Asian Energy Advisors

Demos is a London-based “think tank for everyday democracy.” Here’s a pamphlet of theirs: Wide Open: Open Source Methods and Their Future Potential, which applies open source ideas to public sector policy issues - like those in the Philippines electricity sector.

For centuries the pursuit of knowledge has been undertaken in ways that involve widely dispersed groups commenting on each others’ work. The evolution of the Talmud in Judaism is one example, and the tradition of interpretation in Islam is another. Modern science has developed through critical peer review in an open, expert and increasingly global community. Each shares the principle of making thought open, and using structured commentary to advance knowledge. Each operates more like a gift economy than a market economy.

Open source methods take these principles in a radically new direction. The advent of the internet has made it possible for new knowledge to be developed, shared and refined in ways that emphasize its character as a common good, rather than as something to be owned and enclosed. Open source methods are just the latest in a series of major innovations founded in the fertile pasture which is the internet.

Asian Energy Advisors’ founding philosophy is to play a contributing role in this type of approach to our energy problems here in the Philippines.

I believe the essential question isn’t “What do you do?”; it’s “What are you for?”