P2P not only emerges in its cooperative non-profit form, but als
changes our economic system and the for-profit entreprises. This issue
is dedicated to various expressions of this transformation.
Last week I mentioned my misgivings about a new 'integrative
spirituality' site, and this is echoed by the guest editiorial of John
Heron, which says it all so much better than I could.
Finally, I recommend the spirited comparision of video blogging vs. television.
ISSUE 89, Table of Contents
P/I: PLURALITIES/INTEGRATION
A newsletter about participation
in multiple worlds, multiple visions, but one humanity ; a monitor of P2P
developments
-
Archive at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p
Compiler:
Michel Bauwens, michelsub2003@yahoo.com ; P/I is an emanation of the FOUNDATION FOR PEER TO PEER
ALTERNATIVES
ISSUE 89: September 30, 2005: Why this newsletter? Why the
title?
The title refers to
the enduring tension between a multitude of worldviews, and their eventual
integration. For a full explanation of the rationale behind the newsletter, see
issues 1 and 2. An alternative name could be "P2P and Empire" because in
practice I mostly focus on a analysis of the crisis of the current system on
the one hand, and the emergence of a more participative worldview, which I call
"peer to peer", on the other.
Preferred themes: the networked society, cognitive capitalism, Empire and its
discontents,emancipatory processes among the `multitudes' and the possible
emergence of a peer to peer civilization, truth-building as a collective and
`dialogical' effort, the challenges posed to traditional religions and humanism
by spiritual P2P experiencing and technological transhumanism.
The P2P meme map (i.e. related, but not
necessarily completely similar terms: peer to peer,
many to many, edge to edge development partnerships, distributed networks,
egalitarian networks, protocollary power, user innovation communities, social
networking, smart mobs, filesharing, grid computing, theWriteable Web (or
Read-Write Web), FLOSS i.e. Free, Libre, Open Source Software, CPBB or
Commons-Based Peer Production, the alterglobalisation movement as a network of
networks, free software and open sources as a 'third mode of production', the
coordination format, non-representationality, the rhizome, parallel and
distributed computing, object oriented programming, object-oriented sociality,
the Information Commons, the GPL Society, the hacker ethic, folksonomies and
tags, the long tail, Napsterization, cooperation studies, collective
intelligence, synergetics, wirearchy, peer governance, common-property regimes
If you like
this project, please suggest any interesting links! We would be very happy
to list you as a contributor. Thanks to John Dermaut, Christophe Lestavel, John
L. Petersen, George Dafermos, Jim Hightower, David Spillane, Larry Penslinger,
Nik Baerten, Maurice Nsabimana, Tattoo Mabonzo, Philippe Van Nedervelde, Pascal
Houba, Jaap van Till, and the Multitudes mailing list for regular suggestions.
Recommended:
JamesBurke of Lifesized, http://lifesized.blogspot.com/;
Kris Roose, at http://www.noosphere.cc/
; Nicole-Anne Boyer, http://www.fuzzysignals.com/
: John Heron, www.human-inquiry.com
How
to subscribe: Write to compiler Michel Bauwens at michel@noosphere.cc
or at michelsub2003@yahoo.com.
QUOTES
-
Kevin Kelly on
Amish websites:
"What could
be a better mark of irreversible acceptance than adoption by the Amish? I was
visiting some Amish farmers recently. They fit the archetype perfectly: straw
hats, scraggly beards, wives with bonnets, no electricity, no phones or TVs,
horse and buggy outside. They have an undeserved reputation for resisting all
technology, when actually they are just very late adopters. Still, I was amazed
to hear them mention their Web sites.
"Amish Web
sites?" I asked.
"For
advertising our family business. We weld barbecue grills in our shop."
"Yes, but
"
"Oh, we use
the Internet terminal at the public library. And Yahoo!"
I knew then the
battle was over."
(Source: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html? )
CONTENT
-
Latest online version of the essay is still located at http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2ptheory1
-
My entry for the upcoming Re-Activism conference, on the 'political
economy of peer production' in Budapest
on mid-October at http://mokk.bme.hu/centre/conferences/reactivism/submissions/bouwens . A 20-page
summary essay is available.
- I have published a French-language 'Tribune Libre' in Agoravox, see
http://www.agoravox.fr/article.php3?id_article=2936
If you know French, please contribute and post a commentary to the debate, there are two entries at present.
REQUEST FOR YOUR COOPERATION:
Is the concept of 'Absolute Democracy' which I'm using
in my P2P essays, which denotes the extension of autonomy into all spheres of
life, appropriate, our should it be replaced by another concept such as
"Integral Democracy"? Tell me what you think. The concept of Absolute
Democracy is from Toni Negri, but has an unclear definition, or at least, I do
not properly understand it. So I 'appropriated' it in my own remix. However,
the problem with absolute is that it is so 'absolute', it tolerates no
exceptions .But in essence, though we acknowledge that there are many areas where
other intersubjective forms will co-exist, peer to peer will undoubtedly
transform them, and be present wherever hierarchy is used to promote
participation. As in: you educate your children to be as autonomous as they
possibly can, even though you are using your parental authority to protect and
guide them.
http://www.integrativespirituality.org/postnuke/html/
; www.human-inquiry.com
John Heron writes: "I've been having a look at the integrative
spirituality site, about which you express your cautions in Issue 88."
"These
cautions are, in my view, well considered. And I would like to build on them,
if I may. The site is an intriguing undertaking: it took three years to
construct, with 40,000 pages of material. And there is something deeply amiss
about all this labour. The vast array of detailed topics conveys an
unacknowledged anxiety about the very thing the authors claim they are
promoting, i.e. personal spirituality rooted in inner authority. They want to
provide controlling guidance on every aspect of how to develop this kind of
autonomous spirituality and they do so to a degree that implies they really
have very little faith in it. They affirm some excellent autonomous and
co-operative principles, then undermine them by framing them within an
absolutist theology, and by telling everyone how to go about realizing them in
an excessive number of prescriptive lists about everything they can think of
under the spiritual sun. And they seem to want to go on doing this for
everyone. So they come over as making a powerful bid to control the global
spiritual commons in terms of their own assiduous extensive categorizing. Thus
they define all the categories in terms of which people are invited to make
their `personal' contribution to the commons. And of course the colour map of
meme theory is presented in full and in an entirely uncritical way as a basic
guideline for getting one's spiritual autonomy on a sound track! It is
pretty obvious that they are trying to appropriate the notions of idiosyncratic
personal spirituality, open source spirituality and the global spiritual
commons, and make them subservient to their own commitment to a Wilberian mix
of integral spirituality and spiral dynamics. Their claim to enhance the
commons looks like a cover for their need to replace the risk-taking of true
openness by the security of doctrinal conviction. If they spend their time
telling everyone else how to use the commons, they are avoiding cultivating
their own patch properly - for they are too busy prescribing how others might
work the soil. To be bluntly frank, this comes across as the
displacement-behaviour of people who have never faced up to the fact that their
souls have been colonized by the spiritual dogmatisms of their own teachers. So
all in all, a specious and contradictory undertaking. No wonder the authors
prefer to remain nameless.
However, it does raise the very interesting question
of how the internet can provide an authentic forum for personal spirituality,
open source spirituality and the global spiritual commons.
One answer, of course, is that the web, just as it is,
is the emerging global integral-spiritual
commons (GISC).
This is in line with your note in Issue 88 about Kevin
Kelly on the birth of the One Machine of the internet as a spiritual event. In
terms of this view, the GISC is actually the current entire worldwide
web of internet users seeking to make sense, in terms of multitudinous
categories, of every aspect of human existence, a vast forum of chaos and
emerging order within a common cyberspace. In which case, any attempt to locate
the GISC in one website or some specific network of websites, simply misses the
point, and is a deluded bid for hegemony - like King Canute wanting to extend
his power over the ocean. Within
the GISC, a local group can share with the rest of us of how they have autonomously
and co-operatively cultivated their patch of the commons. They can reveal fully
and openly their principles and practices for inhabiting the commons, and
invite other interested people to participate freely in the development of
them. But if they try to inflate their local cultivation to the whole GISC
itself, they simply create a little ghetto of collective delusion."
-
Please
check out John Heron's site at www.human-inquiry.com
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000126.html
After describing four forces that are changing the
business environment, the author predicts the emergence of a new type of
transcommercial enterprises.
"Transcommercial
enterprises have at their very core a different conception of what it means to
do business. Corporations today sometimes still think they can get away with
anything, but more and more frequently they see the need to paper over their
faults with pronouncements of goodwill, public relations campaigns and sideline
charity-giving. This is not transcommercial. Transcommercial enterprises won't
see doing the right thing as good PR or a desirable goal... if it doesn't
interfere too much with profits. Instead, they'll see doing the right thing
*as* the path to profits. If there's a conflict between doing the right thing
and doing the profitable thing, that just means that there's a market
opportunity for figuring out how to make the right thing more profitable.
Indeed,
I expect transcommercial enterprises to appear almost unrecognizable to people
whose minds are locked in today's business culture. They won't *look* like
Fortune 500 companies do today. They'll seem amorphous and networked and
rapidly-changing, with a lot of bright idealistic people floating around doing
things which seem only tangentially "business-like." In fact, those
people will be the core of the business. Transcommercial enterprises will be
all about having deep, open, honest two-way relationships with long-term
investors, NGOs, government regulators, collaborative networks and consumer
groups. Growing and nurturing those relationships will be a major part of the business
operation, because they will be the founts from which slow and deliberate
capital, new innovation and customer loyalty all spring. And those relationship
can only be grown and nurtured by folks who consider themselves active forces
for positive change. Transcommercial enterprises' company retreats will be full
of people who'd be quite at home at funky nonprofit benefit fundraisers.
Transcommercial enterprises will be big on declarations of principle and
measured adherence to them. They'll trumpet their openness, accountability and
transparency, pay for the privilege of being audited by independent do-gooders
(like the LEED program ),
and be the first to publish the results, warts and all, with plans to do
better. Their books will be open, their corporate strategies discussed in
online communities, and their products and services willingly submitted to very
public scrutiny and appraisal.
Transcommercial enterprises will be intensely neophilic, constantly on the
look-out for better ways of doing what they do. They will aggressively pursue
every possible innovation and efficiency. In fact, knowing that waste is lost
profit, transcommercial enterprises will be nearly OCD about knowing precisely
how much energy they're using, exactly what resources they're using and what
wastes they're emitting, and squeezing every last gram of efficiency out of
those flows. Human capital, I'd suspect, will be as intensely cultivated, with
the goal being creating happy, delighted, extremely dedicated employees armed
with best new tools and techniques, people who feel they are pursuing their
life's work - rather than pushing people right up to the limits of what they'll
take without quitting. I suspect these employees will be far more productive
over the long-run than those of their old-fashioned competitors. Finally,
transcommercial enterprises will do many things which would have seemed ten
years ago as besides the point, or maybe even more the mission of a non-profit
NGO. They will partner with collaborative networks, giving away much of the
fundamental innovation they create, and facilitating work which by today's
standards doesn't benefit them, solely to keep solidly enmeshed in the Tech
Bloom's networks of innovators. Their research-and-development teams will spin
off non-commercial products for non-market customers (like environmental
refugees) on a regular basis. In moderate, sensible, soft-spoken and extremely
effective ways, they'll champion political reforms reducing corruption and
pay-to-play government (which only hurt them), making it clear they're good
corporate citizens."
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4020&t=organizations
Thomas Malone is one of the experts of 'coordination
theory' and is the sponsor of a open source business process handbook. His book
specifically discusses the adaptation of enterprises to the peer to peer
paradigm. But notice the key difference between decentralization, where centers
of power are subdivided, from the full concept of 'distribution', where power
is diffused. The following is an excerpt from his new book. It should be seen
as the necessary complement to Eric von Hippel's The Democratisation of
Innovation. Since Malone in a way indirectly answers the most common critiques
of peer production ,it is well worth reading in toto.
"For
each major kind of decision your company makes, you can ask yourself the
following three questions: (1) Are the potential benefits of decentralizing
important? (2) Can you compensate for the potential costs of decentralizing?
(3) Do the benefits of decentralizing outweigh the costs? Let's look at each of
these questions in turn.
Are the potential benefits of
decentralizing important?
As
we saw earlier, decentralization has three general benefits: (1) It encourages
motivation and creativity; (2) it allows many minds to work simultaneously on
the same problem; and (3) it accommodates flexibility and individualization.
The importance of these benefits varies greatly, but they are often especially
important in certain industries and business functions. For example, the
success of most professional services organizations (such as consulting,
software development, and law) hinges on the motivation and creativity of their
professionals. Consequently, these organizations are especially good candidates
for decentralized decision making. Creativity and innovation are also often
particularly important in functions like engineering, sales, product design,
and information technology. Here, too, decentralization will often pay off. But
as more work in our economy becomes knowledge work, and as innovation becomes
increasingly critical to business success in many industries, the benefits of
decentralization are likely to become important in more and more places.In
fact, in principle, almost any business activity could benefit from having
highly motivated, creative people performing it. Much of the early work in the
Total Quality Movement, for example, was about encouraging assembly line
workers to look for ways to innovate and improve the routine processes they
performed. So the question of whether the benefits of decentralization are
important in your situation is not a purely objective one. It is also a matter
of your strategic choices. Different people in the same situation can make
different choices about how much they want to rely on the advantages of decentralization.
Mrs. Fields Cookies tries to systematize and centrally control almost all the
decisions needed to operate its local stores, while Wal-Mart tries to give
significant autonomy to its local workers. Either strategy can work well, but
you have to pick one and use it consistently.
Can you compensate for the potential costs
of decentralizing?
You
may be thinking, "Sure, sure, all this decentralization stuff sounds great
in theory, but how often could it actually work? How can you make decisions
effectively when no one is really in control? How can you guarantee quality or
protect your company against catastrophic losses if no one is watching over
things? How can you take advantage of economies of scale or knowledge sharing,
if everything is so fragmented?" These concerns are important--sometimes so
important that they'll lead you to reject decentralized structures and stick
with rigid hierarchies. Often, though, there are creative ways to deal with the
potential downsides. Let's look at the four main problems with decentralization
and the possible solutions.
How can you make decisions quickly and
efficiently when no one is in control?
Sometimes,
it just takes a long time to involve everyone in joint decisions and resolve
all their conflicting desires. Cheaper and faster communication, through
e-mail, for example, helps temper this problem. But even when the transmission
of information is free and instantaneous, it still takes time for people to
send and comprehend the information. And no matter how much people communicate,
they still won't all agree on every question. Each of the decentralized
structures offers different ways to make decision making more efficient. In
loose hierarchies, you, as a manager, can sometimes force decisions on people,
even when not everyone agrees. In an economic downturn, for instance, you might
decide for yourself which groups to cut, instead of waiting for the groups
themselves to make such a difficult decision. If you're a good manager in a
loose hierarchy, you probably won't force decisions very often. Sometimes,
you'll have to force a decision, such as when a decision is taking too long,
when it looks as if there will never be enough agreement, or when people are
spending so much time arguing they're not doing their other work. But the rest
of the time, you should let people work things out for themselves. In
democracies, you can make decisions more efficiently in two ways. You can let
the employees elect managers to make decisions on their behalf, as the partners
of many law firms and consulting firms do in electing managing partners. Or you
can let people vote directly (or via opinion polls) on the most important
decisions, as the Mondragon cooperatives sometimes do. In markets, decisions
are often made efficiently because only two parties--a buyer and seller--need to
agree for a transaction to occur. If an earthquake disables one of your
factories, for instance, and your company has an internal market, then pairs of
buyers and sellers can start trading with each other right away to solve the
problem. They don't need anyone else to agree about what to do.
But
for a market to work well, everyone who participates has to agree on the rules
of the game. Markets need legal frameworks to resolve disputes between buyers
and sellers, and they need regulatory systems to prevent activities (like
pollution, price fixing, misleading accounting, or deceptive advertising) that
make the whole market less efficient. In external markets, governments usually
provide the rules. But, as we saw with Visa International and eBay, other
organizations like trade associations, market makers, or standards bodies can
also set rules. In internal markets, the rules are established and enforced by
the managers of the company.
How can you guarantee quality or protect
against catastrophic losses if no one is in control?
Many
people assume that quality assurance and risk management require someone to be
in control. But that isn't always true. When the right incentives are in place,
just sharing information can be enough to maintain quality and temper risk.
Suppose that in your company, the bonuses for everyone who deals with customers
depend partly on customer satisfaction ratings. And suppose that everyone in
the company can easily call up a page on the company intranet to see the
customer satisfaction ratings for each store and salesperson. Just by setting
up a system like this, many service-quality problems are likely to take care of
themselves without any centralized intervention. Social and other pressures
will push people to excel. Sharing information can work in loose hierarchies,
democracies, and markets. But each decentralized decision-making structure also
offers other ways to manage risk and quality. If you're a manager in a loose
hierarchy, you don't have to watch over or sign off on every action your
subordinates take. This freedom allows you to focus on controlling the quality
of people and measuring results. For instance, you can devote more attention to
whom to hire and promote and how to reward them for the results you want. In
democracies, you can elect managers to watch quality and risk. Or you can let
the members of a group vote--taking into account quality and risk, as well as
other factors--on whom to hire and promote and how to allocate rewards. Many
consulting and law firms, for instance, elect their new partners by a vote of
all the existing partners. In markets, you can control quality in two ways.
First, you can use online reputation systems (e.g., those used by eBay, Elance,
and Asynchrony) to help people pick high-quality providers in the first
place.When online reputation systems become widely used, the traditional
signifiers of quality, like brand names, are likely to become less important.
Actual user ratings give buyers a much more accurate and efficient way of
judging quality than relying on their general knowledge of a brand. Which would
you rather buy: (a) a television with a well-known brand (e.g., Sony), even
though previous buyers and objective raters like Consumer Reports rate the set
poorly, or (b) an unknown-brand television (e.g., from Joe's No-Name
Appliances) that gets wildly enthusiastic ratings from most previous buyers and
objective raters? In addition to reputation systems, the other primary way to
manage quality and risk in markets is with various financial instruments:
insurance, performance bonds, pools of risk capital, and other kinds of
collateral. One of my former students, for instance, used to work in the credit
card area of CapitalOne, a large financial services company with a
decentralized, entrepreneurial culture. This student really appreciated the
freedom that individual analysts had there to make pricing and credit policy
decisions for massive mailings of credit card offers. But in 2002, government regulators
forced CapitalOne to institute numerous centralized controls and approval
processes designed to reduce the risk of huge credit card losses. In my
student's view, this involuntary centralization seriously damaged the unique
entrepreneurial culture and strengths of the bank. Could CapitalOne have
managed this risk in other--more decentralized--ways? I think so. Here is one
possibility: Instead of having a centralized manager sign off on the terms of
every mailing, each analyst could have a pool of risk capital. If you were an
analyst and wanted to make a mailing in which the total credit offered was
below your risk capital limit, you could proceed with no other approvals. And
you could still exceed your own limit without centralized approval by assembling
a syndicate of peers who together were willing to contribute enough of their
own risk capital to cover the mailing. In undertaking a huge risk, you might
still have to get approval from a higher-level manager, but you and your peers
could manage most of your own risks in a decentralized way.
How can you take advantage of economies of
scale if everything is decentralized?
Many
times, people assume that just because there are economies of scale in one part
of a process, the whole process has to be centralized. But you can often get
the benefits of both bigness and smallness by centralizing only those decisions
involving important economies of scale and decentralizing everything else. In
semiconductor manufacturing, for example, there are major economies of
scale--Intel now spends about $2.5 billion to build a fabrication plant. But
this doesn't necessarily mean that similar economies of scale apply in
everything else Intel does. There's no reason, for instance, why the design of
semi-conductor chips couldn't be much more decentralized. In fact, some of
Intel's competitors, like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
(TSMC), take this idea to an extreme by providing only
semiconductor-manufacturing services. Its customers, ranging from tiny start-ups
to huge multinationals, design their own chips and then pay TSMC to manufacture
them. Even when economies of scale apply, you can sometimes achieve them with
very little centralized control if you follow two key practices: Share
information widely, and provide incentives that encourage scale economies. Many
companies assume, for instance, that to achieve economies of scale in
purchasing, they need to centralize purchasing decisions. By forcing all the
different parts of their company to buy from the same vendors, they get much
bigger volume discounts. But what if, instead of forcing everyone to buy from
the same vendors, you just provide incentives for people to form voluntary
purchasing groups? If I don't much care, for instance, what kind of personal
computer I have, I could just delegate my personal computer purchasing decision
to a PC purchasing specialist and automatically get whatever volume discounts
that person can negotiate. If I do care, I could look at an online database of
the different PC purchasing plans available in my company and decide which one
is best for me. In this scenario, the central purchasing people could still
have a job organizing voluntary coalitions of buyers, maintaining a database of
available purchasing plans, and negotiating volume discounts for the people who
choose to participate.
Of
course, if the incentives aren't right, this arrangement won't work well. I
might, for instance, choose my own favorite PC vendor, even when this is really
not the best choice from the company's point of view. But if I am measured and
rewarded on the basis of my contributions to corporate profit, then I can
balance the potential cost savings for the company with all the other factors
that are important to me. In general, the three decentralized structures allow
individuals to make their own decisions about economies of scale. But, in each
structure, you sometimes need to restrict individual decisions to encourage
economies of scale (e.g., with utilities) or to prevent abuses of power (e.g.,
with monopolies). In loose hierarchies, the managers do this. In democracies,
it's done by elected managers or popular vote. In markets, some kind of
regulatory infrastructure does it. For instance, in an internal
production-capacity market with only a single factory, the corporation might
regulate the factory like a public utility rather than letting its managers
charge whatever price the internal market would bear.
source of graph, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/images/table8-1.gif
http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/guide/
The
concept of Information Feudalism, implied in Jeremy Rifkin's Age of Access, is
that we are entering a regime where the freedom of property makes place for the
unfreedom of licensing, which places limits on what we can do with the things
we purchase, a new kind of capitalist serfhood. This article discusses the
restriction of rights implicit in online music licenses.
"There is an increasing variety of options for
purchasing music online, but also a growing thicket of confusing usage
restrictions. You may be getting much less than the services promise. Many digital music services employ
digital rights management (DRM) -- also known as "copy protection" --
that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your
choice or creating remixes."
If you want to purchase
music online without DRM, check out
these services selling MP3s: emusic ; Audio Lunchbox ; Bleep ; Live
Downloads
Interesting report on the future
of paid online music, by the Berkman
Center, at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/BerkmanPress/iTunes_August_update_final%5B1%5D.pdf
Matchbox is described as the
first 'label-backed' P2P system, at http://news.com.com/How+label-backed+P2P+was+born/2100-1027_3-5840310.html?tag=nefd.lede
. Other systems mentioned in the article are iMesh and Audible. The use of
filters is described.
http://www.perens.com/Articles/Economic.html
"Open Source can be
explained entirely within the context of conventional open-market economics.
Indeed, it turns out that it has much stronger ties to the phenomenon of
capitalism than you may have appreciated."
"In the early days of Open Source, its proponents did not
fully understand its economics. Through our lack of understanding, we created
the perception that Open Source's economic foundation was intangible. This led
many people to feel that Open Source would not be sustainable over the long
term and would be incapable of scaling to meet the market's need for new
technology. It's important to correct that perception now. In The Cathedral
and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond attempted to explain Open Source as a gift
economy, a phenomenon of computer programmers having the leisure to do
creative work not connected to their employment, and an artistic motivation to
have their work appreciated. Raymond explains excellently how programmers
behave within their own private subculture. The motivations he explored
dominated during the genesis of Open Source and continue to be effective within
a critically important group of Open Source contributors today. Raymond did not attempt to explain why
big companies like IBM are participating in Open Source, that had not yet
started when he wrote. Open Source was just starting to attract serious
attention from business, and had not yet become a significant economic
phenomenon. Thus, The Cathedral and the Bazaar is not informed by the
insight into Open Source's economics that is available today.Unfortunately,
many people have mistaken Raymond's early arguments as evidence of a weak
economic foundation for Open Source.
In Raymond's model, work is rewarded with
an intangible return rather than a monetary one. Fortunately, it's easy to establish
today that there is a strong monetary return for many Open Source
developers. But that return is still not as direct as in proprietary software
development. Thus, I'll ask you to follow a few more steps than you would in
understanding the economics of proprietary software."
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,1088315,00.html
Another article in the vein of Business Week's
Power of Us, but only available to subscribers in full.
"Who would have
thought that your customers would work as volunteers on behalf of your
company?" asks Scott Cook, founder and chairman of software firm Intuit.
The trend, which Intuit calls "user contribution systems," helps the
company constantly improve the quality of its products, he says.
I suspect that the value that can now be produced through
collaboration is vastly greater than in the conventional top-down process.
Wikipedia, for instance, is bigger and more up-to-date than the Encyclopedia
Britannica. "Wikipedia clearly makes the world better off," says
Cook, an enthusiast of this new tendency towards volunteerism. "But
economists measure dollars. People generally assume that GDP and quality of
life go up together. Maybe a chunk of the economy is going underground."
Howard Rheingold, author, techno-visionary and student of
the online community and cooperation, talks about a similar notion that he
calls "sharing economies." He's deep into a long-term study on
various aspects of cooperation and collective action called The Cooperation
Project. (He's looking for cooperation in funding it, in fact.)
www.thefutureofwork.net/blog/archives/000287.html
"Modern
corporations are an artificial legal structure created within the past one hundred years to minimize
the risk associated with control of large asset bases. As Peter Drucker so
aptly notes, they have out lived their usefulness. The assumptions that have
underlain their need are not longer
valid. Primary among those assumptions is that large organizations were required
to capitalize the investments required in the ownership of the means of
production, such as factories. With a shift to more knowledge work this isn't
necessary for a much larger portion of the working population. Confederations
of business clusters will instead move to the forefront. They will be held
together by strategy, rather than by ownership of assets. "
Future of Work newsletter
at http://www.thefutureofwork.net/assets/September_2005_Newsletter.html
http://www.nevon.net/nevon/2005/09/blog_a_movie_an.html
Thanks to James
Burke for suggesting this entry.
[...] The PR folks for the forthcoming Joss
Whedon (Buffy, Angel, etc.) science fiction movie Serenity are inviting bloggers to
advance screenings. [...] It's free, and all they ask is that you blog
something, good or bad, about it. [...] They're full now (Friday p.m.) so if
you haven't emailed 'em you've missed your chance. Apparently the blog-response
was phenomenal.
It's that last sentence that's the interesting bit. Already
quite a bit of blog
buzz on Technorati, some of which is as a result of the blogger promo (this one, for
instance). Stimulating blogs to build word-of-mouth spread of opinion about a
movie really is a smart idea. Low cost but very high return potential. Some
risks, of course - negative commentary could be what people will write. That's
likely if the movie is crap, in which case better get that fact out there
early!
But if the people who blog think it's a terrific movie, then
that's what they will write about. Others will see those posts and write about
it as well (just as I'm doing). Pretty big opinion-spread potential in return
for some preview tickets. It's also interesting to see this as a shift in
"authority reporting". Take a look at a resource like the Internet Movie Database. Go to any movie
listing - Serenity, for
instance. In the left-column menu, Serenity like most movies has a link to external reviews
- what movie reviewers say, usually in mainstream media.
Logical next development - external reviews that include what
bloggers say (and think of the potential for spoken opinions in podcasts, too).
This looks like it's already beginning to happen as the Serenity review list
includes a blog - The Movie Blog.
But I'd also like to see reviews by 'normal folk,' movie buffs who also happen
to blog (or podcast).
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-CL1
"This paper looks at
aspects of Wikipedia's structure and process, with specific focus on its
community (or organisational) learning."
"Learning is conceptualised as a collective,
collaborative process, whereby multiple perspectives are shared and meanings
are constructed. Fundamental to this learning are Wikipedia's policies and the
procedure of collaboration in an often conflicting environment. Conflict is
viewed as a key component in the process of creating the content of Wikipedia
as well as a key factor in people's participation in the project. The
consequence of conflict is of central importance, both in terms of how or to
what extent it is resolved, and how a number of users end up leaving the
project as a result. Throughout, the focus is on how individual users
communicate their opinions and feelings to other users and how these
communications are read and/or understood by individuals and/or the community,
especially in the light of it being mainly a text-only medium. How experiences
are shared between and within projects is seen as a crucial factor in its
organisational learning - Wikipedia as an organisation has both traditional and
radical features, but its learning, as well as so many other aspects of its
proclaimed success, is seen to be predicated on its structure, as well as its
policies. Therefore, to what extent Wikipedia's structured process eases and/or
inhibits its ability to learn is examined, in the light of its growing size and
number of individual language projects.
http://www.unmediated.org/archives/2005/07/new_york_times.php
You can't judge Peer to
Peer processes with the old categories, and just compare them with mass media.
Here's a good response to those who fail to see the difference in approach and
just think it is a re-iteration of the old. From unmediated.org
"The New York Times shallowly surmises videoblogs in their
Critic's Notebook article, Watch Me Do This and That Online. Writer
Sarah Boxer concludes: Congratulations. It's television! Sorry Sarah,
videoblogs are not television. Here's why.
First off, here's a news flash: You can link to videoblogs.
Unlike the excellent Wired News article on the same topic, the
New York Times doesn't link to any videoblogs or any videos. Their thumbnail
photos show a Quicktime player, yet they lead nowhere. For some reason they do
link to Neopets.com. WTF? Perhaps they have a wrongheaded policy of only
linking to "whatever.com" which clearly fails. The New York Times is
doing a great disservice by not linking to the subjects of their article, which
are
frigging web sites. The first half of Sarah's article is nice
enough, giving the reader a few dollops of vlog from across the spectrum. She
gets into trouble when her thesis arrives: Already, though, it's beginning to look a
lot like television, at least in spots. Some vlogs even share television's
worries, chief among them the burden of coming up with fresh programming on a
regular basis.
She cites Rocketboom's recent request for the
audience to send in story ideas. While it's logistically true that story
submissions will make life easier for Rocketboom, the comparison to television
programming is way off the mark.
CLUE #1: Videoblogs interact with their audience.
This is not a weakness. It's a strength.
Television transmits one-way information to its audience.
Weather photos emailed to local news represent a lame exception, but it's a
start. Videoblogs exist in the realm of links and conversation. It's sort of
like Burning Man - everyone is a participant.
Sure, you can
passively watch videos, but everyone is encouraged to comment and make their
own videos.
We are all potential creators and participants. We all have a
voice.
The very concept of audience begins to melt away.
In his book We the Media, Dan Gillmor says "My audience knows
more than I do." Rocketboom opening its doors is a celebration of the
geekosphere; an invitation to be creative and hijack the "channel."
Indeed, Minnesota
Stories is built on the concept of people with video cameras
hijacking the channel.
Everyone is creative and has a story. Want to borrow my
transmitter? Go for it. Better yet, build your own. You won't hear these words
from television.
She dips into the vlogosphere's real reality show, The Carol and Steve Show: It wants to sell
out, but who would buy? Maybe a laugh track would help.
CLUE #2: Do not confuse the packaging with
the contents.
Videoblogs are authentic voices. The Carol and Steve Show is a
superb expression of "Mundane is the new punk rock." Sure, it
hearkens back to TV Land sitcoms, but then you see... Carol and Steve watching
TV. Or running out in the rain trying to grill. Or sitting in bed. In other
words, they're going about their real lives on camera. And there is no laugh
track.
Who would greenlight this show? Carol and Steve, that's who.
Sometimes there's a laugh track on ZipZapZop,
but you know what? I hung out with Clark, and
he had the little laugh track/applause toy with him. He really does hang out
with his guitar and play goofy songs. ZipZapZop is one genuine facet of the
scintillating human we call Clark ov Saturn.
We may well be in the television radioplay phase of videoblogs.
The "show" is one of many forms a vlog can take. Sometimes the
wrapper looks like the old medium. But what's inside is real people, without a
producer, without a middleman. What's inside you can't buy at the candy store.
It's homemade and one-of-a-kind.
As on one of my favorite videobloggers, Ian from The 05 Project. She says he's beginning
to look a lot like "Fear Factor" and gives him some deserving
compliments: He
has Conan O'Brien's direct delivery and David Letterman's deadpan. In short, he
has television charisma. I'm thrilled about all the nice things she
says here, but...
CLUE #3: We don't look like television. We
look like ourselves.
Ian isn't great because he vaguely resembles an amateur
amalgamation of late-night talk show hosts.
Ian is great because Ian is Ian.
Bored kids were daring their friends to do outrageous things
long before Fear
Factor or the invention of television. The difference is, Ian has
never met his new friends. But that doesn't make them any less real.
To say we look more like television personalities than our own
personalities is wrong and perverted.
The more I think about this the more shallow and ridiculous it
seems. Videoblogs are lightyears away from television. I've got
this little planet it my hands; I can spin it
around and jump into someone's life. I can talk to them. I can show them my
life. We could not do this before. Television doesn't have anything to do with
it. The comparison is lazy and, frankly, embarassing for the New York Times.
You can lead a horse to vlog anarchy, but you can't make it
understand the revolution.
http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~yl107/BB030204.html
"The paper begins with the story of EMACS (short for
Editing MACroS), an editor programme originally written for TECO (Text Editor
and Corrector) language and PDP-10 machines in the MIT AI Lab by Richard
Stallman, from which various more sophisticated versions have been developed. I
analyse how the innovation of EMACS took place over time as a socio-technical
process. The EMACS story serves to illustrate how the innovation process in the
FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software)
community occurred, but one that is then adopted and deployed in
other social contexts, including the commercial sector. The analysis of EMACS
is especially useful since it spans the period that saw the
origins of the free software movement and the subsequent
development of a broader FLOSS social world. I will talk about how a variety of
EMACSen (the plural form of EMACS) (e.g. GNU Emacs, XEmacs, MulticsEmacs etc.)
are created, developed and employed/deployed in mundane programming within an
actor-centred network. Actors from different backgrounds contribute multiple
ways of knowing, understanding and resolving problems that arise in the
innovation process. A socio-technical perspective is employed to analyse how
EMACSen are shaped by diverse actors, and at the same time also shape these
actors and their practices.
To widen the scope of the paper in terms of its implication in a
wider societal dimension, anchored in sociology of intellectual/knowledge, this
paper also contributes to our understanding of the formation of knowledge in
the Internet era, where information and knowledge flow fluidly and rapidly. The
EMACS case denotes various key factors of forming cosmopolitan knowledge: how
actors network together (e.g. shared interests), how they interact with one
another (e.g. problem-solving process), and how local epistemologies and tacit
knowledge being translated into cosmopolitan expertise in an
in/tangible form (e.g. materiality of hardware or software). I
believe this empirical enquiry will provide us with a means of retaining the
holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events. Methodologically
speaking, the contextual thickness makes a case study appropriate for
"how" and "why" research questions because answering these
questions deals with operational links needing to be traced over time. The
detailed investigation of FLOSS phenomenon with attention to its context by
using multiple sources of evidence and various methods of data collection will
help to examine the innovation process by which new FLOSS technologies are
created, arguing that this is ongoing
and involves diverse groups who give the technology different
meanings. This perspective also reflects an ongoing thinking in science and
technology studies (STS) that technologies, no matter
their designs, uses or applications, are not independent from
social factors. Given the history of EMACS, one can see how the hacker ethics
are emerged, developed, and followed in the innovation process. Based on the
hacker ethics, EMACS, or a wide range of FLOSS, are not only a
technological revolution, but also a social movement that
operates largely in terms of symbol and meaning, both at the level of everyday
life and at that of institutional operation."
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
- Online video and
cable TV, report at http://www.broadbanddirections.com/register.html
"The report contends that cable TV networks get it, and are
responding to the changes. It also does a review of the video initiatives
offered from the ites of the 75 most highly-penetrated basic cable TV networks.
Some interesting figures: 91% (68) of the top 75 basic cable TV networks now
offer video online...100% of the top 40 basic cable TV networks do so. Another good data point: Of the 32 basic
cable TV networksÂ' web sites that provided broadband-delivered video primarily
to generate incremental revenue, 26, or 81%, used an advertising model, 4, or
13%, used a subscription model and 2, or 6%, were pursuing an e-commerce
model."
(source: Unmediated.org)
P2P
-
An algorhythms to navigate 'small world
network', at http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/newsreleases/articles/20618.php
-
Issue 19 of Multitudes is online, it has a
collection of articles specially devoted to
dis-intermediation/re-intermediation on the internet, at http://multitudes.samizdat.net/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=548
"L'interrogation marquée dans le titre de la mineure
« La fin des intermédiaire ? » (coordonnée par Laurence Allard
et Olivier Blondeau) vise à prendre le contre-pied du lieu commun annonçant la
disparition des intermédiaires (maisons de production, diffuseurs, disquaires
et libraires) à l'âge du numérique : loin d'aller vers un monde illusoire
de contacts directs, transparents et immédiats entre créateurs et consommateurs
de biens culturels, tout laisse à penser que les transformations en cours de la
chaîne de diffusion reconfigureront les fonctions des intermédiaires sans
aucunement les abolir. Dans un article de fond, à la fois synthétique et
précis, Hervé Le Crosnier montre que les intermédiaires remplissent des
fonctions certes en évolution, mais néanmoins incontournables dans des domaines
comme les publications scientifiques, l'industrie du disque ou l'édition
imprimée. À partir d'une analyse en parallèle d'un magasin de disques français
et d'un disquaire ambulant malien, François Debruyne éclaire la façon dont de
tels gate-keepers configurent notre espace musical collectif. Michel
Valensi réfléchit sur les enjeux et les risques du pari qu'il a pris avec les
Éditions de l'Éclat de mettre en ligne une partie de leur catalogue. Enfin,
Nicolas Auray dissèque les différents maillons de la chaîne de production/diffusion
culturelle pour mettre au jour les diverses dynamiques qu'y insèrent les majors
ou le peer-to-peer."
Open source ratings system launched
"A new standard model for rating open
source software is being proposed by an alliance including chip manufacturer Intel
and a US
university. The Business Readiness Ratings (BRR)
scheme aims to enable enterprise adopters and developers to rate open source
software in a transparent and standardised way."
-
I've heard raves and raves about What the
Bleep, but haven't seen it yet. However, this first chapter of a book on the
success of the movie, published by Disinformation.com, is of particular
interest for showing how the producers used 'regional street marketing teams'
to promote the movie, i.e. 'P2P marketing' in action, at http://www.beyondthebleepbook.com/Bleep%20Chapter%201.pdf
-
Open Source biomedical research, a report at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=574863
and commentary at http://onthecommons.org/node/606
"an excellent
empirical overview of this emerging field and its promise for developing new
medical treatments, especially for developing countries. I've mentioned the
open-source models that Richard Jefferson of CAMBIA is pioneering; Rai looks at traditional
biomedical research, and describes its growing embrace of "open and
collaborative" research models facilitated by networking software."
-
Blogumentary, an independent documentary on
the political and social impact of blogging, at http://blogumentary.org/
-
Wiki's as a collaboration tool in
journalism, at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=87197
"Say a team of five reporters, working at a total of three
locations, are collaborating on an investigative project. How are they divvying
the labor, organizing and sharing the information, and plotting the story line?
Chances are they're using a haphazard mishmash of e-mail, phone conversations,
faxes, photocopies, etc. They may even be using knowledge- or
project-management software -- but if so it's still likely that crucial
information is piling up in extraneous locations. It's hard to tell at any one
time exactly who's doing what, or exactly what information already has been
gathered, or how what they have fits into the developing narrative. Enter the
wiki, a technically simple tool that allows the reporters to collaborate on the
structure and attach (or link to) relevent documents or information. Now the
team can work together on one coherent file, collaboratively organizing,
adding, deleting, editing, and commenting."
-
Collabrank, a system to motivate ranking
behaviour in online collaborations, at http://collabrank.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/collabrank.pdf
See how it works on Delicoius, at http://collabrank.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/del.icio.us/
SPIRITUALITY
-
Interesting review of the neopagan Starwood
festival, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050829/krassner
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