We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
- Universal and unprecedented challenges (Why?)
- Open source, access, data… (How?)
- Bloom: the top-secret master plan (What?)
- In summary
TL;DR
To bring an answer to the universal and unprecedented challenges of our century, we have created a free and open source ‘Google’ (and without advertising or targeting): Bloom – currently a suite of productivity apps but tomorrow the only ecosystem you will need
to meet your daily needs. We believe that open source is the only way to build a sustainable world.
You can find the online website here
and go here to learn how to contribute. This is just the beginning of a great adventure 🚀
Universal and unprecedented challenges (Why?)
It’s not news: the beginning of the 21st century is a
decisive turn in the history of humanity. If today, culture doesn’t have frontiers (sport events, art…), the problems either. It is all together that we must respond to both short-term (social) and long-term (environmental) challenges.
The ecological crisis
The ecological crisis is the most important because it encompasses many underlying problems, be it access to drinking water,
global warming, extinction of animal species, climate exoduses,
pollution of soils and aqueous reserves, respiratory diseases, 7th continent of plastic…
Out overconsumption precipitate the destruction of our habitat and
put us in danger. The assessment is alarming, the imobilism even more.
One question obsesses us: Why do we have to work harder and harder to reach a decent standard of living, when we see all the wealth produced in the world?
With taxes, work is today our only means of wealth redistribution. Technology is making human work less and less necessary to meet our needs.
Two futures show off:
- Consume more and more
- Better distribution of wealth
Consuming more and more – economies based on debt and growth – is obviously not compatible with the ecological crisis.
Conversely, reducing the need for production = less work = even more unemployment and therefore less redistributed wealth.
Global wealth distribution. World economic forum.
If the question of the last decades was: How to produce more and more?, today, THE question is: How to improve the global standard of living without continuing to accelerate our self-destruction?
Continuing to mutualize cost and privatize profits is fundamentally incompatible with the social contract (Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, Yellow vests…).
Open source, access, data… (How?)
The solution? Even a child of 4 years would find it without problem: sharing.
In our digital age where copying and distributing a digital document costs virtually nothing and where aberrations are already in place (private copying tax, excesses of rights holders on content sharing platforms, drifting of scientific journals, copyright trolls…), the desire to strengthen intellectual property laws whose negative externalities are never even mentioned, is greedy AND criminal. Yes, patents on drugs or seeds kill.
All this bureaucracy is of course not welcome as humanity faces major crises.
Open source
Open source: The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.
The best known example of open source is GNU/Linux, a free and open source operating system that is used by the majority of servers and phones today.
Compound interest
When Bob works on a proprietary project, the fruits of his work benefit his employer and to a lesser extent the clients of the latter. The day he changes job, he loses all the work done previously.
When Alice contributes or works on an open source project, the fruits of her work benefits her, users of the open source project and the rest of the world who can use it for free, modify it, improve it. When Alice changes her job or leaves, the result of her previous work remains accessible to her, she can continue to benefit.
Thus the wealth produced is accumulated, rather than each actor of society wastes resources to recreate it in his corner.
Distributed organizations
New communication technologies (chat, video-conferencing…) are now enabling organizations and companies to break away from traditional offices. Staff no longer need to be in the same city, the same country or even the same continent.
This poses new challenges in terms of social interactions, but it is a first lever to reduce our global energy consumption.
Global cooperation
This intersection of the means of instant communication and the opening of the production tools allow global cooperation. Users can contribute, participate in the creation of the products they use.
Entering a model of cooperation is the only way to limit the overexploitation of our environment and thus limit our own poisoning.
Resilience and sustainability
What would happen if tomorrow Twitter went bankrupt and stop its services?
What would happen if tomorrow a tyrannical government block WhatsApp?
The financial crisis of 2008 has painfully remind
