The Open Forest Consortium exists to promote and extend the open development model in Portland, the Northwest, and the world. The open and cooperative nature of open source development makes it a uniquely viable organizing principle to reach beyond technology.

Human systems tend to traverse similar stages: birth, growth, stasis, decay and collapse. In an age of "free-market globalization," folks all over the planet are discovering that many of these systems--whether political, economic, social, religious, or otherwise--are no longer working for them. Wealth and effective political power concentrates into the hands of a tiny few, the middle-classes continue to shrink, and the most vulnerable in our communities often cling desperately to survival.

Worse still, the rich and politically connected appear to have gone mad. The economic "haves" apparently just can't get enough, and grab even more. And many of our most prominent political representatives have seemingly gone utterly berserk. Like macro-scale suicide bombers, they plunge whole societies into war, chaos and annihilation.

In this bleak environment we the people are required to come up with new ways of managing our communities. Our task is to fashion updated political, social, economic and spiritual structures that work for us. The good news is we now have plenty of tools to assist us with this task.