Making the Future: Technology, Solidarity and Business

What does solidarity have to do with technology and business?  This answer would seem to be associated with a social marketing scheme that looks good in pictures but really has no basis, only bla, bla, bla.

Doesn´t everyone know that solidarity has nothing to do with technology, unless we are talking about NGOs? But, with Business? With Economy? Come on! What does solidarity have to do with economy unless it has to do with propaganda? Absolutely nothing at all; everyone knows that economy, business, and finance have nothing to do with solidarity; it’s a word that is used for one of those days that that are dedicated to a UN celebration, whose usefulness is questionable. Or one of those days when school children are given a talk about what they should do when they grow up, that has nothing at all do with real life, or at least if these children don´t want to be considered as fools when they grow up.

Surely these words of wisdom would be told to us by any of those wise people responsible for finances, whether from banks, credit rating agencies, from European governments, from the IMF, or the World Bank, or any other of these types of organizations.

Those that want us to believe that it is logical and normal, for scientific progress as well as becoming more specialized and professionalized, and all of this capacity to produce more and more is to have less. Less? Well, that is, less economical and social rights, but in other aspects more: more unemployment, more businesses- small and medium- that are forced to close and more uncertainty.

We have long been hearing and even worse, suffering the consequences of those who really know and are surely making fun of us especially if we tell them that we believe that solidarity should be a core value that guides both scientific and economical development.

Those who have been following us for some time know that in gvSIG we have always been talking about a new model of development and production that would allow us to produce more, better and more fairly; a model where solidarity would substitute rivalry. To construct this new model there has to be new ideas, new schemes, otherwise, if a new model is built based on old schemes this would then lead to utmost failure.

Now more than ever, it is time to consider this new model. Not only by using free software but also by adopting values ​​of collaboration and shared knowledge, replacing individualism with solidarity; this is what guides the development of science and economy, so that the business world follows ethics and responds to different values ​​other than the current ones.

We live in a world that will be faced with a grim future, if we continue with this evolution. However, the future is not already written, the decisions that we make now will determine one future or another, and the one that we would like to have is one very different from what we are experiencing at the present.

We call for solidarity as a value. The slogan for the eighth international gvSIG conference is: Making the Future: Technology, Business and Solidarity. Solidarity is the main idea.