The OpenBusiness Guide v1.0 is online!

OpenBusiness.cc, an international initiative with partners in Brazil, South Africa and the UK, supported by the Open Society Institute, International Development Research Centre Canada, Ford Foundation and Arts Council England, has collected examples of new business models and processes that focus on:

* lowering the costs of market entry for individuals by providing tools or services, that ‘open’ up traditional business boundaries using the Internet

* sharing information for free using alternative ‘open copyright models’ while exploring new revenue models

* giving substantial parts of content away for free while creating derivative revenue streams

* operate organizationally like Open Source software production, but translate the model to services (finance, or film or music production)

The guide represents a first attempt to summarize a trend towards more ‘open’ ways to run a business touching upon concepts, mechanisms and principles such as web 2.0, peer to peer economics, social networking, crowd sourcing, open innovation, peer production, non-monetary incentives, free culture, Creative Commons and Free and Open Source Software.

The first version of the Guide combines theoretical background with practical recommendations. Near the end of the Guide readers can find strategic advise and some selected case studies. In the spirit of the project the Guide is available as a Wiki so it can be improved and become a growing resource for ‘open entrepreneurship’.

It can be found at wiki.icommons.org/index.php/The_OpenBusiness_Guide

One of the advantages of touring the world for lectures, is that you are meeting many interesting people.

Australia has been the occasion for a particularly rich series of encounters.

Our first meeting was with Brian Martin at the University of Wollongong. Brian is an advocate for nonviolent tactics, with a particular interest in the principle of backfire, i.e. when your enemy makes a big tactical mistake that is profitable for your case, as for example the Dr. Haneef case which undermines the legitimacy of the security legislation of the Australian government. He is particularly known for his studies and defense of whistleblowers, i.e. citizens who report on the wrongdoings of their employers.

I also had a most interesting conversation with the co-author of his book, Random Selection in Politics, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), i.e. Lyn Carson. An expert in deliberative democracy , she makes the most interesting distinction between counter-publics and minipublics:

Here is a quote explaining the difference:

“Deliberation pertains to minipublics, not counterpublics:

Lyn Carson writes that “Deliberations are conversations that matter because they work methodically toward consensus, attempt to build common ground, with an eye to the public interest, rather than self interest. The quality, the depth of these conversations is important and a great deal of effort is expended by convenors, or deliberative designers, to create respectful, educational, purposeful, egalitarian spaces.”

(source: L. Carson, Sydney Democracy Forum: The Democratic Deficit and Australia 29 June)

Our P2P Audiovisual Guide now with a “one paragraph” content overview, text restructured, updated and split onto subpages for a better browsing and reading experience.

Let us know how you find it, what could be improved, what might still be missing… And if you find it useful: please link it in your favourite bookmark sharing service, on your blog etc. – the best index is just as useful as the number of people actually knowing about it/using it!

Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002)

The book discusses subjectification (how we become human subjects) in terms of a drive toward celebrity and is a critique of the role of media in technoculture, warning for the ideological usage of the drive for transparency.

Today, we would like to introduce the above book with a meditation on how technoculture produce its subjects?

You can obtain the full text of this excerpt from the author at JDEAN at hws.edu

Excerpt:

“How does technoculture produce its subjects? My thesis is that individuals in mediated, capitalist technocultures subjectivize their conditions within an ideological matrix of publicity and secrecy. People’s experience of themselves as subjects is configured in terms of accessibility, visibility, being known. Without publicity, the subject of technoculture doesn’t know if it exists at all. It has no way of establishing that it has a place within the general socio-symbolic order of things, that it’s recognized. (The dot-com version of this might be something like, “without a website, you’re not even there.”) The technocultural mode of subjectivization, in other words, is celebrity. Celebrity is the form of subjectivity that posits–that presupposes and reproduces–the ideology of publicity. Publicity in technoculture functions through the production of a subject that makes itself into an object of public knowledge.

I raise this question of technocultural subjectivity as a counter to the more prominent emphasis on identity in cybercultural studies. In the early moments of the Internet, theorists emphasized sexual experimentation, role-playing, gender-bending, and multiplicity. Networked communications, it seemed, were the ideal laboratory for postmodern theories of fluid or fragmented selves. Regardless of whether a theorist celebrated cyberian identity play, condemned it, or even worried about the reinscription of old, unappealing identities, that cyberia should be theorized in terms of its impact on identity was generally taken for granted. With the emergence of the Web, however, this emphasis on identity seems quaint, a nostalgic evocation of a pre-political time of freedom and possibility that was never there. The fluid identities celebrated by early theorists now look more like consumers (being) driven to find the next new thing, to produce and reproduce themselves via images, technologies, entertainment, and commodities. Anonymous cybersex brings less a flourishing of desiring selves than does the ready availability of immediate satisfaction close off desire in a new circuit of entertainment and stimulation. Indeed, as the prevalence of conspiracy theory suggests, the very desire to know that characterizes the public of democracy now takes on a different form, configured through and as a never-ending process of searching, linking, and (re)producing information. We might say that these days, instead of really wanting to know, people are enjoined to know, to keep up to date. With permanent, easily accessible information, there is no excuse for not being up on the issues. (And, the injunction to know is of course accompanied by its obverse, the dismissal of news junkies and Net cruisers and couch potatoes who spend all their time consuming media and ignore “real life.”)

So what kind of subjectivity is installed when everyone is supposed to know and the technologies believe for us? I argue elsewhere that technologies encouraging us to search and link, databases, of information from which something always seems to be missing, and democracy as a system of distrust call subjects into being as conspiracy theorists. Here I consider another mode of subjectivization, celebrity. The same technologies that call on us to link also call on us as known, as sources of content that are of interest to cameras, websites, and credit-card companies. The knowing subject, in other words, is first interpellated as a known subject. Whereas the conspiring subject emerges as a subject of desire, the celebrity emerges as a subject of drive. I draw here from Slavoj Žižek . At its most basic level, Žižek explains, desire takes the form of nonsatisfaction; to remain as desire, it can only be a desire for desire. Drive, however, “stands for the paradoxical possibility that the subject, forever prevented from achieving his Goal . . . can nevertheless find satisfaction in the very circular movement of repeatedly missing its object, of circulating around it.” Drive is a loop, a cycle in which the subject is caught. Repeatedly trying, doing the same thing over and over and over again, even when, especially when, the actions are doomed to fail, is a pleasure in itself.

A lot of people worry today about their secrets spilling out and circulating all over the Net. True, the Internet poses major problems with respect to the accumulation, aggregation, and dissemination of personal data. But, the issue of secrecy is usually presented as a kind of “outing,” as a way that one’s personal life becomes a matter of mass, public interest. This is strange. Who really cares? As every promoter, advertiser, and public relations agent knows, it’s not like mass audiences of people are out there, waiting and ready for our revelations, completely interested in the mundane details of our individual lives–or even in our most personal fantasies. But this is precisely the anxiety that accompanies expansions and intensifications in networked technologies. A recent survey of over 2000 American households–with Internet users and non-users–showed extreme concern about personal privacy online.

1) Social Ecology and Communalism, by Murray Bookchin
(From the AK Press website)

“We are standing at a crucial crossroads. Not only does the age-old ‘social question’ concerning the exploitation of human labor remain unresolved, but the plundering of natural resources has reached a point where humanity is also forced to politically deal with an ‘ecological question.’ Today, we have to make conscious choices about what direction society should take to properly meet these challenges…

“This is a highly accessible introduction to Social Ecology and Communalism, as it has been developed by one of the most exciting and pioneering thinkers of the twentieth century. Murray Bookchin’s political philosophy suggests that the solution to the enormous social and ecological problems we face today fundamentally lies in the formation of a new citizenry, its empowerment through new political institutions, and a new political culture.”

—Eirik Eiglad, from the Introduction

These four essays, written between 1989 and 2002 and collected here for the first time in this volume, provide an excellent overview of Murray Bookchin’s political philosophy.

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) was a life-long radical—a trade unionist in the 1930s and 1940s, an innovative social theorist through the 1960s, a leading participant in the anti-nuclear wing of the Greens in the 1970s and 1980s, and co-founder of the Institute for Social Ecology. He was a prolific author and important thinker.Editor Eirik Eiglad has been involved with the ideas and politics of social ecology for more than fifteen years. He edits the journal Communalism.

2) Giving Knowledge Away for Free, by OECD
(From the eLearning blog)

OECD has just published a new book, called “Giving Knowledge Away for Free”, and has made it available as a free eBook. OECD wrote “Learning resources are often considered key intellectual property in a competitive higher education world. However, more and more institutions and individuals are sharing their digital learning resources over the Internet, openly and for free, as Open Educational Resources (OER). This study, building on previous OECD work on e-learning, asks why this is happening, who is involved and what the most important implications of this development are.”

It turns out that giving — far more than receiving — is a surprisingly potent force whose impact reverberates across an entire lifetime, nourishing health and happiness in astonishing ways. That’s the message of Why Good Things Happen to Good People, which weaves new science with profoundly moving real-life stories. Dr. Stephen Post’s institute has funded over fifty studies — from the likes of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Chicago — to support scientific research on the life-enhancing benefits of caring.

4) Rule The Web: How to do Anything and Everything on the Internet — Better, Faster, Easier, by Mark Frauenfelder
(Via The Boston Globe)

Frauenfelder’s “Rule the Web” includes tips on: starting a blog, getting word-of-mouth publicity for it, and following other blogs with an RSS reader; setting up a private wiki, joining an online social network that’s right for you, and sharing digital photos; browsing the Web free from viruses, ads, and spyware; shopping and selling online; downloading music and videos; using the Internet to become more productive at work and at play; protecting and tuning up your computer and software; and much more.

The book was published earlier this month, and instead of browsing through it, I’ve been carefully reading it from the first page forward. Thanks to Frauenfelder, I’ve finally figured out how to add a message board to any website (via QuickTopic), find photos online that I can use for free (via Open Photo, Flickr, and Creative Commons), edit and retouch photos online (via Snipshot), find unlisted phone numbers (via Zabasearch), and more — and that was just the first two chapters. Phew!

5) The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You, by Mark Buchanan
(From the Bloomsbury USA website)

For readers of Freakonomics and The Wisdom of Crowds, an enlightening introduction to a groundbreaking physics-based view of the social world that reveals the essential simplicity of human behavior.

The idiosyncrasies of human decision-making have confounded economists and social theorists for years. If each person makes choices for personal (and often irrational) reasons, how can people’s choices be predicted by a single theory? How can any economic, social, or political theory be valid? The truth is, none of them really are.

Mark Buchanan makes the fascinating argument that the science of physics is beginning to provide a new picture of the human or “social atom,” and help us understand the surprising, and often predictable, patterns that emerge when they get together. Look at patterns, not people, Buchanan argues, and rules emerge that can explain how movements form, how interest groups operate, and even why ethnic hatred persists. Using similar observations, social physicists can predict whether neighborhoods will integrate, whether stock markets will crash, and whether crime waves will continue or abate.

Brimming with mind games and provocative experiments, The Social Atom is an incisive, accessible, and comprehensive argument for a whole new way to look at human social behavior.

What happens when the quality control process moves from the front to the back end of content production, as it does with peer production of content?

Here’s an interesting take on this topic by John Blossom:

(we recommend reading the full entry, but here are the main arguments)

“How does one address the need for high-quality content in a context-driven publishing environment? Here are a few thoughts as to how and where quality content will survive and thrive:

Accept that quality is a process of continuous improvement. While forming well-researched articles and information sources does require a great deal of quality control, the experience of the Web points towards evolutionary quality control as the most promising route for publishing. Having every fact and figure exactly right at a fixed point in time was a “must” in the era of print-oriented publishing. Content management systems and simpler tools such as weblogs and Wikis have make it far simpler to publish revisions online, but editorially we’re still caught oftentimes in the print-oriented quality cycle. The experiences offered by search engines and social bookmarking services suggest that people perceive quality on a given topic as a highly movable feast. Being able to evolve content quality on a continuous basis therefore becomes at least as important as any initial efforts.

Accept that quality is best implemented as a social process. Although Wikipedia’s editorial processes are far from perfect and worthy of some skepticism, Wikipedia has served as a critical proving ground to demonstrate that open social editing processes can scale effectively. The PLoS ONE experiment with online collaboration is developing peer-reviewed scientific research articles successfully through an open comment and review process that supplements traditional peer reviewing. Not every peer review process need be as open as PLoS ONE or Wikipedia but as the Web offers the broadest opportunity for peer input it would appear that the quality of audience engagement in developing materials is perhaps as good a measure of quality as the engagement of audiences in a finished product.

Accept that quality is as much about aggregation as it is about the one right pure answer. As much as tools such as Wikis, weblogs and social bookmarking are about what people write they’re also important for what they bring together as reference content through links, comments and embedded content. Social media is challenging search engines as a starting point for finding answers to questions in part because people come to trust the insights and expertise of specific communities to provide both their own insights and insights from their own research. Answer-oriented communities such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers and LinkedIn Answers provide audiences the ability to vote on answers to specific questions – a competitive aspect to publishing that helps to both aggregate potential high-quality content and to rank its value.”

In an earlier entry, John Blossom also strikes the right note on the interplay between lay members and experts in a social media environment, though I must admit I’m still somewhat sceptical on the premium content bid:

“Keep relationships toe-to-toe. More established media methods for featuring experts online tend to make the expert person the “star of the show.” While this may work well for personalities featured briefly on a site social media tends to favor relationships that evolve over a much longer period of time. Don’t make experts invisible but make it clear that they are but one of many contributors in the community. This is important not only to everyday members but as well to experts who are eager to get uninhibited feedback and ideas from their target audiences.

Don’t expect experts to be community leaders. While experts may be looked up to by your online communities their workloads oftentimes are such that they will not be in a position to anchor those communities any more than other members. In fact, having a dominant expert, widely recognized or self-proclaimed, can inhibit the formation of the peer contributions which build up the broadest base of content possible. Allow experts to use your publishing tools in a way that provides them with a chance to provide thought leadership in your online community without expecting them to take on anything but a “just another contributor” profile within the community.

Consider premium packaging for selected levels of expert access. To go back to the Davos analogy, you didn’t fork over a pile of cash to Bill to have that chummy conversation, but you did pay a pretty hefty tab for the conference. The potential for subscription access to social media seems fairly antithetical to many at this time but as pointed out by Reid Conrad, CEO of NearTime, in his SIIA Previews presentation the smaller the social media community the more effective and important the subscription model becomes for making the most of focused groups creating a high level of contributed value. The technology and methodologies used to implement social media are inherently egalitarian but in a world where some people want to be more equal than others we can expect to see social media “country clubs” sprouting up fairly rapidly – with key experts in tow.”

My encounter with Franz Nahrada’s work on Global Villages, with quintessential nomad Dante, and the reading of this most interesting review of the neonomad meme by Thomas Jankowski (which I recommend reading in full), is leading me to the conclusion that the P2P Foundation itself is actually an instantiation of a neonomad structure.

Neonomadism refers to the ability to work ‘on the move’, without direct linkage to a fixed office. There is many partial neonomadism around, but full neonomadism, while temporarily possible on the individual level, would seem impossible for any collective structure.

But please think again.

The P2P Foundation undoubtedly produces use value, in the value of documentation that has been visited by more than 150,000 people, who downloaded more than one and a half million pages in about a year. And that’s just the wiki, which contains at least 3,000 pages of documentation, representing the collective intelligence of a large number of people.

All this is produced without a fixed office or headquarters, though I suppose that most people in our collective have their home office. Nevertheless, there is no ‘there’ in terms of headquarters. Our volunteers are located in at least four continents.

While most are living from their own arrangements and projects, I am myself an example of a business model which has been created through the creation of a commons. I am (almost, we are very close) living from global lectures, based on invitations from people which have never seen me face to face, but trust the global brand and quality material we have collated, which they see as a sign of expertise. Most of the time it works like this: an institution sends a fairly well-paid invitation, which funds the speaking fee, the travel, and the lodging. The network is them mobilized with the message, “hi guys, I’m coming to your neigborhood’. Usually within ten days, this results in an additional half a dozen invitations, which makes the trip sustainable, and a means of living. In just one academic year, I will have undertaken 6 trips of about 20 days, one every other month. Even when I’m on the move, as I’m now, writing from Sydney, there is actually hardly a dip in our production on the blog and wiki, partially because the collective takes over, partly because with a laptop, and wireless connections, it is increasingly possible to produce at any time, from anywhere.

Note that all of this has been achieved in just over one year of online presence, through virtual branding through networks, with zero advertizing and marketing budgets, just consistent efforts to create quality content. Even in such a short time, a ‘brand’ has been created, which results in real life physical effects and some kind of (minor, but real) global influence.

We are of course not making any physical products, but nevertheless, it proves that it can be done. What do you think?