A very interesting and important contribution by Axel Bruns in Re-public, that excellent Greek-based political journal that really engages in co-creating a understanding of the political and policy implications of commons-oriented policies.

What Axel Bruns does in this piece is directly engaging with the issue of the “ownership of the means of peer production”, which we have discussed here on several occasions.

Axel refers to our own take on the issue of ownership:

“In his contribution, Michel Bauwens describes this as a question of the platforms which support the social Web, and draws a useful distinction between platforms arising out of a sharing model (where commercial proprietors offers space for users to collaborate) and platforms based on a commons model (where the platform itself is operated by community-oriented non-profit organisations, and commercial interest play only an ancillary role). He’s right, of course – if we keep in mind that between these two key models can also exist a number of further, hybrid, variations –, and yet the rather passive term ‘platform’ may understate just what a crucial role these tools of the interactive, collaborative, social Web are able to play today.”

His own point is the following:

“production and usage are nothing without interaction as the point of connection between those two practices, so that’s where the main game now lies. And the increasing sophistication of the latest Web-based means of interaction – of produsage, of social networking, of other forms of online collaboration and social engagement – and the otherwise unsophisticated nature of basic Web interaction infrastructure is also the reason that we must now return to considering who controls these means interaction.”

This naturally brings us to the owners of proprietary platforms like Google and especially Facebook, to which he directs a particular critique:

“From this perspective, it’s not difficult to see that the constructive or (depending on your point of view) insidious contribution which social Web sites from Digg to Facebook make is to turbo-charge the Web’s interaction process – and the more they do so, many of them lock their users into their own proprietary framework of interactive possibilities, and further undermine the universality of basic Web protocols. For this and other reasons, as I’ve already stated elsewhere, I’m no fan of Facebook and similar closed sites: I believe that ultimately, they unnecessarily and unduly create a new walled garden apart from the wider Web – an enclosure which to interact in users trade away the ability to distribute their expressions freely and easily to a wider audience outside its gates. Facebook may be a site for social interaction, but from a wider, whole-of-Web perspective beyond its own walls, it’s contributing not to the social, but to an antisocial Web.”

So, what needs to be done?

According to Axel:

“For that reason, I strongly support Michel Bauwens’s call for us to “furiously build the commons”: a commons not only of information, knowledge, and creative work, collaboratively prodused and curated by all of us, but also of distribution and interaction; a commons in which access to and engagement with content isn’t restricted by a maze of walls – defined through incompatible data formats and noninteroperable access protocols – that enclose isolated user communities.

Projects that work towards the development of portable user profiles go some way towards that commons, but let’s aim for a further step – let’s tear down the barriers to interaction before they do irreversible damage to the social Web as we know it. To do so doesn’t make it impossible for MySpace, Facebook, and other sites to retain their own unique feel – but it also introduces the possibility for users to create their own mash-ups of both sites’ features: a Spacebook or MyFace.”

One of the solutions to strive for is therefore:

“Produsage – the user-led collaborative, iterative, and continuing creation and development of content – can exist on platforms for interaction which are operated by produser communities themselves It may be able to operate within walled gardens, provided these enclosures are large enough to sustain an active and diverse community of contributors – but it thrives only in open environments which impose no barriers to participation. Only here is the produsage process able to harness the long tail of possible contributors all the way to its furthest reaches; only here is it possible for the most casual of contributors to perform those random acts of collaboration”

This means, then, that we must be careful that:

“those who (in the face of produsage’s early successes) develop commercial models for harnessing produsage processes and harbouring produsage communities resist the proprietary reflex to artificially enclose the artefacts and participants of produsage: that they follow the model of a del.icio.us or Flickr rather than that of a Facebook, and seek (legitimate) commercial success without hijacking the community in the process. Google does this, for the most part – and the emerging owners of the means of produsage need to be encouraged to follow the Google motto “do no evil” even more closely than Google itself may have turned out to do.”