Who owns ‘the wisdom of crowds’
This is related to our earlier posts about Antigoras and netarchical capitalism, which refers to a new breed of companies that develop through enabling participatory platforms, while the Antigoras article of Jaron Lanier pointed to the dangers of new monopolies.
Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, tackles this contradiction between community production and private appropriation head on, in what is definitely a landmark post, and asks: “who owns the wisdom of crowds”. His key question is: can the user-capitalization model, which works for Skype and many other new models, result in user ownership, and if not, what is the right relationship between the user communities, that produces the wealth, and the platform, which enables it.
Samuel Rose of SmartMobs, summarizes Jeff’s analysis as follows:
Jarvis asserts that there are “individual”, “collective” and “enabler” (like Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, etc) levels of scale involved in peer production networks.
Basically, he says that on the” individual” level, we want to control the things that we create (and, that if we can’t, we’ll go elsewhere). On the “collective” level, we “create as we consume” collectively, and that the “crowd” itself owns the “wisdom of the crowd”. If someone tries to “own” this crowd-wisdom generated from consumption, they make it less valuable by trying to disconnect it from larger networks to control it.
The “enabler” level is an open question from Jarvis:
What do the enablers deserve for enabling? And what do we as individuals and as members of the collective deserve for creating the wisdom? What do we owe each other in this exchange of value?
Or the real question is: How do we not screw this up?
There are so many ways we can screw it up. Spam, hate, stupidity, and control can do that. But if everyone behaves the right way, then we create great wholes larger than the sums of their parts; every capitalized entity above proves that. But we’re still trying to figure out what the rules are, what “the right way� means.
The truth is that we’re doing nothing less than creating a new society and we’re still figuring out what the rules and economies of that society are.
And the conclusion of the analysis is the following:
The “enablers” that organize themselves around economic models that depend on central “enabler” ownership of “IP” created by it’s users are going to struggle to keep people and content within their fortress walls, and under their rules. They will eventually and inevitably be largely abandoned for systems where the “individual”, the “collective” and the “enablers” are one and the same. A system where the “users” become the company owners, employees, research and development, and innovators. This is the future of “peer production” networks.
January 28th, 2006 at 6:01 am
[...] I’m not sure I can be convinced that such technological developments are as crucial as they are said to be. The reason is that, first of all, P2P processes function very well already without them, and secondly, that reputations and identity are not easily transferable amongst projects,the whole process is very contextual, you may be very good in one environment, and less so in another. I think we should resist the urge to apply purely instrumental reason, ‘what’s in it for me, strategically and tactically’, to the new commons, where such reasoning is subsumed in the larger field of cooperation. Communal reputation and rating systems are more important for successfulll cooperation than individualist technologies. The reason is that the former are necessary means to avoid a power transcendence, i.e. they avoid that a minority can represent the common and place itself above it, they are an insurance against private appropriation. I think this is why we see a rapid development of the former, while the latter technologies fail to take off. The market answers the question, what’s in it for me, and needs individualist technologies, P2P processes answer the question, what’s in it for us, and need communal technologies. [...]
January 28th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? Whomever is able to capture it. The key to the sustainability of a user-based commons (such as a free software community) is a legal or institutional mechanism such as the GPL, which assures that the “surplus value” created by the commons stays WITHIN the commons (or at least is not over-exploited by private appropriators). If user-based communities are going to be able to acquire long-term equity in their own production, we will need to create innovative instruments to assure that private capital cannot own and control it. An exemplary battle in this regard may be massively multiplayer online games, in which users who create avatars, rooms, props, etc., do not legally own their own virtual creations; the corporation that created the game does.
Social norms can go a long way toward “punishing” corporate owners who misbehave. Witness the user outrage when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. started to censor posts and web links on its recently acquired MySpace site. But whether smart mobs can necessarily prevail or find suitable alternatives is an open question, to my mind, despite the long-term trendline in their favor.
January 31st, 2006 at 7:21 am
[...] Regarding to our earlier entry, The Wisdom of Crowds, David Bollier send us an interesting comment, part of a continuing conversation on the relationship between P2P as a process, and the Commons as an institution, see here (part 1) and here (part 2): [...]
February 2nd, 2006 at 6:03 am
Ten Ways To Take Advantage of Web 2.0…
One of the questions I get asked fairly frequently is how people can leverage Web 2.0 techniques in their applications and infrastructure today. Now that it’s getting more well known, many people are now growing interested on making immediate,…
February 5th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
[...] Make Content Editable Whenever Possible. The read/write Web is about making users co-creators of content on a massive scale. Armed with foreknowledge of the effectiveness of the Wisdom of Crowds, you can take advantage of the fact that none of us is as smart as all of us. Wiki sites turn this editable dial all the way to the right for example, and let every page be editable by anyone who is allowed. Far too many sites don’t take advantage of the fact that you can give people an ownership stake, and get them immersed in working on improving what you offer, all just by letting them have the ability to change an appropriate level of content. The better wiki software keeps a copy of all versions so that no permanent damage can ever be done and that all information contributed is ultimately shareable. Note that there are still some barriers to fully exploiting this, including preventing mischievious users from causing havoc. But there are ways to limit and control this now emerging as I’ve written about before. [...]
February 8th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
[...] – the debate on ‘who owns the wisdom of crowds‘ [...]
February 24th, 2006 at 12:44 am
[...] 2. Make Content Editable Whenever Possible. The read/write Web is about making users co-creators of content on a massive scale. Armed with foreknowledge of the effectiveness of the Wisdom of Crowds, you can take advantage of the fact that none of us is as smart as all of us. Wiki sites turn this editable dial all the way to the right for example, and let every page be editable by anyone who is allowed. Far too many sites don’t take advantage of the fact that you can give people an ownership stake, and get them immersed in working on improving what you offer, all just by letting them have the ability to change an appropriate level of content. The better wiki software keeps a copy of all versions so that no permanent damage can ever be done and that all information contributed is ultimately shareable. Note that there are still some barriers to fully exploiting this, including preventing mischievious users from causing havoc. But there are ways to limit and control this now emerging as I’ve written about before. [...]