The Gordon Cook Interview (5): The role of the P2P Foundation

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, will be serialized separately.

This is the fifth and final part of the interview.

The P2P Community Structure and Goals

COOK Report: How have you structured and developed your community and where do you see it going?

Bauwens: If you have no money and no capital, you plant your flag and say this is what I want.

You mainly start with yourself and show the example.

I started collecting and organizing information around peer production. This then attracts people who are interested in the subject and I simply ask them to collaborate. Organically we have grown by 50% since 2006 when we started our community. We have more than 11,000 pages in our wiki that have been viewed 12.5 million times over the course of almost 4 years. We have almost 3000 daily readers of our blog and according to the Topsy double ranking calculations of Twitter influence, we are a top 2% global blog in terms of retweets and mentions. NOT that we reach a mass audience directly, but we reach the influencers, each in turn have their own audience, and that adds up. The people who read us are pretty sophisticated. For example on my delicious network there is Clay Shirky, Mackenzie Wark (Hacker Manifesto), and Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs).

These people are read by lots of other people. All this has been achieved without any money and without any marketing. Why? Because we focus on the consistent spreading of quality information.

So out of this came several things. People started buying my presence, i.e. my ‘performance’ as a lecturer, to hear it from the horse’s own mouth as it were. I have about six trips a year where I am gone for about 15 or 20 days. My business model now is that with a free encyclopedic online presence people pay for my scarce physical presence. Do I make a sufficient living out of this? No. Do I eke out some living? Yes. I must admit that I pine for a regular income from some kind of neo-patronage, as I feel a commercial orientation would not be compatible with my current goals, even if I was a somewhat successful entrepreneur at times in my previous life. You understand it by understanding that you have different kinds of capital. Financial capital, relational capital. Reputational capital, purpose capital. You may have less of some but if you can compensate and find happiness and freedom in the other, then it is so much easier to endure the hardship of the lack of financial capital.

Traveling around means real life face to face human contact. Once people meet you some of them want to work with you even more. You get a chance to spawn local communities. I have a local chapter in Greece and they get 30,000 visitors on their pages. Now they invite me. I will have an interview in a major newspaper. In Spain, we had at least four TV appearances during our last trip in Barcelona.

The next thing that happens is that once the community is on line, then people want to get together in person. So we have been able to organize 6 conferences of people locally. We generally find a university or a foundation who would say here is $ 20,000 to fund a conference on a particular thematic subject and they let me suggest some of the speakers. This model has worked well though it doesn’t insure institutional continuity. But there is a real community that has the possibility of being self-sustaining. For example, I have a mailing list. Very active. 30 or 40 items per day. But I am not the list master anymore. There are two guys who volunteered for that. There is a NING community and another person takes care of that. When one creates something there can be some interesting ego issues in letting control of it spread to the involved community members.

For more detail see http://p2pfoundation.net/History_of_the_P2P_Foundation .

For me the key to avoiding ego issues is aligning collective efforts with a higher purpose that transcends the individual ego. And not to oppose self and altruism but to find an alignment between them. I try to think of what motivates me and what I am good at. I like to speak and to be in front of an audience, which may be in effect be narcissistic. Therefore, instead of lamenting this fact, I like to think let’s use this for something that transcends my own limitations so that my own proclivities become useful to others. The second thing is, I think, a service orientation. This is where my peer to peer ethos comes in. No matter who you are – if you are a student and you are awkward about it and you don’t know how to express yourself in the community I will help you. I will post your request, and if no one answers I will repeat it. This does not always work, but at least we try. Sometimes people have other things on their mind or just don’t know but I will always have a consistently service oriented approach. We are a knowledge exchange community and are there to help you. As long as it relates to peer to peer, we will try to help and this creates gratitude.

If only one percent give something back, that is fine. One percent out of one hundred is one person.

One percent out of one thousand is ten people. One percent of ten thousand is one hundred. That is a powerful dynamic. People voluntarily contributing to some degree to the further building of your resources. For me the link is important because we are building a cathedral. I use it as a metaphor to focus on building of a massive body of knowledge by volunteer effort. Building cathedral was a community effort which people could see. It could attract people from all over the world and they could be proud of it for the rest of their lives. So our wiki, if you will, is our cathedral. We can continue to improve it and even if I die it will live on, at least this is my hope.”

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.