The following is from a remarkable essay by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, which I consider a must read. It is entitled: Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale

The starting quote is right of the mark:

Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes when networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what;s possible. This is good news for those of us intent on creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage and
commitment that lead to broad-based change.

But networks aren’t the whole story. As networks grow and transform into active, collaborative communities, we discover how Life truly changes, which is through emergence. When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t
that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how Life creates radical change and takes things to scale.

The essay then tries to address the following questions:

Why do networks form? What are the conditions that support their creation?

What keeps a network alive and growing? What keeps members connected?

What type of leadership is required? Why do people become leaders?

What type of leadership interferes with or destroys the network?

What happens after a healthy network forms? What’s next?

If we understand these dynamics and the lifecycle of emergence, what can we do as leaders, activists and social entrepreneurs to intentionally foster emergence?

And this is what they have to say about Emergence, before tackling in detail what they call the life-cycle of emergence:

Emergence violates so many of our Western assumptions of how change happens that it often takes quite a while to understand it. In nature, change never happens as a result of top-down, pre-conceived strategic plans, or from the mandate of any single individual or boss. Change begins as local actions spring up simultaneously in many different areas. If these changes remain disconnected, nothing happens beyond each locale. However, when they become connected, local actions can emerge as a powerful system with influence at a more global or comprehensive level. (Global here means a larger scale, not necessarily the entire planet.)

These powerful emergent phenomena appear suddenly and surprisingly. Think about how the Berlin Wall suddenly came down, how the Soviet Union ended, how corporate power quickly came to dominate globally. In each case, there were many local actions and decisions, most of which were invisible and unknown to each other, and none of which was powerful enough by itself to create change. But when these local changes coalesced, new power emerged.

What could not be accomplished by diplomacy, politics, protests, or strategy suddenly happened. And when each materialized, most were surprised.

Emergent phenomena always have these characteristics: They exert much more power than the sum of their parts; they always possess new capacities different than the local actions that engendered them; they always surprise us by theirappearance.

It is important to note that emergence always results in a powerful system that has many more capacities than could ever be predicted by analyzing the individual parts. We see this in the behavior of hive insects such as bees and termites. Individual ants possess none of the intelligence or skills that are in the hive. No matter how intently scientists study the behavior of individual ants, they can never see the behavior of the hive. Yet once the hive forms, each ant acts with the intelligence and skillfulness of the whole. And over time, even though the individual ants die off, the hive develops greater intelligence.

This aspect of emergence has profound implications for social entrepreneurs. Instead of developing them individually as leaders and skillful practitioners, we would do better to connect them to like-minded others and create the conditions for emergence. The skills and capacities needed by them will be found in the system that emerges, not in better training programs.

Because emergence only happens through connections, Berkana has developed a four stage model that catalyzes connections as the means to achieve global level change. Our philosophy is to Act locally, connect regionally, learn globally. We focus on discovering pioneering efforts and naming them as such. We then connect these efforts to other similar work globally. We nourish this network in many ways, but most essentially through creating opportunities for
learning and sharing of experiences and shifting into communities of practice.

We also illuminate the work of these pioneering efforts so that many more people will learn from them. We are attempting to work intentionally with emergence so that small, local efforts can become a global force for change.”

Interesting posting by Dion Hitchcliffe which reviews the debate between Andrew MacAfee and conservative Nicholas Carr about the potential of the Web 2.0 to transform the enterprise.

It also carries an interesting graphic on the Long Tail as it affects power and control.

Here is the conclusion:

“And this is where this shift of control is changing things. Previously, innovation often came from the top of the enterprise and trickled down to the consumer. But the tools for creation of content of almost every variety is becoming pushed out to the edge, is virtually free, and driven by passion-filled individuals who can create wonders in their spare time. The inversion of control is changing where the innovation is happening and that’s why we’re seeing it on the Web first. There’s little doubt that it will pour into the enterprise in due time, but since it’s largely not created there, it’ll happen in the wild first. The Long Tail of control, created by the forces of Web 2.0, will push the majority of content creation into the tail. And significantly, that means that most folks won’t have to be frequent creators or even consumers of this content, but that will be more than enough to create what everyone wants, a likely embarassement of riches once things really get rolling.

The upheavals and outcome of all this is as unclear as it is significant because enterprises are primarily organized around central control and focused innovation, two things easily disrupted by this shift of control. Now that innovation, content creation, and control over its distribution now happens mostly at the edge of the network and in The Long Tail it will be fascinating to see what the ongoing fallout will be as entire industries are likely remade in the process.”

I posted a long post about Saskia Sassen’s recent work and its relation to panarchy (p2p politics):

Saskia Sassen on Panarchy

This is certainly not a new issue for the free software community, but for our general readers, I recommend the following blog article. It starts by noting that as most of applications are now on the web, rather than running on our own computers, the free software protection of public code becomes less useful.

Rather we need open applications and ethical software guidelines that protect the users (and producers) of the data, vis a vis the platform provider.

We monitor such issues in our Standards pages, maintained by Michael Pick.

It’s a long entry, worth reading in full, here are just the key citations:

“Many popular web applications now open their web APIs, which allow other applications to access their data. These APIs allow users to build complex tools that collect data from multiple sources, similar to the way UNIX allows you to stack smaller applications and connect them together. Even if the back-end source code of these web applications was released, the application is often so heavily dependent on the information that it stores that it won’t necessarily be useful. That is not an argument for or against releasing back-end code, but is just to say that we’ve reached a point in software that accessing the data is more important than the process of how it is generated.

So as data becomes cheaper to process, the value appears to be in its analysis; making creative connections and correlations between dispersed data and unrelated pieces of information. ”’The dominant paradigm is shifting from the individual’s ability to process data towards the individual’s ability to access the preprocessed value created by large networks”’.”

What does all this mean for free and open source licenses? Well, as the boundary between local and remote applications gets blurred, it’s becoming clear that the licenses devised for local software are not well suited to the latest wave of web-based applications.

A new standard must be defined for these applications, one that considers the vast amounts of user data they are processing, storing and transmitting. A new standard has to strike a balance between the rights of the individual user and the right of the service provider to control and leverage the user’s data as an integral part of their networked application.

The next wave of ethical software must address the following issues:

* Individual ownership of data – Who owns personal information?

* Individual’s privacy – How is information shared? How anonymous is broad analysis?

* Redistribution of reprocessed data – Can I reuse the data in a new application?

* Cross compatibility between related networks – How easily can I move between competing services?

* Data Removal – How much information is retained after unsubscribing from the service?

* End of Service – What is the strategy for the stored data if the service fails?

Via: Hands On with Skypes Joost/Venice Project – AppScout

The founders of Skype have announced the “Joost” project/product. I have not yet had a chance to actually try the beta (windows only) version of Joost, but it apparently is an attempt to bring high quality television-type experience to the internet. (Playfuls has a great overview of the service).
Apparently, the content if “on-demand”, and not live-streamed. Unlike video services like YouTube and Google Video, Joost, at least for the time being, is not user-generated video. Instead it is content created by entertainment industry companies, like MTV.
One of the important (IMO) technological developments of Joost is that the content delivery uses a partial Peer to Peer system, somewhat similar to the way that Skype handles voice data. Initial reactions to the technology have been positive. This is an important, and disruptive development, because the emergence of high quality television distribution over the internet via services like Joost threatens the hegemony of existing television networks. How long will it be before the technology in Joost is duplicated, and released under more open standards? Consider this with along with the rapidly decreasing cost of Audio/Visual production, as documented in our wiki by Valentin Spirik. And also consider the rapidly decreasing cost of bandwidth and storage for digital content.  And, think about the fact that Apple and Microsoft are both working to make  home “media severs”, that could easily serve Joost-type video content on a regular television. Barring any major Net Neutrality set backs in the US, within a 2-3 year time frame, there should be an emergence of both new Joost-type providers, and many new content channels.

Joost itself may try and bring on some of these developments. They are claiming that they want to incorporate user “interactive”, features, and possibly user-created content channels. Either way, Joost, by proving that the technology works, is both opening the door to further P2P video content distribution innovation, and perhaps also inadvertently throwing down a gauntlet against the telcos and cable providers, and traditional broadcast and cable networks in the US. We’ll have to wait and see how they’ll respond to this development.

Charles Leadbeater’s new book, We Think, which will shortly be featured as Book of the Week, promises to be an extraordinary interesting book, full of concrete real-life examples of mass creativity at work.

Chapter 11 for example, features the experience in a city in Brazil, which I recommend reading in full.

Here’s the crux of the story it tells, in terms of peer governance, and how it can be applied to the real material world of housing and urban planning:

“Self-organisation without leadership all too easily leads to a dead end: the shanty. Top down leadership that stifles self-organisation fails to mobilise a wide range of people and resources. The trick is to provide leadership for a process through which people, together, find structured collaborative solutions. Cities like Curitiba are among the best examples we have of innovation as a mass, self-organising collaborative activity. That is why cities have been such vital sources of innovation in all fields – government, art, science, business. The lessons of cities like Curitiba should be applied to innovation in other walks of life.”

Here’s a beautiful summary of the “(free) culture wars”, from a writer at the Institute for the Future of the Book. It expresses the key cultural difference between an open and free culture, and the forces that constrain it.

My own view is that we will still have different kind of institutions, providing an ecology of support for the culture producers, which increasingly be all of us, in a bottom-up fashion.

These topics are explored in our Media pages, which are distinct from Valentin Spirik’s pages on autonomous audiovisual production, which are a how-to guide on how to produce culture without intermediaries.

Excerpt:

“Imagine a world without publishers, broadcasters or record labels. Imagine the complex infrastructure, large distribution networks, massive advertising campaigns, and multi-million signing contracts provided by the media incumbents all gone from our society. What would our culture look like? Will the music stop? Will pens dry up?

I would hope not, but I recently read Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book, The Anarchist in the Library, and I encountered a curious quote from Time Warner CEO, Richard Parsons:

This is a very profound moment historically. This isn’t just about a bunch of kids stealing music. It’s an assault on everything that constitutes cultural expression of our society. If we fail to protect and preserve out intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And the corporations wont be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create. Worst-case scenario: the country will end up in a sort of Cultural Dark Age.

The idea that “artists will have no incentive to create” without corporations’ monetary promise goes against everything we know about the creative mind. Through out human history, self-expression has existed under the extreme conditions, for little or no gain; if anything, self-expression has flourished under the most unrewarding conditions. Now we that the Internet provides a medium to share information, people will create.

A fundamental misunderstanding in the relationship between media industry and the artist has produced an environment that has led the industry to believe that they are the reason for creative output, not just a beneficiary. However, the Internet is bringing the power of production and distribution to the user. And if production and distribution — which are where historically media companies made their money — can be handled by users, then what will be left for the media companies? With the surge in content, will media companies need to become filters and editors? If not, then what is there?

The current media model depends on controlling the flow of information, and as information becomes harder to control their power will diminish. On the internet we see strong communities building around very specific niches. As these communities get stronger, they will become harder to compete with. I believe that these niches will develop into the next generation media companies. These will be the companies that the large media companies will need to compete with.”

A selection of quotes from Eben Moglen, chief counsel of the Free Software Foundation, selected by Idealog:

On software for social change:

“Infrastructure improvement has a tendency to improve matters for the poor more rapidly than other forms of economic development. … Software is creating roadways that bring people who have been far from the center of human social life to the center of social life.”

On Microsoft:

“In this neighborhood at this moment, the richest and most deeply funded monopoly in the history of the world is beginning to fail. … Plus or minus the couple more years left before Microsoft fails entirely, we have now proven either the adequacy or the final superiority in crass economic terms of the way we make things.”

On open source:

“The magic of this technology is that it can be used for the great ideal of capitalist distribution: never actually give anybody anything … just as it can be used for our fundamental purpose which is always give everybody everything.”

A quote from this recommended podcast, which could quality as the motto for the P2P Foundation’s own aims:

“If we know that what we are trying to accomplish is the spread of justice and social equality through the universalization of access to knowledge; If we know that what we are trying to do is build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete; If we know that we are doing this as an alternative to coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing with long and deep problems of human injustice; If we are conscious of what we have and know what we are trying to accomplish, when this is the moment for the first time in lifetimes, we can get it done.’”

Still more goodies are regularly listed here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I received a number of emails of Richard Stallman, related to the foundational essay on peer to peer that was published in CTheory last year.

Most of his comments focused on possible confusion, mistakes on my part, on the precise differences and commonalities between free software and open source.

He also vigorously challenged my use of intellectual property as a concept, and referred me to the following mini-essay, which summarizes why we should not use this term.

I’m reproducing part of it here, but recommend reading the whole piece.

Richard Stallman:

“It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks – three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws — into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not arise by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.

According to Professor Mark Lemley, now of the Stanford Law School, the widespread use of the term “intellectual property” is a fad that followed the 1967 founding of the World “Intellectual Property” Organization, and only became really common in recent years. (WIPO is formally a UN organization, but in fact represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents, and trademarks.)

The term carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights for physical objects. (This analogy is at odds with the legal philosophies of copyright law, of patent law, and of trademark law, but only specialists know that.) These laws are in fact not much like physical property law, but use of this term leads legislators to change them to be more so. Since that is the change desired by the companies that exercise copyright, patent and trademark powers, the bias of “intellectual property” suits them.

The bias is enough reason to reject the term, and people have often asked me to propose some other name for the overall category — or have proposed their own alternatives (often humorous). Suggestions include IMPs, for Imposed Monopoly Privileges, and GOLEMs, for Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies. Some speak of “exclusive rights regimes”, but referring to restrictions as “rights” is doublethink too.

Some of these alternative names would be an improvement, but it is a mistake to replace “intellectual property” with any other term. A different name will not address the term’s deeper problem: overgeneralization. There is no such unified thing as “intellectual property”–it is a mirage. The only reason people think it makes sense as a coherent category is that widespread use of the term gives that impression.

The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws. Non-lawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle, and function similarly.

Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues.

Copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of expression of a work. Patent law was intended to promote the publication of useful ideas, at the price of giving the one who publishes an idea a temporary monopoly over it–a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others.

Trademark law, by contrast, was not intended to promote any particular way of acting, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying. Legislators under the influence of “intellectual property”, however, have turned it into a scheme that provides incentives for advertising.

Since these laws developed independently, they are different in every detail, as well as in their basic purposes and methods. Thus, if you learn some fact about copyright law, you’d be wise to assume that patent law is different. You’ll rarely go wrong!

People often say “intellectual property” when they really mean some larger or smaller category. For instance, rich countries often impose unjust laws on poor countries to squeeze money out of them. Some of these laws are “intellectual property” laws, and others are not; nonetheless, critics of the practice often grab for that label because it has become familiar to them. By using it, they misrepresent the nature of the issue. It would be better to use an accurate term, such as “legislative colonization”, that gets to the heart of the matter.”