The point being that it was not that long ago that we saw the last vestiges of a read-write culture that flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. People read, they reflected on that, and then they wrote. And then other people read that, and so on, and so on. The pamphleteers allowed the discussions to go out beyond the salons.

Then bam! We hit the read-only culture – consumers consumed (read/watched/listened to) whatever the massive incumbents produced and both technology and laws conspired to protect that situation.

Larry Lessig is up in Cambridge, Mass. at the Wikimedia Foundation Conference this week and yesterday he was talking about this R/W and R/O culture concept (thanks to notes taken by David Weinberger).

Larry has important things to say about laws and technology in the fight to preserve or re-create a true R/W culture. But this is also fundamental to an emerging 21st century platform for finding solutions to the Philippine energy pricing problem I discussed yesterday.

That solution will, and must, get beyond the “salons” of Manila and Washington and include consumers, business, universities, and government entities throughout the Philippines – as both consumers and creators of the energy sector. And it might – just might – include pictures, video, and music in addition to words.

Update: Come to think of it, the Web 2.0 concept of “consumer as producer” may just end up having a whole lot more to do with solutions to our energy problem than policy formulation.

But I’ve got to believe I’m a 0.001 percenter. Evidence? There is no "small community" (yet) with which I can reinforce "strong-as-steel" bonds. There is not great demand (yet) for my advisory practice.

My concepts of practice for the Philippine energy sector are unconventional, not because they are offensive to most people, but because they’re just not the normal way things get done here (as if the usual way has been effective).

Here are just a few randomly selected past discussions, trying to explain my (developing) philosophy:

• Platform of Participation
• Discussions and faster feedback loops
• It’s disruptive; incumbents risk losing control of the conversation
• A new advisory ethic – Transparency, Conversation, Humanity, Correction, Immediacy
• Some key competencies
• It’s not about good ideas – it’s about trust.

The fact that I haven’t found the formula for getting my family fed by putting this philosophy into practice doesn’t discount the value of the philosophy – it means I haven’t found the implementation formula yet – or it hasn’t found me.

This is why enabling a community discussion matters. Not just in sofware, of course.

Brian refers to:

Julius Caesar’s speeches to his troops before the battles they fought in Gaul. He started with an insight: his men were tired and frightened. They wanted to run away. He turned that on its head. You survive by attacking, he told them. You die when you retreat. Bam. Same brains, new petrol.

Looking at the recent stuff going on in Iloilo with PECO and its IPP discussed here and here, it’s clear EPIRA and all of USAID’s/WB’s/ADB’s advisories alone are not enough.

If you search Mamutong for open source consulting you can see that I’ve been wrestling with an approach that better leverages today’s tools and capabilities within a rapidly flattening world for delivering higher quality and more responsive advisory support than has been available in the past.

Leveraging off Jeff Jarvis’ work here, let’s explore what a new advisory ethic might look like:

• Transparency: Our clients deserve to know about us and our perspective to better judge what we say.
• Conversation: We do not believe in one-sided lectures. We believe conversation leads to better understanding (and therefore better strategies and advice).
• Humanity: We believe open-source consulting lives at a human level while old consulting lives at an institutional level.
• Linking: We believe one of our key jobs is to link our clients to other voices and to source material so they may judge themselves and be more informed of risks and uncertainties.
• Correction: We believe it is vital to correct errors quickly and openly.
• Immediacy: We believe that the fast spread of information will yield better information.

The above is just a postulate. But it’s predicated on using the same brains, but new petrol.