Project Socrates

Abstract

The main goal of this project is to develop a network of publicly available laboratories for knowledge sharing, research and development on demand.

Index

• Why this project exists

Why this project exists

History

In 1985, Richard Stallman founds the Free Software Foundation.
In 2001, Lawrence Lessig founds Creative Commons.
In 2012, Alicia Gibb founds the Open Source Hardware Association.

What are the common ideas and values behind them?

The four essential freedoms:
the freedom to use, study, modify and distribute software, hardware and information:

Freedom respecting organizations and projects

Many people have embraced these values and have created and founded many freedom respecting projects and organizations such as Trisquel GNU linux, FreeCAD, KiCAD, the FOSSi foundation, the Libre Space Foundation, Kaggle:

The missing pieces

Despite the enormous success of the culture of freedom solidified by Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig and Alicia Gibb, I feel at the moment I'm writing this document there is only one freedom mature and massively available at scale: to distribute software, hardware and information:

The access to the remaining freedoms (use, study and modify) are heavily bottlenecked by self service and there is a lack of infrastructure to access knowledge at scale for which it is required to exercise those four freedoms together: