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Revisioning iCommons
In 2005, iCommons was established as an outgrowth of Creative Commons with an objective to ‘advance the wider dissemination of non-commercial sharing of scientific, creative and other intellectual works by the general public’. Creative Commons was the sole member, guarantor and sponsor of the charity, providing organisational and financial support.
Today, iCommons has a small,... more
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Throwing Down the Gauntlet
Heather Ford · Johannesburg (South Africa) · Jul 23rd, 2007 4:50 pm · 51 votes · 1 comment
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| Yochai Benkler at the iSummit 07 in Dubrovnik. Pic: Joi on Flickr, by Pic: Joi on Flickr |
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I was teased terribly at the last iCommons Board meeting about my constant references to “peer production” as the focus of this year’s Summit. “What exactly is peer production?” people asked. “Who actually knows what peer production is about? And why is it important anyway?”
This was the first gauntlet thrown down by my bosses: I had to lucidly explain exactly what this great book, The Wealth of Networks, was about. The second challenge came a couple of weeks later when I was asked to speak for 10 minutes about iCommons at a local “Geek Dinner” in Johannesburg. I challenged myself to tell the local bloggers and geeks at a very loud dinner about Yochai Benkler’s ideas on peer production using just four slides. (If you know me, you’ll know that I usually subscribe to the “Lessig method” which enables me to produce a zillion slides, although I’m yet to perfect the lucidity part.)
I finished my presentation in seven minutes, and a few days later received the most wonderful comments from someone who heard about iCommons that night for the first time and actually understood straight away what it is we’re trying to do! So, instead of writing a long, academic book review of The Wealth of Networks, I’ve chosen to explain the slides that I used. Please note that this is a massive over-simplification of one of the most well-researched books on the subject available today. Please read the book – it will surprise and amaze you and enable you to tell many fascinating stories at dinner tables.
The keynote lecture at this year’s iCommons Summit is by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks. This is a critical book because it outlines the key strategic area for the international Commons movement in the next few years. Working from the foundation of licensed work and communities who understand the power of open licensing for down-the-line remixing and repurposing, the next stage is to develop practices for Commons-based peer production – or “social production” as Benkler calls it. By building practice and expertise and knowledge in this new field, we will reinforce this kind of practice and build it into the de facto standard for production in the 21st Century.
In my first slide, I show a picture of the gigantic tower in Johannesburg where our national broadcaster, the SABC, transmits . In the slide, next to the tower is a small server which looks pretty much like the PC that we use to communicate with the world. Benkler begins his book by noting how radical the change is that has seen a massive decentralisation of the means to produce and distribute information, culture and knowledge.
Before today, the “industrial” model of making information goods was based on economies of scale in the non-networked environment. “Making the initial utterances and the physical goods that embodied them required high capital investment up front,” writes Benkler. “Making many copies was not much more expensive than making few copies, and very much cheaper on a per-copy basis. These industries therefore organised themselves to invest large sums in making a small number of high production-value cultural artefacts, which were then either replicated and stamped onto many low-cost copies of each artefact, or broadcast or distributed through high-cost systems for low marginal cost ephemeral consumption on screens and with receivers” (Benkler, 2006: 31).
Instead of the “few to many” hierarchical approach that kept mass media in business in the last century, the Internet is characterised by a pretty flat network where the majority of content is created by individuals and communities rather than corporations.
Writes Benkler, “The material requirements for effective information production and communication are now owned by numbers of individuals several orders of magnitude larger than the number of owners of the basic means of information production and exchange a mere two decades ago” (Benkler, 2006: 4).
So more of us now have the opportunity to become entrepreneurs and actors in the new networked information economy because the means of production are so much cheaper now than they were just 20 years ago.
Slide 2 is my favourite. It is a picture of one of a“TV dinners” of the 1970s. I use this slide to explain how the industrial model of producing culture meant that culture started to look like one of those ghastly un-nutritious TV dinners.
Because the economies of scale required that huge volumes of cultural or information goods needed to be created before you could break even, everyone started looking for the blockbuster, the big hit that would make them the huge amounts of money. Today, we’ve enter what Chris Anderson from Wired magazine calls “The Long Tail” where local and niche cultures can be satisfied because of the fact that it is simply much quicker and requires fewer buyers for a cultural artefact to cover its costs of production.
According to Benkler, there is an opportunity for transformations that “make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made” (Benkler, 2006: 23).
My third slide is a copy of the comic strip, Dilbert, whom Benkler describes as “a white-collar employee in a nameless U.S. corporation”. Benkler uses Dilbert to illustrate the kind of “industrialised” culture that developed in the last century where consumers didn’t talk back and where we were isolated from effective energy. Poor Dilbert. No matter how hard he tries to resist corporate hierarchy, he is trapped in a cubicle, alienated from the world. Nothing that he says or does seems to have any positive effect on the world around him.
According to Benkler, “the networked information environment opens new domains for productive life that simply were not there before” and it is “…this freedom that increases the salience of nonmonetizable motivations as drivers of production. It is this freedom to seek out whatever information we wish, to write about it, and to join and leave various projects and associations with others that underlies the new efficiencies we see in the networked information economy.”
He’s talking, of course, about projects such as those to build Linux and Wikipedia. It is in explaining and characterising the motivations and rationale for these projects that Benkler really excels.
Which takes me to my fourth slide; a picture of a car with the bonnet open and all the parts visible. Benkler describes, in wonderful detail, some of the core characteristics of what he calls “[C]ommons-based peer production” that enable us to have a free operating system and free encyclopaedia when just a few years ago this idea would have seemed quixotic.
Peer production is the process that radically alters the production process for culture. Commons-based peer production – that is, peer production whose products are available for the world to share – has the potential to connect institutions and their users in ways that produce value for both institutions and the world.
This is why The Wealth of Networks is so important for iCommons. Firstly, it frames the Commons debate around fundamental human values of freedom and equality, and convincingly argues that Commons-based peer production is essential to businesses wanting to compete in the networked information society. This is important in terms of extending the debate about the information Commons into something greater than a debate only about copyright and copyright licences. It’s also important because it shows how compelling it is for everyone (especially business) to understand and practice Commons-based peer production if they don’t want to wither away and die in the face of rapid technological and social change.
Secondly, Benkler validates a strategy that iCommons has had in the wings since we started actively working last year: that we need to build practical models based on successful peer production projects that enable us to scale up successful practice of peer production.
In this way, Benkler outlines the key strategic area for the international Commons movement in the next few years. Working from the foundation of licensed work and communities who understand the power of open licensing for down-the-line remixing and repurposing, the next stage is to develop practices for Commons-based peer production – or “social production” as Benkler calls it. By building practice and expertise and knowledge in this new field, we will build the kind of practice that fundamentally changes our relationships to work, justice and development.
The next stage in making the Internet work for humanity is about developing a keen understanding of peer production, rather than focusing only on the licensing of works. Creating more licensed work in the Commons is really important – but the missing piece is what we say to people when they ask: so how can I use CC to get my work out there, to make sure my message is heard, to make sure I get a recording contract or make sure that my lesson plan gets traction? The answer is not: “Put a CC licence on it and the world will be your oyster.” The answer is something like this: “Well, it’s part of a larger strategy and the most important question you want to ask is: do you want people to participate with you on this journey? Because if you don’t, then you’re probably better off making copies on your Xerox copier.”
All of you reading this Annual, coming to the Summit, volunteering in your countries, making this at least part of your life’s work, picking up that gauntlet and saying that you’re ready to experiment, you’re ready to contribute, you’re ready to start this global conversation, to start up a node or join a node and tell people when something goes wrong, or when you have amazing successes, when strangers start collaborating with you and helping you build a relationship, that can change the world.
Hopefully, at the 2017 Summit we’ll look back and say: at the crossroads between a free Internet and going back to our old habits, we were just looking for the right strategy and then Benkler’s book came along and we picked up the gauntlet and made sure that the world made the right choices.
Reference
Benkler, Y (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, accessed 11 May 2007.
tags: johannesburg south africa policy-law benkler wealth of networks peer production
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