Very good summary by David Bollier of non-commodity based value creation through the Commons. He then concludes this interesting post showing that even the aspects of this value creation that can be monetized, do not necessarily privatise easily, i.e. the wisdom of crowds has a chance of staying within the community, rather than outside of it. Corporate behaviour can adapt to this new situation however, see below for his recommendations.
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“What this suggests to me is that the commons should be taken seriously as a new paradigm for value-creation. You don’t necessarily need markets to create something that people want and use. A commons differs from a market in that it doesn’t use property rights, contracts and money to generate value; it leverages gift-exchange, people’s interest in reputation, shared ideals, etc. The commons is a collective governance regime for managing shared resources sustainably and equitably. Familiar examples include scientific disciplines, voluntary civic organizations and open source software communities.

What is notable about many online commons is that many of them are out-competing conventional markets. They often produce value more efficiently than conventional corporations. But they do still more: they generate value in more flexible, personally satisfying and culturally authentic ways. Most companies can’t begin to compete on those terms.

But even at the more basic economic level, online networks have the ability to aggregate excellent information and creativity from a vast pool of disparate and dispersed people. That’s also something that Centralized Media can’t do. Their ability to use top-down market power to push and shape consumer demand often can’t compete with self-organized communities usinge the network to aggregate and express their own consumer demand. Those communities can then choose to fulfill their needs through a niche market or through a commons that they own and control themselves.

The power of this phenomena is remarkable. Linux, the open source operating system, has become a significant, disruptive force in the tech industry, for example. Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia, has amassed more than 600,000 entries in four years, and inspired hundreds of other public wikis. The Internet Archive and Ourmedia.org, have become enormous archives of public domain information and creative works. There are many open-content educational initiatives like M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare curricular materials and peer-to-peer file sharing communities devoted to scientific research.

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In the new context of pull platforms, social communities can efficiently exploit network effects and proprietary value for themselves. Value tends to stay within the originating communities. Attempts to “export” and privatize that value (through intellectual property rights and other proprietary controls) are not necessarily effective. For example, when the News Corporation bought MySpace, a social networking website used by millions of young people, it tried to prevent users from posting links to a rival website. MySpace users outraged, and said so – and the company backed off. It realized that if it tries to dictate terms that the online commons finds obnoxious, the community of users/customers will go elsewhere, eroding the financial value of the website in the process.

In the pull environment, therefore, companies must learn how to co-exist with and respect the commons. They have to adopt a more open, accountable relationship with users/consumers, and show a genuine respect for their autonomy and intelligence. High-handed forms of “push” marketing are likely to flop in the pull environment, where people want – and can insist upon — a more genuine, transparent and accountable relationship with any vendor.