OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS, Inc.
	  International Public Intelligence Clearinghouse
				   1914 Autumn Chase Court, Falls
				   Church, Virginia 22043-1753

       Voice:  (703) 536-1775 | Facsimile: (703) 536-1776
		 INTERNET: steeler@well.sf.ca.us

						       8 October 1993

     About the concept...

     The concepts preached by OSS, Inc. were first articulated in the
     Whole Earth Review in a Fall 1992 article on "E3i: Ethics,
     Ecology, and Evolution: An Alternative Paradigm for National
     Intelligence".

     The concept's basic premise, expressed best by John Perry Barlow
     at the First International Symposium on "National Security &
     National Competitiveness:  Open Source Solutions", is that the
     secrecy paradigm has lost, and the openness paradigm has won.  In
     the Age of Information, a "centralized" national intelligence
     apparatus devoted to secrets is counter-productive and
     pathological--each government is better off focusing on a
     "distributed" virtual intelligence community that is open, with
     intelligence in the service of its citizens rather than an elite.

     As Howard Rheingold pointed out at the same symposium, *computers*
     were once reserved for an elite.  In the same way that computers
     have become available to citizens, and have empowered citizens, so
     also must national intelligence be "reinvented" in order to serve
     and empower citizens.  This concept is totally supportive of both
     the Vice President's National Information Infrastructure, and the
     Secretary of Labor's concept of the American Workplace.  On the
     one hand, the concept seeks to provide the "content" portion now
     missing from the NII, and also provide the "decision-support"
     needed to empower American workers.

     As James Madison has written (and as adopted by Steve Cisler, host
     of the Information Conference on the WELL), "A popular government
     without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but
     a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.  Knowledge
     will forever govern ignorance, and a people who means to be their
     own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge
     gives."  Ex Veritas Potens--From Truth, Power.

.