigger job, in that we need to provide an even wider variety of tools to accommodate the several conceivable paths the movement might have to take in the process of implementing a new socioeconomic model. We need to think ahead of what the world zeitgeist wants, and to an extent, guide it by presenting the ways and means to get there. We are charged with the building of an edifice for immediate present, and for the future, by anticipating the possible requirements, and extending a variety of "what if" conditions, to provide alternate routes.

Consequently, this is another important topic that must be considered by the GDT Environment Foundation.

Motivational Thrust

Refocusing on the Objectives of Global Socio-Economic Change

Whether you follow the ideology of Peter Joseph, David Icke, the Occupy movement, or any of hundreds of thousands of projects and ideas for global reform on behalf of humanity, you now know, if even as a vague urgency, that in regard to the need for Global Socioeconomic Change there is incontrovertible unanimous agreement among the multitudes that now have grown far in excess of the critical mass required for activating and coordinating reform in almost all areas of life one cares to think about.

Timing and Window of Opportunity

Ultimately, each individual has to act according to his personal convictions and understanding of what's going on in the world and how these things are going to affect him and his family over a period of time. Most people don't have or feel a moral imperative to work to avert catastrophes that befall others, even in the near term. Most are not even aware they exist. So, the work actually has to be carried out by a handful of clearly focused individuals (maybe ten, or a hundred, or a thousand) who have already made their personal analyses and conclusions about the timing and windows of opportunities.

These individuals will have concluded that the best striking time is now, 2012, and over the next five to six or eight years. If an important dent isn't achieved within that period, the work will grow significantly more difficult and practically impossible beyond that.

It is from within this group of focused individuals that the work can actually be done. You know if you are such an individual. This individual often wonders if his sense of urgency is clearly justified when watching the world around acting as if there’s plenty of time. This individual observes those living in the world who don't see the need for carefully planning with calculated time lines, but going on in traditional ways, succumbing to ego and the need for power and leadership, often advancing their own personal ideals as the only way to which they must bend others to follow. One then wonders if the urgency is only a delusion of just a few mavericks.

But coldly calculated mathematical odds and logic clearly dictate the path of the maverick. Consider the odds if ours is a grossly miscalculated overly-short timing of the window of opportunity; and, in fact, there turns out to be fifty of even another hundred years before things become irreversible? Are we going to feel unhappy that we brought about the key changes too early? How would we feel if we followed the trends of a carefree, more comfortable lifestyle, doing only just enough to have the emotional satisfaction of ‘doing all we could’ after the irreversibility of events and shortness of the timing of our window of opportunity become clear.

The world continues in motion. The powerful already understand the danger a free and open Internet will mean to their interests. Thus, we understand why many governments and super-national corporations are advancing attacks to restrain it; first, with the ‘kill switch’ that they believe the President should have, about which legislation lays dormant but we can expect to resurface every few months. Then, there’s the recent anti-piracy proposals that titter on the brink of approval, delayed only by public outcry. With the Internet gone, our chance of global change is nearly unattainable. Minimally, this will set the course of reform well beyond anyone's ability to reverse the harmful trends which are in relentless motion towards unthinkable probabilities.

The Core Group that must Drive the Movement

If you're among the mavericks that can see more clearly, you have already achieved some level of transcendence above the status quo, and to a degree you have debunked for himself or herself some of the fundamental social beliefs that lock people in traditional modes of viewing reality. This gives you a degree of flexibility, the ability to transcend old realities into new viewpoints and not get stuck on ‘rightness’. This gives you patience and the ability to learn and examine new ideas.

As this person, you have a strong sense and ability to apply the scientific method of observation and practice, which could easily allow evolutions of solutions towards ever-improving life situations.

Those not generally aligned with these principles can't really participate with any degree of dedication or regularity necessary, for whatever reasons they have given themselves. Even so, these people will provide some needed support and contributions down the line, as activities are identified, planned, and executed.

But the future is in the hands of those who choose to work to create it now.

Can you be one of the pioneers?

Structure—Scientific Method

This group is an experiment of what we aspire in our social interchanges, where 'solutions are arrived at' through the Scientific Method, and consequently, beyond these initial guidelines, when you signal acceptance upon joining this effort, no 'leader' or personality can stand above others as an authority. Many things will have to be defined and spelled out, and we hope this will take place as part of the initial discussions.

A structure is always subject to purpose and function. This we can separate into tasks and issues, such as levels of importance, priorities, organization of objects, ideas, and so forth.

In general, we can make some general initiatives about some of the foundation objects or ideas:

1. Communication Policy

1. Methods of organization, in tagging, and categorizing

1. Rules of Editing other's contributions

1. Categories and Tag Standards (possibly from an existing set)

1. Security. In addition to server and other hardware and software security, we need to consider the social environment, and set up methods of internal security of information, and behavior.

Follow up on more details will surface as we move through the SM as applied to our activities, in the SM section.

Welcome to add comments and contributions...

After this point, as initial method of participation, kindly enter your comments by editing the "Discussion" tab of this document. It is located between "Page" and "Edit" in the second light blue menu bar. That information and comments in that discussion, will provide a guide to this wiki's organizer to set up the necessary facilities to move forward.

GDT Environment Foundation | Application of the Scientific Method | SM Outcome: Areas of Development and Project | Develpment Ideology; Business Rules | Meetings | Index To Topics | Resources | Wiki Use Help ^(edit)