Lodestar Project Launches!

Following publication of The Guide for Developers, The Lodestar Project is now launching.

Its long-term aim is to create a new generation of social network whose members act on their beliefs to make the world a better place for all who inhabit it.

In The Guide for Developers, I set out the Lodestar Vision:

‘You enroll in Lodestar. You tell it about yourself, especially your beliefs, attitudes and mood. This brings focus to your thinking about how the world is and what could change. It shows you a picture of your opportunities. You join a community and see ideas bubbling up and projects in progress. You might join one or add one of your own or you may be content to watch for a while. Your beliefs guide you towards the problems you most care about and where you can make a difference. You become part of the force for change. The force grows to the point where it can reshape our world, reversing the damage we’ve done and building a new one. The journey is a unifying one. Unity can dissolve hate, build confidence and open up enormous opportunities for our species and the world we share with others’.

The Guide depicts how this might work in practice. But before Lodestar can be designed and built it will need backers with the know-how and resources to give it a foundation.

The early part of the Lodestar Project is therefore to build that sponsorship. For now, that is where the help is needed.

To gain access to that potential sponsorship we will need to enlarge this network. This can only be done by sharing these blogs and the Guide with others, currently outside of this readership and asking them to do the same.

Within that expanding network we will more likely encounter folk with the means to contribute to that foundation.

Passing on the link to the blogs is a simple, quick and painless thing to do.

The blog site is here.

Details of the Guide are here.

Project Information is here. The Lodestar Office can be contacted here.

Acorn photo by Heather Gill on Unsplash

Just Published: Lodestar - A Guide

I'm pleased to announce publication of my new non-fiction book: Lodestar - A Guide for Developers.

The Lodestar in the title started life as a fictional social network in the pages of The Infinity Trilogy. Could it become a reality?

Can a social network really be the key to a better world? Certainly not the ones we have today, fun though they can often be. First generation Socnets are mainly about message and media sharing and the profits that flow from selling on usage data.

Lodestar is conceived as an action network, anchored in its users' beliefs and designed to build and boost unity & confidence.

This book is not a technical design. Rather, I call it a sketch of what Lodestar could be and how it might work. To become a reality will require a great deal of interest from the developer community. By this I mean the broadest range of technology investment specialists, entrepreneurs and philanthropists as well as digital architects, software engineers and project managers.

This book is my teaser to draw in anyone who might join the project. It is published at cost by Amazon. Click here for more details.

Cover image by Emiliano Vittoriosi on unsplash

The Seduction of Secrets

What is a secret?

The definition is of a truth, hidden from general view. The implication is that there is often some malevolent intention behind this deception. The truth in question, if revealed, threatens the interests of those who do the hiding. It follows that the bad guys have seen this truth and by hiding it from the rest of us, they gain some advantage. In the cold war, the secrets were largely scientific, concerned with the weaponization of nuclear physics or biology. The danger there though was the inequality of knowledge between the competing factions. We were safe as long as both sides had the same destructive capability. Destruction was mutually assured if either side elected to use their knowledge in anger. The glamour of cold war spy novels derived from the high stakes and the guile of the agents on both sides as they strove to protect their perceived advantages. I say perceived because in reality, what those agencies were in fact protecting was the status quo. But there is another kind of secret, an even more intriguing one. This is the secrecy of ignorance. What I mean is, a truth obscured not by an act of hiding but rather through a lack of effective searching. This may be because we are unaware of its existence or alternatively, we just lack the interest to look. These kind of secrets become particularly interesting when someone gets serious about uncovering them. Why is this person so focussed on finding this truth? What do they stand to gain? Should we be searching too? In Infinite State, the concluding part of the Infinity Trilogy, Carlo Bianci is driven by the conviction that Lodestar, a new generation of social network, contains just such a truth. His increasingly reckless drive to find it brings the world order to its knees. What is this secret and why is it worth the heavy price of uncovering it? Infinite State is available from Amazon. Click here for details.

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash