The Open Source Movement - Philippine Electric Power Policy and Reform

Riffing on Kos' post, particularly the last paragraph ...

...the aggregation of thousands on behalf of a common cause...

Bloggers [like me] and their opinions might be mildly interesting, but the ability to pool our efforts on issues that capture the collective imagination is what really gets me excited.

This is the only way to counter powerful influences on the Arroyo administration relative to electricity issues. We have to get the conversation going among the dozens of NGOs within the Philippines that are addressing energy issues, the market participants (utilities, cooperatives, customer groups), and regulatory reps and get it propogated through weblogs.

Meetups, conferences, workshops all contribute but they don't reach the hundreds (thousands?) of people necessary to achieve cohesive communicable force in counteracting the aforesaid powers influencing the Government.

Think wisdom of crowds and open source, grassroots movements. Joe "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" Trippi understood the power of it.

Larry Lessig (Professor of Law at Stanford) yesterday noted another pertinent concept to our efforts here.

the single most important thing that I learned from my years working on "constitutionalism" in Eastern Europe: That 90% of the challenge is to build a culture that respects the rule of law, and that practices it. A document doesn't build that culture. And no one has a formula -- either for building it, or preserving it.

We're building a culture that will guide Philppine electricity reform policy - it's not going to be found in EPIRA or tweaks to it, nor in specific USAID advisors. The answers to adaptively developing changes in the sector are to be found in the "culture" that we have to develop.