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The parent poster is very informative, and practical, although misses the open source point as a cultural thing, as well as does not discuss the issue of open standards, which may be even more important than open source for a big project (since with open standards, you can at least replace tools over time).

Also, since much work related to rocketry is considered some form of munitions, that is another stumbling block. Although hopefully OpenLuna can avoid most of those issues and focus on the habitat aspect?

But there is one other aspect that is even more important than CAD, and this is simulation and related standards for storing that data connected to simulations. And there are all sorts of simulation tools emphasizing all sorts of different things at all sorts of different levels of detail. And there are all sorts of very interesting simulations that can be made about how to make things that have both on-Earth benefits and advance the cause of making space habitats.

Take for example these ideas for the US National Institute of Standards And Technologies:
"Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
"The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine. To document and monitor these changes, US industry will require key resources and methods that will enable it to measure sustainability along several dimensions (such as carbon foot print, energy accounting and recyclability of materials) allowing accurate assessment of status and progress."

That is exactly the kind of information you need in designing a space habitat too, whether on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or even anywhere on Earth (like under the sea, or in Antarctica, or in the desert).

Over the last ten years this paper I co-wrote for the Space Studies Institute conference on space manufacturing has gone from unimaginable to mostly obsolete, now that so many people are doing open source design. :-)
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

But, one big issue to consider is to save design costs, you ideally need a good simulation framework for doing virtual testing of concepts. And to do detailed simulations, you ideally might need millions of people to donate spare CPU cycles. If you can get to the point where you can launch an automated seed factory to the moon that would then build infrastructure, all you would need is a billion dollars to build it and launch it (which hundreds of individuals could swing today). But to get to that point you need a credible design. Getting that design together, with as much virtual testing as possible, is something that could productively occupy many people for years, and the best value for a small group might be to put together enough seed information to make the equivalent (maybe not web based) of a Wikipedia of space habitation and open manufacturing information. Three fizzled attempts by me in those directions from years gone by (roughly two, ten, and twenty years ago, respectively):
http://www.oscomak.net/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

James P. Hogan, the sci-fi writer, has been a big inspiration to me, especially with these with two books:

The parent poster is very informative, and practical, although misses the open source point as a cultural thing, as well as does not discuss the issue of open standards, which may be even more important than open source for a big project (since with open standards, you can at least replace tools over time).

Also, since much work related to rocketry is considered some form of munitions, that is another stumbling block. Although hopefully OpenLuna can avoid most of those issues and focus on the habitat aspect?

But there is one other aspect that is even more important than CAD, and this is simulation and related standards for storing that data connected to simulations. And there are all sorts of simulation tools emphasizing all sorts of different things at all sorts of different levels of detail. And there are all sorts of very interesting simulations that can be made about how to make things that have both on-Earth benefits and advance the cause of making space habitats.

Take for example these ideas for the US National Institute of Standards And Technologies:
"Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
"The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine. To document and monitor these changes, US industry will require key resources and methods that will enable it to measure sustainability along several dimensions (such as carbon foot print, energy accounting and recyclability of materials) allowing accurate assessment of status and progress."

That is exactly the kind of information you need in designing a space habitat too, whether on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or even anywhere on Earth (like under the sea, or in Antarctica, or in the desert).

Over the last ten years this paper I co-wrote for the Space Studies Institute conference on space manufacturing has gone from unimaginable to mostly obsolete, now that so many people are doing open source design. :-)
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

But, one big issue to consider is to save design costs, you ideally need a good simulation framework for doing virtual testing of concepts. And to do detailed simulations, you ideally might need millions of people to donate spare CPU cycles. If you can get to the point where you can launch an automated seed factory to the moon that would then build infrastructure, all you would need is a billion dollars to build it and launch it (which hundreds of individuals could swing today). But to get to that point you need a credible design. Getting that design together, with as much virtual testing as possible, is something that could productively occupy many people for years, and the best value for a small group might be to put together enough seed information to make the equivalent (maybe not web based) of a Wikipedia of space habitation and open manufacturing information. Three fizzled attempts by me in those directions from years gone by (roughly two, ten, and twenty years ago, respectively):
http://www.oscomak.net/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

James P. Hogan, the sci-fi writer, has been a big inspiration to me, especially with these with two books:

For US$400 million, people could create a Wikipedia of open technology and help the human race transition to a post-scarcity society. Instead we get a boat ride? (Not to say it is not a cool idea.)
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/index.htm

From our garden simulator help file:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/help100/00000136.htm
"The magic wand is used to grow plants, to pull all plants in a soil patch, to duplicate plants and soil patches, to rename plants, to reseed plants, and to place plants in stasis (or remove them from stasis). The tool actions associated with any tool can be changed in the tool editor."

You could also map action from other tools, like the "growcorder" onto the magic wand to use it for that functionality:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/help100/00000134.htm
    "The growcorder is used to scan, magnify, or scan and magnify garden objects to find out more information about them."

I guess the way our patent system works, we can expect a cease and desist order from Microsoft any day now for using the ideas we developed over a decade before them. :-)

From our garden simulator help file:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/help100/00000136.htm
"The magic wand is used to grow plants, to pull all plants in a soil patch, to duplicate plants and soil patches, to rename plants, to reseed plants, and to place plants in stasis (or remove them from stasis). The tool actions associated with any tool can be changed in the tool editor."

You could also map action from other tools, like the "growcorder" onto the magic wand to use it for that functionality:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/help100/00000134.htm
    "The growcorder is used to scan, magnify, or scan and magnify garden objects to find out more information about them."

I guess the way our patent system works, we can expect a cease and desist order from Microsoft any day now for using the ideas we developed over a decade before them. :-)

See also:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

A key idea of free and open source technologies is that they are ultimately so much better and easier to maintain, that if only one person in a thousand feels like contributing (say, with Debian), that makes more than enough productivity to support everyone.

But what about all the "slackers" who will consume without giving back? The answer is just, "So what?" Why not have pity on such people who are stuck in such an embarrassingly juvenile state of mind?

If a few can supply the many, then, so what of the slackers? Who cares? Why build a whole mythology around slackers? And surprisingly, there may be less slackers than one might expect, because when you have the freedom to make things your way, without a "boss", there is often a lot of fun to be had in making things. Just look at all the kids making free music for the internet these days. Or people writing web pages. :-)

Examples like the Israeli Kibbutzim have already shown in the past that even with hard manual labor, there are always a bunch of schmucks (like maybe even myself and my wife, or many others already working in non-profits :-)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html
who are willing to work hard even with apparent slackers in their face. Sure, Kibbutzim had problems with slackers, but modern automated robotic technology changes the nature of that situation:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=agricultural+robot
(and without bringing in migrant laborers to exploit and expose to pesticides). And how hard can it be to sit in your GPS-driven air-conditioned tractor and listen to free music? Or even make some more music of your own in between keeping an eye on how the robots are doing?

We're may be about to see an entire change *back* to the way things used to be.

This is the world the prospective college student is probably imagining these days as in their future -- or will be soon. :-) Robot tractors. Free music. GNU/Linux everywhere. Slackers who only take stuff and don't make stuff as being "so junior high" or "so nursing home". Essentially, these kids are imagining (or will soon) a John Lennon "Imagine" sort of world -- with abundance and security for all. With robot tractors able to get higher yields from less land and less water through precision farming, why fight so much about the agricultural fields or river water? With nanotech solar panels and nanotech near-perfect insulation, why fight about the oil fields?

Here is part of a sci-fi story about the flip side of that "Imagine" world kids are thinking about, where it all goes horribly wrong, say, with a Stanford-led elite unable to let go of a fear of scarcity, and instead using the robots to guard most of the world who are kept in "welfare" prison camps:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm

"Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the next zone and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed." There were a hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn around. Construction, blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train derailments, possible thunder storms, animal migrations and so on. They could be quite creative in their reasons. It was all part of their politeness. If you turned around you were fine. If you made any move in any direction other than the one suggested, you were immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only tried it twice.

To me, "post-scarcity" means the end of rationing the basics for everybody, where wha

1. How a NASA-based educational MMO should be designed.

Think Big. NASA's MMO network should eventually have a worldwide support involving hundreds to thousands of NASA personnel who seed content into the system or supervise the system in various ways. It might entail tens of thousands of server nodes as well as extensively involve users machines for local processing. Naturally, some parts of the operation of the system might be outsourced, like to Amazon's or Sun's pay-as-you-go virtualized cloud computing infrastructures. NASA's MMO framework should be he definitive place worldwide to go for manufacturing knowledge -- like Wikipedia only about how to make things and simulate them and develop software to control all that. Yes, there are some sites like Marshall Brain's "How Stuff Works" but this will eclipse those by several orders of magnitude in terms of detail (and people like him would be good consultants on content if they were willing to contribute under free licenses).

The entire thing should be done under a free and open source license, including all content contributions. This may entail getting all non-NASA participants to contribute a signed document about their involvement with the project.

It should be done by NASA cooperating with the existing leaders in the open source and free software projects, like by looking at SourceForge or FSF projects (many projects already exist for physic modeling and MMORGs in a variety of ways). Hiring an existing commercial MMO group creates two conflicts -- one is that this project could detract from a current online offering, the other is that there will be a temptation not to release the details of simulation technologies (And so keep huge chunks of the software or content proprietary) or to provide older packages other than what is being commercially promoted. There is lots of knowledge in the free and open source world on how to do big systems and how to write simulation software.

Been thinking about this on and off for over ten years (including kicking around some ideas with with Al Globus in the past, not that that means he endorses anything here).

See NASA pre-proposal from about ten years ago: "Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

See SSI paper of about seven years ago: "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

Knowledge should be stored in a RDF-like approach (similar to how our Pointrel data storage system works).
http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/

Open software architectures should be used, like our PataPata project tried (similar to Squeak or Python, maybe on Java):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/patapata

Overall architecture will be a hierarchy of simulated activities, structured across a loose meshwork of nodes. There will also be multiple levels of realism and detail.

It should be planned as incremental and evolutionary changes as hardware and software continue to improve -- in part from the use of this system itself for design and simulation.

2. How a NASA-based educational MMO should support both formal and informal education efforts.

Make a general learning tool usable by everyone; create safer filtered whitelisted subsets of it for use in classrooms. The use of an RDF-like approach helps support this kind of tagging and filtering across multiple data sources.

3. How a NASA-based educational MMO should connect to current and future NASA missions.

Add NASA data and knowledge to the system including detailed plans for NASA equipment. Participants will help desig

1. How a NASA-based educational MMO should be designed.

Think Big. NASA's MMO network should eventually have a worldwide support involving hundreds to thousands of NASA personnel who seed content into the system or supervise the system in various ways. It might entail tens of thousands of server nodes as well as extensively involve users machines for local processing. Naturally, some parts of the operation of the system might be outsourced, like to Amazon's or Sun's pay-as-you-go virtualized cloud computing infrastructures. NASA's MMO framework should be he definitive place worldwide to go for manufacturing knowledge -- like Wikipedia only about how to make things and simulate them and develop software to control all that. Yes, there are some sites like Marshall Brain's "How Stuff Works" but this will eclipse those by several orders of magnitude in terms of detail (and people like him would be good consultants on content if they were willing to contribute under free licenses).

The entire thing should be done under a free and open source license, including all content contributions. This may entail getting all non-NASA participants to contribute a signed document about their involvement with the project.

It should be done by NASA cooperating with the existing leaders in the open source and free software projects, like by looking at SourceForge or FSF projects (many projects already exist for physic modeling and MMORGs in a variety of ways). Hiring an existing commercial MMO group creates two conflicts -- one is that this project could detract from a current online offering, the other is that there will be a temptation not to release the details of simulation technologies (And so keep huge chunks of the software or content proprietary) or to provide older packages other than what is being commercially promoted. There is lots of knowledge in the free and open source world on how to do big systems and how to write simulation software.

Been thinking about this on and off for over ten years (including kicking around some ideas with with Al Globus in the past, not that that means he endorses anything here).

See NASA pre-proposal from about ten years ago: "Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

See SSI paper of about seven years ago: "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

Knowledge should be stored in a RDF-like approach (similar to how our Pointrel data storage system works).
http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/

Open software architectures should be used, like our PataPata project tried (similar to Squeak or Python, maybe on Java):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/patapata

Overall architecture will be a hierarchy of simulated activities, structured across a loose meshwork of nodes. There will also be multiple levels of realism and detail.

It should be planned as incremental and evolutionary changes as hardware and software continue to improve -- in part from the use of this system itself for design and simulation.

2. How a NASA-based educational MMO should support both formal and informal education efforts.

Make a general learning tool usable by everyone; create safer filtered whitelisted subsets of it for use in classrooms. The use of an RDF-like approach helps support this kind of tagging and filtering across multiple data sources.

3. How a NASA-based educational MMO should connect to current and future NASA missions.

Add NASA data and knowledge to the system including detailed plans for NASA equipment. Participants will help desig

Check out the free PlantStudio software:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/index.htm
Originally for Windows, but runs under WINE.

"PlantStudio Botanical Illustration Software is a tool for creating 3D plant models and 2D illustrations. The PlantStudio software simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure. You can "grow" plants over their life cycles, producing lifelike images at any age. You can design, animate and breed a wide variety of plants. By using the "evolutionary arts" of variation and selection in the plant breeder, you can quickly and easily create whole families of unique plants for your 3D scenes."

It's about ten years old, but still useful. :-) [I'm one of the developers.]

I was referring to engineering timescales, not technical feasibility. Technically, you are right, we could build big things in space sooner if we made a *huge* international effort. But any large engineering project like just one big dam tends to take at least four or five years, and that's on Earth. Add in the political issues and problems unique to space and twenty years seems quick to me for any significant number of space power systems. Maybe you could have one built in a ten year time-frame, like another International Space Station (although it's been more than ten years since the current version was announced (1993) and that thing still isn't fully done is it?)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_S tation#Origins
Still, as computing and technology get more capable, maybe we'll see surprising developments as we approach the singularity -- like being able to launch a small "seed" that does all the construction work via robotics and AI using space resources from the Moon or Near Earth Asteroids. :-) That's the kind of thing a billionaire could fund as a single launch -- if we had the plans for that seed. :-)
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout 2001_web.html
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."

Here is a conference paper we presented on this topic in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web here:
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to The Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout 2001_web.html
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems. ... We believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own lives to nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level - but in a more direct way than has been attempted thus far. In particular, individuals could collaborate on the iterative development of detailed space habitat designs and simulations using nothing more than the computers they already have at home for playing games. While excellent progress has been made on the general engineering design of space habitats (in terms of basic physics and proof-of-concept projects), many of the details remain to be worked out. There have been individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI Matrix effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet coalesced around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of such details."

See my linked lists of triads:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/pointrel/
    http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/
SourceForge downloads going back to at least 2001:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
My own work on it goes back about thirty years.

You can think of a triad a like a relationship for an object A with an attribute B and a value C.

One of the reasons I first decided to put it on SourceForge was in case someone later tried to patent the idea. Glad I did.

Essentially, and while there are variants of this, for speedy lookup of triads, I have data items which link via extra pointers. So, for example, for the triad A, B, C, there is the record structure:

Triad# A B C PreviousA PreviousB PreviousC LastA LastB LastC

To, if you have a triad number, you can fetch the last user of that triad, and then work back from there to find all the triads which contain that object in the A, B, or C slot. These links are all built or updated as new triads are added.

I have other variants of this as well -- quads where the first item represents a "space" of triads (though you can easily generalize this to arbitrary length tuples). And most recently where each object reference is two parts defining a Unicode name for a space and a binary string of data to be interpreted in the context of the standard for that space. This is a little like RDF and namespaces.

I appreciate the reply.

We can quibble over specifics, especially the issue of who pays the costs versus who gets the benefits, e.g.:
      Banking: The gold standard (gold dinar and islamic banking vs. fiat dollars and usury):
          http://www.moneyfiles.org/goldwar.html
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_gold_dinar
          http://www.prosperityuk.com/prosperity/articles/wi zzoz.html
    Health: "Has Canada Got The Cure?"
        http://www.alternet.org/story/40951/
    Empire: "War is a Racket"
          http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracke t.htm
but thanks for the comment about being a good start -- we sure need to start somewhere. :-)

Another excerpt from the essay:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingASt arTrekSociety.html
"A common denominator in just about each of these areas is the domination
by out-of-date ideologies based on scarcity perspectives and/or the
capture of the government regulatory and funding bodies by narrow
interests who are afraid of losing out by progressive post-scarcity
change (which they fear will leave them impoverished). There is also the
issue of some people desiring to continue to have lots of raw power over
other people's lives (like that of a master over slaves); frankly I
can't address that character flaw other than to point at religious and
humanistic traditions of enlarging one's sense of self to include
community and world responsibilities (including finding joy in helping
the growth of others to be independent decision makers), so I restrict
what follows to monetary aspects of the problem. Ultimately though, raw
power lust has to be dealt with -- and dealing with that I freely admit
will be tougher than the economic aspects of making the case for a
post-scarcity worldview."

That is really where the core of the problem is. We can always argue about specifics in any one area -- but that is the big picture as we transition to a world where kids realize the schools they are forced to be in have little relation to an emerging post-scarcity reality made possible by automation and the internet:
    http://www.whywork.org/

An essay I wrote in 2004:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingASt arTrekSociety.html
An excerpt:
"Now, let us move on to the question of where could more money for
education and creativity come from -- such as to fund more creation of
free copyrights and free patents? And where could budget cuts be made so
US parents (and everyone else) could work less hours and devote more
time to their families and charitable hobbies -- including informally
educating their children? As we shall see, a hundred billion dollars
here, a hundred billion dollars there, and soon we are talking real
money. :-)

Let us consider ways to free up money for the non-profit sector (or
reducing working hours) by cutting wasteful government and consumer
spending in these areas with (annual estimate of easy savings):
    * Healthcare ($800 billion),
    * Military ($200 billion),
    * Prisons ($125 billion),
    * Agriculture ($40 billion),
    * Transportation ($250+ billion),
    * Housing ($350+ billion),
    * Manufacturing (very variable),
    * Media (very variable),
    * Banking ($14000 billion up front, $320 billion annually), and
    * Education (very variable).
This is a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085
billion per year. And this is even without considering any lifestyle
changes such as from widespread adoption of Voluntary Simplicity:
    http://world.std.com/~habib/thegarden/simplicity/
which will ultimately result in the largest savings in the US and
worldwide (but I discuss no further here). "

Our (free) Garden Simulator is also intended as an an open ended toy.
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/gwi.htm
Doesn't suceed at that as much as we hoped, in part as we tossed too many of the fun aspects (neighbors, food preservation, survival aspects, etc.) in the interests of finishing version 1.0.

Our PlantStudio software which tries to do less ends up succeeding more at that (where just designing your own plants can be a lot of fun).
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/

Seymour Papert called these things "Microworlds" and was a big inspiration for us,
    http://www.papert.org/
"People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. The Logo programming language was created there, as were the first children's toys with built-in computation. ..."

For young kids though (under five to seven?), just playing with physical toys and doing physical activities and being in a physical neighborhood seems like a better idea than spending too much time at the screen. I think it has a lot to do with how children are wired to learn best. See for example:
    http://www.alternative-doctor.com/home_page_articl es/vid-kids.html
"In addition to the physical perils of too much screen, educators and other experts believe the TV and computer games take children away from the time that otherwise would be spent on developing their imaginations and social skills through peer play, socialization and hands-on creativity."

I still think computer microworlds be useful and positive; it's more a question of moderation and how they fit into a child's overall entire experience (especially later in life, after age five or so). We also found out that people learn more creating their own simulations than using someone else's.

Our (free) Garden Simulator is also intended as an an open ended toy.
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/gwi.htm
Doesn't suceed at that as much as we hoped, in part as we tossed too many of the fun aspects (neighbors, food preservation, survival aspects, etc.) in the interests of finishing version 1.0.

Our PlantStudio software which tries to do less ends up succeeding more at that (where just designing your own plants can be a lot of fun).
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/

Seymour Papert called these things "Microworlds" and was a big inspiration for us,
    http://www.papert.org/
"People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. The Logo programming language was created there, as were the first children's toys with built-in computation. ..."

For young kids though (under five to seven?), just playing with physical toys and doing physical activities and being in a physical neighborhood seems like a better idea than spending too much time at the screen. I think it has a lot to do with how children are wired to learn best. See for example:
    http://www.alternative-doctor.com/home_page_articl es/vid-kids.html
"In addition to the physical perils of too much screen, educators and other experts believe the TV and computer games take children away from the time that otherwise would be spent on developing their imaginations and social skills through peer play, socialization and hands-on creativity."

I still think computer microworlds be useful and positive; it's more a question of moderation and how they fit into a child's overall entire experience (especially later in life, after age five or so). We also found out that people learn more creating their own simulations than using someone else's.

AoT, you might also want to check out: Conceptual Guerilla
On Rankism
Voyage from Yesteryear
Or my essay: how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society

I posted something earlier to slashdot quite a while back on this, inspired vaguely if I recall correctly from another person's slashdot sig comment (which I could not track down again -- but was something like, "if IP is so valuable, why isn't it taxed?"). Can't seem to find my older posts -- I guess slashdot loses links to them as they get rolled together into archives?

I later posted to Lessig's blog on it in Jan 2003, where it was discussed some such as here The essential post there is: "Copyrights should be taxed annually at 3% of a self-assessed buyout value, similar to real estate, to make up for the external costs copyrights impose on society. Watch Disney squirm as they are forced to argue the mouse is like a piece of real estate but they should not pay property tax on it. We might see an immediate increase in the public domain as rights holders decide not to pay the tax for some works and those works immediately move into the PD as a consequence. Other works that are self-assessed at low amounts to avoid taxes might be bought into the public domain by individuals paying the assessed amount directly to the rights holders. If implemented internationally, developing nations might make a tidy sum by such taxes for defending specific copyrights while at the same time having immediate access to all other materials for which rights holders decide not to pay the tax for that country. The tax payments by default reinstitute the notion of formal registration, making it easy to find rights holders and the current status of previously copyrighted works. This is an Aikido approach -- rather than oppose the strong force, redirect it for your benefit. With looming defecits, this gives the US government a new revenue stream."

I think Lessig is trying to do a good job, but in my opinion, he proposes half measures which receive only lukewarm support (and strong opposition).

I also have a long essay on what the US could do to reform itself financially, including a copyright tax: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingASt arTrekSociety.html

"You can design, animate and breed a wide variety of plants. By using the "evolutionary arts" of variation and selection in the plant breeder, you can quickly and easily create whole families of unique plants for your 3D scenes."

We have three free applications there on gardening, 3D plant design, and creating interactive choose-your-own-adventure stories, plus many educational web pages related to learning the science behind the projects (in the on-line help manual pages). There is over eight person-years of work in there.

To put all this hysteria in perspective, about the same number of people as died in the WTC disaster die on U.S. roads each and every month and few seem to mind. If writers want to end a character immediately in a soap opera, they can just say they had a car accident and no one will question it. Yet, U.S. policies still promote cars over other alternatives (mass transit, working from home, mixed use zoning). Millions more middle aged lives are cut short each year from lack of exercise -- where are the walking trails and bicycle trails in every U.S. city and suburb (compared to say, the Netherlands)? So from this point of view, even if a million U.S. citizens are killed a year by terrorists, bicycle paths are still a better investment in American health and safety than more surveillance. So, my starting position is what people care about seems really strange when looked at from the big picture perspective. And fear, and building and economy and tax structure and new laws based directly on short-term fear, have direct negative effects on U.S. society, as U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

The problem is that the ways to safety have all been outlined for the last forty years and ignored. They are essentially summed up in: people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. So, as an action agenda for the most safety:
1. Stop throwing stones.
2. Make houses out of something else than glass.
3. Help others to live in non-glass houses and to stop throwing stones.
I'm not going to talk about stopping throwing stones as that is now considered unpatriotic (although I have done so for a long time in the past). But I can still talk about glass houses, I guess.

Consider this book "Brittle Power" written around 1980: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/art7095.php Federal energy policy continues to promote the most centralized, unforgiving, and vulnerable sources and infrastructures, while ignoring or suppressing the more efficient, diverse, dispersed, localized, and renewable options that could in time make major supply failures impossible by design. At present, the Department of Energy, apparently unwittingly but quite effectively, is undercutting the antiterrorist mission of the Department of Defense.

The problem with the U.S. from a safety perspective is that because the way the economy is set up, the most money can be made by centralizing a service, like Microsoft centralizes the OS, or agribusiness centralizes monocultures, or the oil company centralizes with a few pipelines. All these are the most profitable concerns because they are centralized, and backed by social, legal, political, and financial systems that keep them that way and supress alternatives. And because they are centralized, they are vulnerable.

What are the safe choices?

Consider, for example, a suggestion I read years ago that taking one year of the money spent on maintain the Persian Gulf Deployment, and applying it to insulating U.S. homes, would eliminate U.S. dependence on foreign oil. The figures may have changed since (and may have been optimistic) but do you see the point? Passive solar architecture shouldn't just be an oddity -- it should be the law, if we are serious about building a safer society. Yet, it is more profitable to centralized companies for have the U.S. government subsidize oil costs (some economist say to $60 per barrel) than to consider a decentralized approach like home insulation. Same with resisting the non-brainer of fuel efficiency standards for automobiles.

Another safe choice -- local community supported agriculture, to reduce the length of food supply lines (typically 1500 miles). Other forms of alternative energy (especially wind power) could be developed. Well insulated refrigerators can be 10X more efficient than current ones (that is the major consumer of electricity in many american homes).

Basically, take much of the stuff environmentalists, consumer advocates, small farmers, civil rights leaders, and probably the green party have been saying for years, and do it. But you know what, it isn't "profitable". It's somehow "profitable" to tax Americans a trillion dollars a year to prop up the current system, but somehow talk about doing things that provide true safety, and while we're at it, also compassion, and justice, and humaneness, and fairness, and one will get mostly blank stares. Seems so much easier to just declare a war on terrorists and the problem seems almost solved -- it seems like the president is doing something, instead of providing leadership on home insulation (an effectively impossible thing for an oil man to ever do...)

My own tiny efforts along that line (mostly laughed at or ignored): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak That, and helping people learn how to grow more of their own food with a garden simulator. The problem is, when the current approaches keep being tried, and they keep not working, any alternative is going to seem laughable. We can spend $300 billion dollars on defense, but suggest spending $100 billion dollars a year on sustainable technology research and that seems laughable.

The ironic thing is, all the people who messed up the system already as far as promoting policies producing an unsafe U.S. are mainly the ones getting rewarded by the new spurt of government funding. And we get solutions like pump more arctic oil when it will take ten years to get it, it will be expensive, and any yahoo with a hunting rifle can shut down the Alaskan pipeline for days or weeks (as recently happened from one shot).

These people are working on a report for Congress that will hopefully show a better way: http://www.nepinitiative.org/ Bet they recommend insulating homes as the number one way to fight terrorism. A laughable idea, or is it?

If anyone can do such simulations in realtime at home in 2050, then one possible outcome has to be that any government or large organization or wealthy individual can fairly easily design (and then make) such devices -- or ones even more advanced (smaller, easier to assemble, etc.). Einstein warned, "The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." My feeling is one way to transcend the threat of everyone being able to quickly destroy using nuclear or other weapons is to create the means where everyone can create even faster than, just like duckweed in a pond keeps growing even as fast as ducks eat it. That means true defense requires a sustained investment in advanced manufacturing technology and organizing manufacturing knowledge(including self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore.) We must accept that such things aren't pipe dreams -- they are absolute necessities (as is a simultaneous focus on reducing the causes of war such as injustice, want, and ignorance).

I don't mind spending money on defense -- I just want to see the money spent well on defending against true threats to human survival -- want, ignorance, injustice, corruption, "love of money", and weapons of mass destruction (whoever controls them at the moment -- like the Russian Mafia?). We are over 50 years beyond the creation of nuclear weapons; the defense department should be willing to think at least another 50 years ahead. The defense department is instructed by Congress to win wars and in the long term this strategy will fail because of technological amplification swamping the biosphere's capacity to support humans (such as through Moore's law leading to every home computer being a nuclear weapons design station in 2050 or sooner). I want to see a defense department that learns how to transcend wars and thus be able to truly defend all of humanity.

Would not it take at least as much courage to transcend wars as to win them? Our armed forces have no short supply of courage, and so perhaps there is hope.

One of the problems with this sort of weapons design work is it is too exciting for technically minded people to easily resist doing it. See for example: Ted Taylor: Confessions of a nuclear weapons design addict. We need alternative technical projects that are even more exciting and cost even more (shameless plug for OSCOMAK!)

Of course, according to Moravec and Kurzweil and Vinge, AI will be rampant before then and we will be passing through the AI singularity -- another cause for hope or despair about transcending nuclear war depending on your perspective.

If anyone can do such simulations in realtime at home in 2050, then one possible outcome has to be that any government or large organization or wealthy individual can fairly easily design (and then make) such devices -- or ones even more advanced (smaller, easier to assemble, etc.). Einstein warned, "The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." My feeling is one way to transcend the threat of everyone being able to quickly destroy using nuclear or other weapons is to create the means where everyone can create even faster than, just like duckweed in a pond keeps growing even as fast as ducks eat it. That means true defense requires a sustained investment in advanced manufacturing technology and organizing manufacturing knowledge(including self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore.) We must accept that such things aren't pipe dreams -- they are absolute necessities (as is a simultaneous focus on reducing the causes of war such as injustice, want, and ignorance).

I don't mind spending money on defense -- I just want to see the money spent well on defending against true threats to human survival -- want, ignorance, injustice, corruption, "love of money", and weapons of mass destruction (whoever controls them at the moment -- like the Russian Mafia?). We are over 50 years beyond the creation of nuclear weapons; the defense department should be willing to think at least another 50 years ahead. The defense department is instructed by Congress to win wars and in the long term this strategy will fail because of technological amplification swamping the biosphere's capacity to support humans (such as through Moore's law leading to every home computer being a nuclear weapons design station in 2050 or sooner). I want to see a defense department that learns how to transcend wars and thus be able to truly defend all of humanity.

Would not it take at least as much courage to transcend wars as to win them? Our armed forces have no short supply of courage, and so perhaps there is hope.

One of the problems with this sort of weapons design work is it is too exciting for technically minded people to easily resist doing it. See for example: Ted Taylor: Confessions of a nuclear weapons design addict. We need alternative technical projects that are even more exciting and cost even more (shameless plug for OSCOMAK!)

Of course, according to Moravec and Kurzweil and Vinge, AI will be rampant before then and we will be passing through the AI singularity -- another cause for hope or despair about transcending nuclear war depending on your perspective.

The general issues applicable to any such effort to make educational simulations include:
* money spent on education is mainly spent on teachers and buildings,
* successful companies in education spend over 90% of funds on advertising, packaging and sales, not content development,
* parents spending money on software tend to buy that which immediately promises increased test scores not increased insight,
* a lot of flashy science suddenly appears very incomplete and sketchy when you try to actually build a simulation based on it (one of the big values of simulation IMHO),
* the real world is very complex, and simple simulations may teach the wrong things,
* the public code available to use in simulations (from government labs) is often poorly written and takes a major investment to make useable even when the science may be good,
* it is difficult to meet a good educational design goal of having open ended models a community can comment on and improve without essentially becoming open source or free software, and yet funding agencies generally expect any grant proposal to include a plan to produce a revenue stream and so to be completely proprietary and thus a grant proposal that says code will be written and given away doesn't do as well as one that says code will be written and kept proprietary (silly, but mainly true, got the letter from NSF to prove it),
* historically, people who did computer simulation work couldn't get PhDs (since most PhD programs seek to produce experimentalists or mathematicians, again we both have the scars to prove it) and it is difficult to get educational support or appear credible without one, and
* all the standard issues of innovative education being to an extent subversive (like getting people to think for themselves and ask questions) and that colliding with a funding system with mainly other priorities.

There are some obvious exceptions like Maxis (which got in at the right time and focuses on games and consulting), however when you consider the potential for computers and the billions spent on education, the number of comprehensive educational simulations which are used in practice is small. There are a lot of labors of love out there, but whether most people can support themselves on such is a different question. (We get by on mostly unrelated consulting.) These sorts of simulations can take a lot of time to do well (our free garden simulator took six person-years and is only a shadow of what we wanted to do). To do it right, you have to make something that is both a robust program (on a variety of platforms) and is also good educational science. There are few people who can do both, and so in general it takes a large team and much expense. The dollars just aren't there so far for lots of really good simulations, in large part reflecting an entrenched world view in academia (which staffs government funding agencies) that prizes experiment and mathematical proofs over simulation. (The military has historically been an exception to this.) All are needed and useful when done well, and they can all work together in synergistic ways. Maybe this report will help change things for the better. In general, things are improving in terms of academia accepting simulations (driven for cost reasons more than anything) and people who are in academia right now have less trouble doing simulation focused research.

As a caveat, one thing we have discovered is that generally the people who write a comprehensive educational simulation learn more about a subject then those who use the simulation. So having students construct a simulation may be a more useful educational experience than just using one.

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak

I don't know if you have such a position (or if one would call it exactly a "Fellow"), but I'd like to be a sort-of Soros Fellow based around New York City who is also an Information Technology staff member. Essentially, I'd like to wander around the Open Society Institute (as well as the larger Soros Foundations Network) and create and deploy "open source" technology for knowledge management and digital libraries (including open content) to help other Soros Foundations Network staff do their jobs better, while at the same time make available that technology outside the Soros Foundations Network under open source licenses (and integrate back in community generated improvements as well). I'd naturally be happy to instead be a more conventional Soros Fellow who just works on some Digital Library projects of my own design (I have a couple in mind) but I think helping with Soros Foundations Network's immediate knowledge management needs (or at least the subset shared by others) would serve as inspiration to create all sorts of wonderful things over the long term, which other foundations and other individuals might find of great usefulness -- and the hope is perhaps they might even improve on them a little in the process and share those improvements back to us.

While I know any foundation would not match private sector pay, what would interest me most in working with the Soros Foundations Network and get my full-time (plus some) devotion to it is if my employment agreement ensured all software I developed for the foundation could be released under an open source license of my choice or into the public domain. Also, I'd want to talk about open content licensing issues in regards to any large work undertaken in the digital library space. That would help me weave together various threads of my life into a whole cloth. Currently I work for six to eighteen months at a time doing proprietary work for clients, and then take some time to work on my own projects. In both cases I end up a little too isolated for being the most productive I could be.

Here is my perspective on the issues of our day and what I think I can help with at the foundation. You may find this of interest even if we do not work together in the future.

Due to continuing exponential growth of computer chip manufacturing capability (predicted by Moore's law), computers are predicted to be a million times bigger in capacity, faster in speed, or smaller in size (pick one at a time for a constant price) within the next couple of decades. However, exponential growth in technological capacity is also occurring in a variety of fields besides computing. Technologies for power generation, CAD/CAM, materials, nanotechnology, communications, positioning, robotics, artificial intelligence, transportation, biotechnology, and collaboration are all increasing on their own exponential curves. That growth is also interacting with the exponential changes in computing and the other fields in a synergetic way. Cars that drive themselves are just one example of a technology around the corner that will change the face of society -- something only made possible by several of these trends coming together. We are heading for an age of abundance (although the future is still far from assured given continuing risks from arms races in part driven also by technological imperatives). Raymond Kurzweil's latest web site makes the issues clear: http://www.kurzweilai.net/ And it also makes clear how there are both opportunities and dangers: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=2

When I audited a course in Soviet Politics [snipped] around 1984, one idea bounced around was that because the Soviet Union was highly centralized, if they did decide to switch to a democratic capitalist model, they could do it overnight. Yet, nothing was further from the truth when Gorbachev actually started Perestroika a few years later -- because old ways of doing things, old habits, old customs, old relationships, and old world views were slow to change. Now, fifteen years after the initiation of Perestroika, that area and its economy is still in disarray, and the people living there as well as their environment have suffered greatly as a result.

The same may well be true of Western society as we transition into this age of abundance made possible by all this technological advancement. In the age of the internet, many of the old competitive ways of doing things such as obtaining local benefits while passing on external costs no longer make much sense (if they ever did), yet the new ways are still forming, like the chaordic vision of organization advocated by Dee Hock. http://www.chaordic.org/ As we move into this age, "gift" economies may take center stage, such as the gift economy behind Linux and much of the interesting content on the internet. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbroo k/ The realization is still slow to dawn that we as a society now know enough and have enough potential wealth to have plenty of each of nature, technology and society for everyone. Perhaps that was always true and we had just forgotten it.

Buckminster Fuller http://www.bfi.org/ brought this issue up decades ago as "Design Science", but such ideas are at odds with a lifetime of conditioning to believe in an economy of scarcity, and so they move very slowly. People are still caught in thinking we must choose between countryside, gadgetry, or humanity. We can have all of these things -- if we use the knowledge we already possess in a collaborative way to reconcile issues of self interest with the greater good through innovative practices. Perhaps not all conflicts can be resolved, but many of the basic life-support ones about adequate water, minimal food, clean air, decent shelter, livable communities, conserved biodiversity, and innovative education can. To do so requires that we include this upcoming transition to an age of abundance in our thinking about economic policy, foreign affairs, and domestic political issues. It also requires preserving the digital commons in terms of free access to basic information about the essentials of life (and how to make them). The OSCOMAK project http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak was a step in that direction, but I have not had enough time to develop it. I would hope I could continue to pursue it in some way in conjunction with the Soros Foundations Network, since for example such information might help developing nations bootstrap their economies.

What excites me about working with the Soros Foundations Network is that I would be involved with people who care about such things, and we could all be working to make similar things happen together, all made possible by far-sighted gifts from George Soros.

As the Soros Foundations Network moves forward, I would like to play a role helping articulate a vision and strategy that balances these three aspects (nature, technology, society) amidst the upcoming potential of prosperity made possible by advanced information systems and other products of the exponential growth of technology. I would also like to help create the information systems that the foundations network itself uses for internal communications, internal education, and external communications. These systems could be built using an open source collaborative model allowing the Soros Foundations Network's own needs for knowledge management to create another gift for humanity in terms of freely available tools for collaboration and knowledge management, leveraging the work of existing collaborative communities where possible, and adding to them where there are special needs.

For example, why shouldn't each on-the-go Soros Foundations Network staffer have (if they desire) a belt-worn wearable computer and tri-band cell phone to keep them in touch with the network's digital library from anywhere in the world? The hardware exists pretty much off-the-shelf for this http://www.xybernaut.com/ and will only continue to get better. The software is still something to be wrestled with though, and that is a challenge I would relish. Similarly, why shouldn't the Soros Foundations Network have a situation room with hundreds of display screens monitoring world issues, the progress of grants, and the initiatives of other foundations? Again, the relatively affordable hardware for such a room exists now off-the-shelf -- the software is the main issue. http://www.unigraf.fi/PAGES/multiscr/videowall.htm These are the sorts of things I would like to create for the Soros Foundations Network and, if done primarily as open source, for the world.

The internet also makes possible a fine grained sort of collaboration which was never practical before (such as through using threaded email lists or discussion sites like http://www.slashdot.org/ ). Such collaborations might help in advancing the Open Society Institute's mission. Yet such collaborations produce new legal issues (or, more correctly, put new twists on old ones). There is a related paper my wife and I wrote that talks about clear licensing as a way to promote collaboration which I will be presenting for the SSI Conference on Space Manufacturing in Princeton the beginning of next week. I'd be happy to send a copy after the conference is over if it is of any interest. It touches on some of the broader non-technical issues that directly effect how IT can be used for the common good.

Unfortunately, it seems many non-profits (including schools) see the internet as a potential profit center for selling information (whether that is realistic is a different issue). To that end they prevent others from making derived works from their materials (as a byproduct of restricting copying to create artificial scarcity), which in turn limits fine-grained collaboration to improve technical artifacts. So, there is much to be worked through here in terms of the bigger picture.

While large corporations can play a role in developing such technology (just wave money in front of them), they aren't exactly going to be out front cheer leading and inventing the open source information tools an open society needs (since there are many other short-term profitable things they can focus on, typically involving financing by people with proprietary interests in information management). Yet, as individuals, many of the people in such organizations would love to work on such projects and could make convincing pitches to management if given half a chance and a shred of economic justification. And many other individuals outside such organizations will give freely of their spare time to help make such efforts happen.

Leading by example is almost always a good idea. As Alan Kay said, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it". If we are to have an open society, we need to invent open technology to go with it. Somebody has to make that technology. This is an area the Soros Foundations Network can play a leadership role while at the same time helping achieve its other goals through open source efforts.

Low cost long range wireless devices handling distributed peer-to-peer content to ensure democracy:
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html

Or how about supporting an open source community on manufacturing knowledge:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/index.htm

which relates to surviving Vernor Vinge's Singularity (Teilhard's Noosphere)
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html

Or just supporting more open source / free software educational simulations: http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm

Or support some other people's efforts:

Humanity Libraries Project
http://www.humaninfo.org/

Center for the Public Domain
http://www.centerpd.org/

The real benefits of asteroid mining will be to make self-replicating cities in space. These will allow a diversity of human-derived cultures to flourish.

What will be of value in the space frontier is using the energy from the sun and matter from the asteroids to build space cities or space habitats. These will provide homes for trillions of ideas. The wealth that will flow back to Earth won't be material -- it will be spiritual (new dreams), intellectual (new designs), and political (peacemaking).

Such habitats will also provide a place for misfits to go -- as the American frontier was for a time -- letting the Earth settle down.

To create a space city that can self-replicate from asteroidal ore and sunlight will take a better understanding of manufacturing and how webs of manufacturing processes fit together.

Links:
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs /sp acsetl.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

1. Open source library of knowledge for developing nations (making the world's intellectual wealth available to all)
http://www.oneworld.org/globalp roj ects/humcdrom/
http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/& lt;/a>
http://www.oneworld .or g/globalprojects/humcdrom/copyrigh.htm
http://payson.tulane.edu:8888/
; http://www.globalprojects.org/
; http://www.humanitylibraries.net/ http://www.villageearth.org/
http://www.villageearth.org/ATLi bra ry/cdrom.htm

2. Open source knowledge management systems
http://www.bootstrap.org/
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/ar chi ves.html
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion /

3. Self-replicating space habitats (support trillions of humans in style without overrunning the earth)
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs /sp acsetl.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

4. Pursue the "Ecocity Berkley" vision in the book by that name by Richard Register and look for related visions of sustainable development
http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob ido s/ASIN/1556430094/
http://www.co-intelligence.or g/y 2k_commtyorgs.html
http://www.fuzzylu.com/greencenter/h ome .htm
http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sust vl. html
http://www.rmi.org/

5. Work towards ending the drug war and pardoning hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned on non-violent drug charges. (I believe drug use is wrong and should be avoided, and by all means as it is now illegal, so don't do drugs! But as with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine, drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one (except when like DUI it hurts or puts at risk others directly)).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pag es/ frontline/shows/drugs/
http://www.drcnet.org/facts/

6. Teaching tolerance and compassion
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.splcenter.or g/t eachingtolerance/tt-index.html

7. Open source educational simulations and simulation construction toolkits (one of the most meaningful ways to use computers in the classroom).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://riceinfo.ri ce. edu/armadillo/Simulations/simserver.html
http://www.creativeteachingsite .co m/edusims.html
http://www.workingmodel.com/
http://www.idsia.ch/~andrea/simtools.h tml

8. Preserving biodiversity (when it's gone, it's gone forever)
http://www.tnc.org/
http://www.environment.about.com/newsissues/enviro nment/library/weekly/aa091700.htm

9. Develop any specific sustainable technology in energy (e.g. solar), recycling (e.g. recycle computers), materials (e.g. plastics from starch), society (e.g. participatory democracy & social justice).
http://www.google.com/sear ch? q=sustainable+technology
http://www.edf.org/issues/Recycling.htm l
http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/

10. Make corporations more accountable to human needs
http://www.adbusters.org/inform ati on/foundation/
http://www.adbusters.org/c amp aigns/charter/death.html
Previous link vanished, try instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.adbuste rs.org/ campaigns/charter/death.html+corporate+death+penal ty&hl=en
http://www.cwsl.edu/news/n_corpo rat e_death.html
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/340& lt;br> http://www.chaordic.org/

11. Reform the "Intellectual property" laws and their related organizations, perhaps so that copyrights are for a couple decades and most patents are for a dozen years and only for true innovations. Ensure that any IP developed with any government money is immediately put into the public domain.
http://danny.oz.au/fre e-s oftware/advocacy/against_IP.html
(Lots of other Slashot links!)

12. If you don't want to get you hands dirty volunteering your own time, look around and find good people (not organizations, although the people may be in organizations) already doing good things. Pick people with a track record of years of fighting for the common good or who have already made a major accomplishment demonstrating commitment and just anonymously give them $100K without strings attached. Example: Marty Johnson at Isles, Inc.
http://www.isles.org/mileston.html& lt;br> Find people just starting a career of public service or a charitable venture and struggling to do good things and give them $20K and tell them you believe in their promise and cause. Expect a bunch of the money to be wasted but give it anyway and learn how to give effectively. For ideas, look at the grantees list of any foundation. Then ask those people who they know who are just starting out and trying to do a good job.
http://www.beldon.org/grants2000_07.htm l

When I was about thirteen, I got about seven books out of the library on money thinking I wanted to become a millionaire. Six told me how to get rich (start a business and run it well.) One of them asked me "why do you want to be rich?" That is the one whose name I remember and the ideas in it have changed my life. For advice on setting a direction of what to do with wealth, read the Book "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry, especially the chapter on how foundations fail in their mission and how grants go to people who sound good but usually can't deliver (i.e. how hard it is to give money away).
http://www.seeingmoney.com/SevenLaws.ht m
http://www.hallbusi nes ses.com/biographies_primers/1420.shtml

My wife and I are working on a few of these issues ourselves (and a few example links are to our stuff). We make money contracting and spend it to "buy" our own time for making quality software the market can't or doesn't seem to want to pay for. Even without IPO riches, any competent software developer can make $75K-100K in today's market. Graduate students can live on $20K a year, and so can many software developers (kids make it harder) if they follow the path of Voluntary Simplicity. It's a question of priorities.
http://www.life.ca/subject/simplicity .ht ml
http://www.simpleliving.net/slj/ http://www.scn.org/earth/lightly/ http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/

Voluntary simplicity leaves a lot of funds for doing good deeds - even if they are done on your own time by using your own money to take time off and develop open source software or do other worthwhile ventures. Or take a job that doesn't pay as well but involves helping an organization that you believe in.
http://www.idealist.org/

There are awesome things happening over the next twenty to forty years. According to Moore's law, desktop computers in twenty or so years will be a million times faster than today's. Already computers can drive cars somewhat well and identify vegetable better than humans.

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/199 9/number_3/machine399.html ;

Other breakthrough innovations are happening in technological areas like energy, materials, nanotechnology, communications, agriculture, biotechnology, and robotics. Use your wealth to think deeply about what all this means and do something to ensure human survival with style.

It is saddening to see people spend so much money on less important stuff (another night club in this case). Now if it was a night club where these issues are discussed, then maybe it makes sense.

Capitalism without charity is evil, because capitalism only meets the needs of people with money.

To an extent, Slashdot itself is a good example. This site provides technical information and commentary and is contributed to by a large community. In this case, copyright probably prohibits redistribution in a purely open source sense, but everyone has free access to the site.

The Educational Object Economy (EOE) is a global community for web based learning tools in Java. They have a collaboratively maintained repository of links, so this is an open source database (even if the tools linked to may not all be open source).
http://www.eoe.org

The EOE site has many great links to related efforts and related papers, such as the Open Library for creating and distributing educational course materials.
Open Library

Project Gutenberg is a collection of free electronic texts, contributed by many people, and so is an open source repository of electronic texts.
http://www.gutenberg.org

Another effort is Open Content, a site created to "facilitate the prolific creation of freely available, high-quality, well-maintained Content."
http://www.opencontent.org/home.shtml

The Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge (OSCOMAK) is a project I've started. It is intended to create a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products. The idea is ultimately to allow cooperative groups to design and simulate anything from a pre-industrial farming village to a self-replicating space habitat.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak

-Paul Fernhout