”Although writing is one of my passions, getting a book done can be a long, lonely and burdensome process – unless you apply principles of P2P production to it.” says Tomi Astikainen, author of a free eBook called ”Mind Your Elephant – How to get rid of your ego, connect with others and save the world”.
Tomi Astikainen has written book on the new p2p subjectivity, written for a larger public. It’s available here.
Here’s a presentation, with some excerpts.
Presentation:
“Mind Your Elephant was one of those books that wanted to be written. Last summer Tomi was in a cross-roads in his life and took on a semi-spiritual hitch-hiking journey through Europe. He used this experience for personal reflection and development. ”It sounds like such a cliché that someone embarks on a journey just to find out it’s a journey into himself. But that’s exactly what happened. When you’re trying to hitch your way from Zagreb to Budapest and get dropped in the middle of nowhere for five hours, you can only take the situation as it is and trust in people’s good will. This kind of experiences helped me get rid of my impatience and accept that life doesn’t happen in the past or future but in the present moment. When I came back to Finland I tried to write a summary for my travel notes. However, I got this strong feeling that the journey has not yet come to an end. All of a sudden it made so much sense: I had to write.”
Mobilizing peers and the commons
Although Tomi had written for himself already 12 years, he felt overwhelmed to take on a project of this magnitude on such profound topics. It was obvious he couldn’t do it by himself. ”I needed perspective and I had to be accountable for someone to get the work done, so I asked my friends all over the world to provide me with input and feedback throughout the process.” Tomi used his blog as a channel to coordinate the actions of this widely dispersed group of people. Once the book was ready for a wider audience he set up a website www.mindyourelephant.org and synced it with social media tools. He was positively surprised that during the first week more than 100 people downloaded the book. ”Based on the feedback that I got from my friends – and now also from people I didn’t know – I was convinced that we’re onto something great here. It became obvious quite soon in the process that it wasn’t my book at any given time – it was born as a book of the commons, for the commons, by the commons.”
P2P writing is here to stay
”Mind Your Elephant became like an ever-developing living organism. It’s still being shaped based on reader feedback. And now readers have taken responsibility to start translating it to various languages. People have given a lot of ideas of how to take it forward. Elephant book circle, elephant comics, elephant viral videos, elephant workbook for teenagers… people are coming up with amazing suggestions and I hope these start actualizing driven by people’s creativity. The creative commons license allows them to take it, break it, shape it and make it to whatever they want.”
Tomi says that writing with P2P approach is here to stay for one very simple reason: the quality is so much better when a large number of people are involved in the process. ”Technology enables us to get together and co-create amazing things. And it’s so easy for you to just go on the site, login with your Facebook account and invite your friends to see what’s happening and engage with them in a meaningful conversation.”
According to Tomi it seems people all over the world are going through the same struggle. ”When you hear people’s moving personal accounts and realize how similar hopes, dreams and worries people have in Colombia, India and The Netherlands you know that we are dealing with universal issues – that, in the end, we are all one. The sub-standard system we were born into is giving way to something extraordinary.”
Excerpts:
Sharing, co-creation and freedom to participate are solid themes also in the book. Open-source communities are mentioned as one the examples that are already taking us towards a better society. Feel free to download the whole book but here’s an excerpt of what to expect:
“Imagine for a while you are living in the late 1990s. You are about to start a local youth club with your friends. You have been appointed to purchase all IT and knowledge related infrastructure the club needs. You have got a few brand new computers and some start-up money as a donation, but you need to calculate if it’s enough or whether you should get sponsors. After careful mapping of needs your purchase list looks like this: operating system and basic software for three computers, virtual collaboration tools (shared calendar, forum and email at least), website for marketing purposes, eLearning tools, and Encyclopedia Britannica on CD to let your members in on information they need in their volunteer work. How much would all these cost?
Now think about the same assignment today. You get Linux Ubuntu as the operating system and Open Office as the software. You get your free email addresses and virtual collaboration tools from Google and set up your phpBB forum with ease. But you have hard time deciding whether to use Joomla, Drupal or WordPress to build your site. You choose the latter because it’s so easy. Finally you make Wikipedia the start page in your free Opera browser and open up your Moodle eLearning community. Cost of all this is zero Euros. How can this be? In just over a decade everything has become free thanks to people who’ve put in long hours to develop software in global open-source communities just for the love of it. Mind you, the development in open-source world is so rapid that by the time this book comes out, Google Wave has most likely made most of what I just said sound like remnants of the past.
In Internet-enabled collaboration it’s not only the end results that are free; also participation is free. It’s becoming more and more commonplace that people have their most exciting collaborative communities online – although it doesn’t even feel like work. It is no wonder that this free and open participation was enabled by the Internet – a platform made accessible to everyone without restrictive rights by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTTP and HTTML protocols. If he and his employer – CERN – would have been selfish and greedy, we might not be a globally interlinked species yet.
Linux Ubuntu community Code of Conduct starts by saying: “Ubuntu is an African concept of ‘humanity towards others’. It is ‘the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity’. The same ideas are central to the way the Ubuntu community collaborates. Members of the Ubuntu community need to work together effectively. The code of conduct lays down the ‘ground rules’ for our cooperation: be considerate; be respectful; be collaborative; when you disagree, consult others; when you are unsure ask for help; and step down considerately (if you decide to leave, do it so that it minimizes disruption to the project).” These ground rules are so ingenious that any parent could apply them directly in upbringing, any teacher in a classroom or any leader at a workplace.
The Ubuntu philosphy ”I am because you are because we are” serves as the basis for the whole book. First part – Mind your elephant – deals with the fact how we can learn who really are and, most importantly, who we are not. It is the individual perspective: ”I am”. Second part – Crocodile dentits – examines how relationships between people can be strengthened. It shows our connectedness: ”I am because you are”. Third part – Community of ants – sees Ubuntu from the perspective of how we can better behave in a group of people. It is the perspective of community: ”I am because you are because we are”. Finally, these learning points are gathered together to suggest a very different kind of world view, a new culture and a development path for humanity.”
Agile development for common good
“The new culture supports rapid technology transfer: development ideas, progress of work and outcomes of the projects can be shared globally and across disciplines without a need to hoard information. People are generally more aware of what’s happening in communities around the world and the emphasis on dialogue brings together talent from various sectors across cultures.
When people and societies act for a common good from the standpoint of generosity and abundance, the incentive to innovate and come up with unique solutions is no longer about self-interest or profit. Need for rigid organizations decreases dramatically: ad-hoc project teams can be formed to fulfill a development function and then dissolved after the job is done. Thus people can have multiple roles and there is no need to egoistic identification with the title. I love cooking, writing, graphic design badminton and facilitation but I am not only a chef, an author, a graphic designer, a badminton player or a trainer. These are things that I do, not what I am.”