- co-operate privately and safely with our family, friends and others;
- have the best technological support;
- recognise the human dimension in the programs we use;
- pay the people who provide us with products and services, fairly;
- see companies support and nourish our society and its ecological environment;
- encourage creativity and innovation and see people make a living out of that.
Strangely enough, a company like Facebook violates all the above values and yet we put up with it. Why? By now, we’ve come to think of IT as an inherently flawed technology, like fossil fuel combustion engines. Cars propelled by such engines harm our environment and health, in the long run. We know it, yet we drive (guiltily) because there is no alternative. Until electric cars came along.
We think we must mitigate the loss of privacy, the destructive effects of the gig economy, the harm done by fake news, with regulation and self control. The technology itself is supposed to be at best neutral: it is our use of it that is bad.
But that’s a frame! it is not like that. Current IT is designed to do all these harmful things and we can create another form of IT that actually aligns with the values stated at the top.
Our goals
We’ve invested all our time and money in Perspectives for three years, but we need another year. We need income to continue and go live on the magical date of 01-01-2020. We pursue two roads to that end.
Firstly, we’ve started to build a community of users willing to pay in advance for InPlace, the citizen version of Perspectives, to crowd-fund the completion of the project.
It can be done. We have an inspiring example. In 2013, 19.000 people financed a new phenomenon: online quality journalism based on a subscription model. A critical public dissatisfied with the journalism offered by traditional papers of the day financed the Dutch De Correspondent (actually, an international version is being set up right now).
We count on enough people in the Netherlands thinking critically about what comes from Silicon Valley. See for example the article Als we het internet vrij laten, neemt het ons gevangen by Jan Kuitenbrouwer in the NRC.
Secondly, we look for foreign capital for the Perspect IT company. We think there is a good business case for a company serving government and businesses, based on the Open Source Perspectives programs.
So we have three goals:
- Find 10.000 Dutch citizens willing to finance InPlace by paying the € 36,- subscription fee per year in advance.
- Find foreign capital for Perspect-IT BV.
- Finish Perspectives and Inplace!
Join us at InPlace. Help us reach out. Bring us in contact with influencers. Find us ambassadors, become one yourself!