An excerpt from the book itself: The book’s intent is to lay out a roadmap that explains to readers how the Netherlands came to its national consensus to invest in national knowledge infrastructure. And show what the evolution of the resulting policy process has accomplished. It will conclude by pointing out the changes in perception that must be accomplished in the united states in order to render feasible what Holland has done. Namely treat the fiber and ducts as the national highway system.

Not deep under the ground, there are so many cables, I believe no one knows who owns what cables, but the result is that connectivity from home to home is high.

Superlatives are being used to underline the importance of working together and collective decision making. They go back to earlier centuries where the Dutch keep being challenged by the sea level (a large part of the country is below that level), and how they cope with them. Some events and decisions ultimately led to a situation where the Netherlands reached a competitive economic advantage. The high quality optic-fiber infrastructure makes it possible for organizations to transfer data to each other in such high speeds, not possible elsewhere in the world at the moment. At least, that’s what the book tells us.

The book (produced and distributed by SURFNET) can be downloaded from here.

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Paul argues that every act of communication is also an act of coordination. In order to communicate, both agents involved have to agree on the way communication works, which language is being used. But how do you agree without communication? Communication seems to be interrelated to coordination.

Mark argues that stigmergy is a form of self-organizing, without the need for any communication. This should resolve the coordination paradox. Because agents leave traces in the system, other agents can act on them. This indirect form of communication is not directly addressed to anyone, but the one that notices the trace can act upon it. But how does coordination work here?

The interesting part is that it seems there are some different approaches. Paul is talking about direct communication, while Mark talks about indirect communication. But coordination is always needed. And communication is always happening. Can stigmergy be the autocatalyst for communication? But how is communication being agreed upon? Please let us know your opinion.

So why am I discussing this? Currently I am starting to research self-organization as the new dominant form of organization, and how online collaborative spaces can play a role there. Very much related to digital stigmergy, communication and coordination. The goal of this research is to help organizations, or, better, employees of organizations, how to participate in self-organized groups or online collaborative spaces. Participating starts by giving tools to employees to empower them, and to identify socially interesting online spaces where they can collaborate and co-create.

Self-organization and online collaborative spaces

Social structures are changing. Now we are more connected than we ever were, and this connectivity between humans will grow further and further. At the same time, people are spending more time participating more online. The Internet enables us to participate more globally, which changes the way we communicate and cooperate.

By using the Internet, people leave traces by posting comments, having their visits being logged, writing articles, updating Twitter and Facebook statuses, etc. By doing this, the Internet as complex environment or system changes. These changes caused by humans influences behaviour of other humans. For example, articles on Wikipedia are created and getting better because people create articles and make changes to them. Even all changes are recorded and can be seen by anyone. Most of the time, these actions are uncoordinated, but stimulates a subsequent action. Direct communication is often not necessary. This phenomenon is also known as stigmergy, which is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent.

Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. Because people are more and more connected, and make use of a shared environment, self-organization is happening more and more. People connect through social networks, and organize themselves without any formal contract. Contracts are at most social contracts, for example when people are striving the same goal. Actions and participations are not obligatory, but voluntary. This is very different from the most contracts that exist in most current organizations. People are free to contribute and produce, while their actions are judged by their peers a posteriori.

People working together to produce goods and services through self-organization resembles a new, third, mode of production, which is called (commons-based) peer-production (Benkler, 2002). The central mode of coordination is neither command (as it is inside the firm) nor price (as it is in the market) but self-assigned volunteer contributions to a common pool of resources. On the Internet, producing and coordination costs are very low. Producing, or reproducing, digital goods have almost no transaction costs, and because of stigmergy, coordination costs are very low as well.

Motivations for people to use the Internet to consume and produce are both market-based and social. Most people have to make a living, but are spending time online as well for maintaining social relationships. Combinations of the two are seen as well, and in both directions. People peer-produce while not being paid, but hoping to be noticed by companies that will hire them (or get credit). On the other hand, companies pay people by contributing to open-source projects, because they use these products. Individual people are peer-producing for both reasons at the same time, and for different projects. Their social interests can differ from their professional. These characteristics can be seen as an eco-system where people peer-produce for both motivations, and theoretically can switch very easy from one system to another, and from one project to another.

The enabler for these self-organizing of people is the Internet. More and more tools are being created to be used online that amplify the possibilities to self-organize and peer-produce. Tools are getting more and more mature and make it more and more easy and inviting for people to participate. These self-organized groups are very knowledgeable, which makes these groups very powerful. Power is shifting from classic hiërarchical top-down organizations to decentralized bottom-up organized networks.

Organizations need to adapt to the change of social structures and distribution of power. By starting to recognize that new organizational forms exist and have the right to exist, classic organizations can adapt to, co-exist with and co-operate with the decentralized self-organized groups. Trying to fight or ignore their existance and the value they have and produce will exclude companies from these groups, which is no good for them. Opening up by participating and collaboration is a better strategy. Many companies already do this, but it would be better to adapt to fit these existing groups more. Companies who empower their employees to speak about their company and to collaborate with self-organized groups outside their company are seen as more authentic and are accepted easier in those groups.

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A Dutch journalist is now very much dedicated to speed up this process. Governmental transparency is what’s it all about. Transparency is needed for more quality of public services, can make the government more efficient, and the public can help the government spending public money more wisely, says Brenno de Winter, the Dutch journalist.

He set up a site called ‘Bigwobber’, which points to the law of openness of public services (in Dutch, Wet Openbaarheid van Bestuur, or WOB). On the site you can exchange knowledge by making things tranparent like requests, objections and cases that go to court.

More info:

• http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/05/opening-up-in-netherlands.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/fighting_fund_for_the_big
• http://www.bigwobber.nl/

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These characteristics are of course not only applicable for software development or writing an encyclopedia. It is good to see that other types of initiatives can succeed as well. One great example is ‘Nabuur’, a Dutch nongovernmental organization that started business in 2001. Nabuur strives to be an anti-hierarchical, self-organizing, open-source network whose volunteers help people in the developing world directly, based on what those people ask of them.

On the Nabuur site, which means neighbor in old-Dutch, real villages can ask for assistance in all kinds of ways. For example, a project can be started to help improve the local water quality. People from all over the world can contribute to these projects by answering those questions and giving advice. The assumption is that small communities can carry out many public-works projects by themselves if provided with the right information. Projects can exist in all imaginable areas, from web design to farming, and from building houses to sawing clothes.

How does it work? A local community asks for help. When nabuur.com approves, the initiative will receive a ‘village’ on the site. Nabuur.com coaches someone from the community to represent the village. Nabuur provides for promotion and online volunteers (the neighbors), and also for the guidance of a facilitator at the site to coordinate the progress. The local representative describes the problem, the project and the steps to take, and makes concrete tasks for the neighbors, thus helping peers. Online solutions are proposed and implemented locally. There is feedback to the site through photographs and stories in the online ‘village’. Thus, more and more new projects are created on the site to help the village develop.

Links:

• Virtual Volunteers Listen First, Then Reach Out (NY Times)
  
• Nabuur.com
• Nabuur, een concreet voorbeeld van peer-to-peer helpen

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The vision he has, is a restaurant that is open-source in all possible ways, from the interior like furniture to the menu with the recipes. On the Instructables site the community is being asked to give ideas regarding anything that has to do with restaurants and possible can be used. On any creation, in any shape and for any purpose, the designer or creator gets credits by having his or her name mentioned on the product. “In some restaurants you can buy the stuff you see, in this restaurant you’ll go home knowing how to re-create what you just enjoyed, be it the food or the chair you sat on.”, says Hendriks on his project page. Less than a week from starting the project resulted in more than 70 comments on his idea.

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Who are these Dutch members of the P2P Foundation there were present? First there was James Burke. Not from Dutch origin, but living in Amsterdam for quite some time he speaks almost fluent Dutch (he disagrees on that), and member of the P2P Foundation for a long time. The most of you will know who he is. Then we have Marijn van der Pas who works for a press agency as a journalist (ANP). Like James, he lives in Amsterdam. New on the team is Martien van Steenbergen. He is a strong evangelist for an Utopian world, and an ideal city. From his point of view it would be 5000km2 and would have space for about 75,000 people and some other characteristics. Martien took his wife and two daughters with him to the dinner. Then there was me, member of the foundation as of April 2006.

We had a great dinner, and it was a great first meeting. We got the chance to meet each other in person, and discuss subjects like why we are a member of the foundation, what our future plans are, what we do for a living, and the like. For a review (in Dutch) I refer to the blog of Martien. The plans are to have a next meet up in December, when Michel is in Amsterdam for a few days. To be continued!

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The platform is based on the program Tribler. The researchers strive for an e-commerce model that connects users with each other in a global market, without a centralized governing organization, as the first real Internet currency, comparible to currencies such as the Euro or the Dollar. The more a user uploads, and the better the quality, it enables more and faster downloads for the user. This virtual economy is regulated on the basis of trust, a network of friends that ascertain users can be trusted.

Read the article (PDF) which describes the P2P algorithm (Give-to-Get) that prevents free-riding. It explains how using bandwidth to upload is rewarded by being able download more and faster. When there is an abundance of common download capacity, it remains possible for free-riders to download at good speeds. As yet, the algorithm is more suitable for relatively shorter videos. See also the post on the Dutch P2P blog.

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Their about page:

“Inspired by the open-source movement, this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story. It’s a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired, and those who choose to participate.

The investigation takes place in the open, not behind newsroom walls. Participation is voluntary; contributors are welcome from across the Web. The people getting, telling and vetting the story are a mix of professional journalists and members of the public — also known as citizen journalists. This is a model I describe as “pro-am.”

The “ams” are simply people getting together on their own time to contribute to a project in journalism that for their own reasons they support. The “pros” are journalists guiding and editing the story, setting standards, overseeing fact-checking, and publishing a final version.

In this project, we’re trying to crowdsource a single story, and debut a site that makes other such reports possible down the road. But we don’t know yet how well our site and our methods work. Our ideas are crude because they are untested. By participating, you can help us figure this puzzle out.

An outstanding fact of the Net era is that costs for people to find each other, share information, and work together are falling rapidly. This should have consequences for reporting big, moving stories where the truth is distributed around. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of journalists and volunteer users should be able to find out things that the larger public needs to know.

James Surowiecki, who wrote a book on the subject, says that “in smart crowds, people cooperate and work together even when itâ€s more rational for them to let others do the work.” What professional journalism says to its audience is that you havenâ€t the time or inclination to hang around the halls of government or go where news is happening. Itâ€s more rational to let us, the press, do that for you. Go out there and live your life, weâ€ll keep you informed.

Except it doesnâ€t always work that way, does it?

We know that pro-am journalism can work only if people are persuaded to give their time, lend their knowledge, pool their intelligence. Those are donations, but not of money. Often they are more critical than money.

To succeed in this, we have to persuade several hundred people to donate good work to one big story — and to swarm around so it gets really good. We plan to modify this site for use in future stories, more sprawling and more difficult. Maybe about the environment. Or the schools. Or — who knows? — the war.

A professional newsroom can’t easily do this kind of reporting; it’s a closed system. Because only the employees operate in it, there can be reliable controls. That’s the system’s strength. The weakness is the organization knows only what its own people know. Which wasn’t much of a weakness until the Internet made it possible for the people formerly known as the audience to realize their informational strengths.

Our site was designed for the “open” mode of news production. That means anyone can wander by and check out what we’re doing. And if we do this right, anyone who is interested can find within minutes something useful to do. We’re betting that openness of that type has editorial advantages bigger than its well-known weak points.

This is not just an open, but also a pro-am, project. Some things will be decided by editors, others will be left to participants. We don’t know what the optimal mix is yet, but in the course of the project we’ll find it.

One place that is likely to happen is The Exchange, Assignment Zero’s discussion forum. That’s where you can talk about the project, float ideas and tell us what’s working, or not. Anyone can start a thread. The editors watch The Exchange and of course participate.

One day, stories with a thousand people on the masthead might become routine, and we’ll know how to do them. For now, we just need hundreds, acting in the spirit of the enterprise, to help us take apart and put together a single, sprawling story.

Assignment Zero is a starting point, a base line. Who knows where we will end up. But if reporting in the open style ever comes into its own — at our site or someone else’s — that might very well change journalism and expand what’s humanly possible with the instrument of a free press.“

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• March 30th, 2007, P2P-Foundation nu ook Nederlands en een oproep, is about what this new blog is about, and why we exist.
• March 31th, 2007, Wisdom of crowds en de politie, een goede match, is about the Dutch police who asks ‘the crowd’ for clues about a not yet solved cold case.
• April 2th, 2007, Peer2Peer en social software is a re-post from a friend which is a summary about a lecture of Michel in Amsterdam in April 2006.
• April 2th, 2007, Podcast: Michel Bauwens praat met Carool Kersten in Chiang Mai, is an interview in Dutch with Michel Bauwens which is embedded on the blog as a podcast.

I would like to use this oppurtunity to ask all our Dutch readers to contribute or to hint interesting material for the new blog. Which language will be next?

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OpenID support announcements are everywhere. The Wikipedia is in, Microsoft is in, AOL is in, Digg is in, WordPress is in. OpenID is the best idea in ages but it has a problem. Nobody wants to trust somebody like Microsoft, AOL, Digg or even beloved WordPress to provide their identity. I think thatâ€s why the only people you see promoting their OpenID much are hosting identity providers.

I think it boils down to metaphor. When I first wrote about OpenID I was thinking about identities hosted by a few trusted providers. OpenID grew from a desire to cut down on the number of accounts we each have to remember and that would seem to solve the problem. I mentioned some kind of ICANN like agency to maintain the whole thing and then trailed off. When you think in these terms, thatâ€s the problem with OpenID, who to trust to control it? I havenâ€t found an acceptable answer.

Now I think the answer is this: Control should be distributed. Identity should be a swarm. Trust should not be a hierarchy. OpenID needs a way to link many identities together in a secure flexible way. The metaphor needs to change to peer to peer. Philosophers figured this out ages ago but lacked the tools to make it happen, however maybe things have changed.

 

vs.

In the hierarchy model, ‘A†has all the power/control and there is no way to change the situation. This power is embedded into the system and once established cannot be changed without rebuilding the system. There just isnâ€t any mechanism to link ‘B†and ‘C†without ‘Aâ€.

In the peer to peer model, ‘A†might have more power/credibility (for example, if itâ€s a major university) but the situation is flexible. The power comes from trust not the system itself. If ‘A†is seen to wither while ‘B†and ‘C†grow strong, the system can be adjusted by users to recognize this.

If I want some anonymity I can always create a new identity someplace and link it to nothing. The question then is who will trust such an identity?

These identities could be at a university, or an employer, news organization, political party; coffee shop, night club, etc. The metaphor creates so many identities I donâ€t even bother to know about most of them. That is after all how the humanity works anyway. I have countless identities for famous people that the people themselves know nothing of. The same with dead people.

The folks at XFN seem to have had this idea for awhile now. Their system works by embedding simple meta data about relationships into HTML to enable links between friends and identity consolation. They have better diagrams than me too.

XFN seems to be struggling for an implementation in the same way OpenID is struggling to get out from under hierarchy. OpenID is being implemented by big kids who smell power but XFN gets rid of that stench. I think itâ€s time for the two to dance.

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