Innovation Commons Network

Change to New Blog

2008-09-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

This blog has moved to http://incollaboration.ning.com.

The Real Answer to the Tragedy of the Commons

2008-02-21T15:23:00.001-08:00

This the actual real answer to the tragedy of the commons. Is it the answer to the economic problem introduced in the Reingold talk? Is it the real model for an innovation commons?

Howard Reingold on Collaboration

2008-02-21T14:51:00.000-08:00

Stages of Collaboration

2008-02-05T07:24:00.000-08:00

I've had an interesting exchange on this topic on LinkedIn. It can be found here:

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/management/organizational-development/MGM_ODV/164431-353379

The Federal Idea

2007-10-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

Different cultures give a different prominence to the idea of the individual, but one can sense a growing feeling of impotence, everywhere, in the face of institutions and government, local and global. Democracy used to mean that the people had the power, but now that translates into the people have the vote, which is not the same thing.

The vote is an expression of last resort, a useful reminder to our rulers of the source of their bread and butter, but hardly a way for individuals to influence what is going on around them. Moreover, in the institutions of everyday life, particularly those of business, the only people with the vote are those outside, the financiers or the governors. Those who work in them are effectively disenfranchised. Democracy has its limits.

If we want to reconcile our humanity with our economics, we have to find a way to give more influence to what is personal and local, so that we can each feel that we have a chance to make a difference, that we matter. We have no hope of charting a way through those paradoxes unless we feel able to take some personal responsibility for events. A formal democracy will not be enough. We have to find another way, by changing the structure of our institutions to give more power to the small and to the local. We have to do that, with all the untidiness which it entails, while looking for efficiency, and the benefits of coordination and control. But more is needed than good intentions to empower the individual to do what we want him or her to do. The structures and the systems have to change to reflect a new balance of power. That means federalism.

Federalism is an old idea, but its time may have come again because it matches paradox with paradox. Federalism seeks to be both big in some things and small in others, to be centralized in some respects and decentralized in others. It aims to be local in its appeal and in many of its decisions, but national or even global in its scope. It endeavors to maximize independence, provided that there is a necessary interdependence; to encourage difference, but within limits; it needs to maintain a strong center, but one devoted to the service of the parts; it can, and should, be led from that center but has to be managed by the parts. There is room in federalism for the small to influence the mighty, and for individuals to flex their muscles.

We think of federalism as applying to countries-the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Canada. Her politicians might not admit it, but the United Kingdom is really a federation of its separate regions, as is Spain, and, increasingly, even France, as its regions gain more autonomy. The concept, however, goes beyond countries. Every organization of any size can be thought of in federal terms. Hospitals, schools, local government, and most charities are, if we look at them with federal spectacles, made for federalism, local and separate activities bonded in one whole, served by a common center. All businesses of any size have federal propensities, and a need to be all the things which federalism offers.

Why has such a good idea not been so obviously popular? Few businesses are consciously federal, nor does history provide many, if any, examples of a monarch or a central power voluntarily moving to a federalist structure. The hard truth is that we are always reluctant to give up power unless we have to, and federalism is an exercise in the balancing of power. The federal idea is an example of the second curve, but one which too few institutions or societies develop until they are forced to. It is a very different, and very uncomfortable, way of thinking about organizations. It is messy, untidy, and always a little out of control. Its only justification is that there is no real alternative in a complicated world. No one person, or group, or executive, is so all-wise and so all-sensitive to be able to balance the paradoxes on their own, or run the place from the center, even if people were prepared to allow them to. We have to allow space for the small and the local.

Federalism relies on a set of Chinese contracts between its various parts and operates through doughnuts of varying size and shape, which leave, of necessity and of right, considerable space for local decisions. The goals of the parts have to adjust to the requirements of the whole, and vice versa. No one in a federal organization can have everything exactly as they want it. Therefore, it is an excellent example of putting the preaching of this book into practice, with all its difficulties as well as opportunities.
Let us be clear, federalism is not the easiest of concepts to make work, or to understand. Yugoslavia is hardly an advertisement for the concept, nor is Canada. California is creaking under an excess of federalism from within and without. IBM proclaims its conversion to the idea, but may not be its most successful exponent in the years ahead. A federal Europe frightens many, and not just in Britain. Nevertheless, we have to persevere because it is the best way to return some sense of meaning to our larger institutions, a way of connecting their purposes with their people.

Much of the confusion and difficulty arises from a misunderstanding of what federalism is. A confederation, for example, is not the same thing as a federation. A confederation is an alliance of interested parties who agree to do some things together. It is a mechanism for mutual advantage. There is no reason for sacrifice or trade-offs or compromise unless it is very obviously in one's own interest. A confederation is not an organization that is going anywhere, because there is no mechanism or will to decide what that anywhere might be. The Confederation of Independent States, which replaced the Soviet Union, will never be an effective body. The British Commonwealth, another confederation, is a thing of sentiment and language, not a real organization. These are not the stuff of federalism
.
Confederations adapt when they have to, usually too late. They do not lead, nor do they build. They are organizations of expediency, not of common purpose. The British would like Europe to remain an economic confederation, a common market. Many in the rest of Europe want a more federal state, one with a greater common purpose, within which sacrifices and compromises are acceptable, one in which the rich are readier to help the poorer, one with common standards and common aspirations.

What is true of Europe is also true of organizations.

Alliances, joint ventures, and networks are the tools of confederations, arrangements of mutual convenience, inevitably fragile as the conveniences change. Organizations with a clear purpose will want to be federal, not confederal. The distinction is important.

The key concepts in federalism are twin citizenship and subsidiarity. They are old ideas, re-invented for today's world.

From: The Age of Paradox, Charles Handy, Harvard Business School Press, 1995

Technology Fountainheads

2007-09-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

Technology Fountainheads: The Management Challenge of R&D Consortia

This book is a study of six R&D consortia in the US – Sematech, Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), Microelectronics and Computer technology Corporation (MCC), the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the Gas Research Institute (GRI) and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore).

“The six consortia…were borne out of sense of industry crisis and/or deeply sensed need to advance the cause of industry R&D. In each instance, industry and/or government leaders articulated the need, advocated collective endeavor, and called for action.”

Why was Sematech successful?:

1. A viable, sustainable nationally important mission
2. Worked at precompetitive level
3. Outstanding leadership
4. Secured government funding
5. Industry led with 80% participation

Classification of R&D consortia;

1. Open membership
2. Exclusive membership
3. closed membership

Functions of R&D consortia:

• Development & dissemination of new industrial process technologies
• Technical education & training
• Environmental research (safety 7 health)
• Supply-industry infrastructure development
• Academic research & graduate education support
• End-product development & commercialization
• Industry standard-setting
• Industry disaster & crisis response

Strategy: “Vision is the basis for a call to action. The validity of a vision may depend upon the stature of those sounding the call, and on the premise that certain objectives can be met more effectively in a collective endeavor rather than the undertaking of a single firm.

If the vision is the basis of collective action, mission is an articulation of purpose. To be sustainable, a mission must promise the fulfillment of some broadly perceived need at the industry or sector level. It should attract the support of relevant constituencies – those whose backing can contribute to the consortium’s success, or whose lack of support could jeopardize its success from the onset.”

“A viable mission has several characteristics. First, it must not deal in domains of corporate core competencies or threaten consortium members’ competitive advantage. Second, it must offer firm-specific economic value. To the extent that a consortium reflects public purpose and the national interest, it will have validity and legitimacy. As a primary mission, however, collective or public purpose may attract support only in the short run. In the long run, return on R&D investments, becomes more the compelling objective – and at least for the United States, that measure tends to give priority to short-term results.”

Basic elements of consortium strategy:

1. its membership constituency, as well as other founders (that is, the markets it will serve
2. It’s R&D sourcing modes (basically the choice between an internal staff and external contracting)
3. Its product line, or range of services it will provide
4. Its pricing modes (that is, the forms in which its revenues are derived – e.g., one time shareholder fees, annual membership dues, cost per project charges)
5. Its R&D delivery systems (the channels used in the diffusion of new technology to member companies, their suppliers and their markets)

Theory of Consortia

“”The relevant theory, developed largely by Olson and Hardin, may be summarized as follows. A collective good is likely to be provided if the economic gain is great enough for one party or group that it alone would be willing to pay the full cost. Others may join the group if the net benefits to them contributing to the collective effort are positive, or if some attractive by-products are available through membership. Non economic benefits – for example the psychic rewards of belonging – may be relevant in small groups, but may decrease in importance for larger groups.”

“Current theory also holds that large groups will be less effective than small ones, on the grounds that:

‘The larger the group, the smaller the share of the total benefit going to any individual and the less likelihood that any small subset of the group, mush less any single individual, will gain enough from getting collective good to bear the burden of providing even a small amount of it.’”

I’m not sure that I agree with this. It seems like the premise is based upon additive rather than synergistic value. It would seem to be true if there was a decreased value for adding members. But, I don’t believe it’s true in general.

Benefits of Collaboration

“In theory, the economic rationale for the formation of a collaborative group is the anticipation of gain by some member or core group – a greater gain than if the member or core group were to undertake the same mission independently.”

• Cost sharing opportunities
• Sharing complementary knowledge
• Transitioning opportunities for firms moving into new fields of technology or diversifying into new businesses
• Risk reduction opportunities
• Monitor technological advances
• Risk of not collaborating
• Non economic motivations (especially for the core group)
• Potential for economic gain
• Improving the health of the industry
• Networking opportunities
• Sense of mutual dependence (smaller firms)
• Potential for selective and proprietary product offerings

Technology Fountainheads: The Management Challenge of R&D Consortia, E. Raymond Corey, Harvard Business School Press, 1997

Sematech: Saving the US Semiconductor Industry

2007-09-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

Why Sematech consortium worked:

1. Members were willing to change
2. Members reduced interfirm secrecy
3. Solved problems with facts and information
4. Continuously reapplied the cooperative model
5. Accomplished specific, agreed-upon goals
6. Members avoiding “sandbagging”
7. Leverage continuous learning
8. Microchip industry profited by helping itself
9. The amount of investment was too big to dismiss
10. The organization was the optimal size
11. Leaders were willing to contribute without assurance of direct payback
12. Founding members brought with them the confidence of previous success

“The most important and timely success factor mentioned by everyone involved in Sematech is unprecedented cooperation among competitors requires an absolute belief in the necessity for collective action – a commonly held conviction that without hanging together, each will surely hand separately. In Sematech’s case that conviction was a widely held view that the industry’s survival was gravely endangered, and with it, the nation’s economic and military independence.”

“If it’s not competitive, it has to change.”

“The first empowerment was the decision to try. The second empowerment was the planning workshops, which said, ‘Try to do what?’”

“The biggest secret is that there is no secret.”

“One of the things we learned at Sematech early on was that all the secrets we were keeping from each other were basically the same secrets.”

“The prohibited areas of competitive collaboration were related to proprietary product and marketing issues. Legally allowed precompetitive collaboration involved core competencies or generic manufacturing process issues. The approximate proportions of the two types of information were eventually discovered to be a surprising 85 percent generic to 15 percent proprietary.”

Principles:

1. Being open to ongoing self-assessment and willingness to change
2. The recognition of long-term interdependence for survival
3. The importance of hearing every voice
4. The necessity of continually learning from learning
5. The moral conviction of the win/win rewards of systematically expanding mutual support

Sematech: Saving the US Semiconductor Industry, Larry Browning & Judy Shetler, Texas A&M University Press, 2000

Crowd Gaming

2007-07-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

MSNBC.com has come up with a new way to entertain yourself before the movie begins. They have developed motion sensors that are placed throughout the theater that can tell which way the crowd is moving. What’s the fun in that? The crowd controls a ball and paddle like the ancient video game “Breakout.” The goal is to break the wall of news on the screen provided by MSNBC.com.

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/crowd-gaming-what-to-do-before-the-movie-starts/

I've been looking for a demonstration of crowd gaming for awhile. This is a visual demonstration of collaboration.

First Democracy

2007-06-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

"Democracy is government by and for the people. That is hardly a definition, but it will do for a start. As a next step, I shall propose that a government is a democracy insofar as it tries to express the seven ideas of this book: freedom from tyranny, harmony, the rule of law, natural equality, citizen wisdom, reasoning without knowledge, and general education.”

Paul Woodruff
First Democracy

All good principles for an innovation commons.

Read the book summary at http://illuminatedinnovant.blogspot.com/2007_06_10_archive.html

2007-03-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

USC Stevens Institute for Innovation Launches; Showcases Breakthrough Innovations

Posted on : 2007-03-28 | Author : University of Southern California
News Category : PressRelease

LOS ANGELES, March 28 /PRNewswire/ -- During a day long celebration of innovation at the University of Southern California today, USC President Steven B. Sample announced the strategic plan, mission and vision for the newly-named USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, the university's bold, new approach to harness and advance breakthrough research and innovation for societal impact.This is the first time a major research university has created a university-wide, centralized hub out of the Office of the Provost to consolidate innovation transfer operations and innovator development and to be the catalyst for educational and co-curricular programming. Additionally, this is the first time such an undertaking has included innovations from all disciplines -- from cinematic arts and music to sciences, medicine and engineering -- focusing efforts on innovators as well as the innovations."Innovation isn't confined to science and technology. It can also be social or artistic, with creative ideas taking the form of start-ups or licenses, new products or services, or even nonprofits and new organizational models," Dr. Sample said. "It is this broader -- more inclusive -- definition for innovation that makes it relevant and powerful within a research university. At USC we are dedicated to breaking down the barriers between disciplines and pursuing innovation that meets societal needs in areas that include education, human health and safety, the arts, the environment, and urban policy and planning."To celebrate the USC Stevens launch, innovators from a variety of disciplines, research centers and USC schools including the School of Pharmacy, Institute for Creative Technologies, Information Sciences Institute, Roski School of Fine Arts, School of Cinematic Arts, and School of Social Work demonstrated their inventions at the showcase. Some of the innovations displayed included: * Wei-Min Shen's Superbots -- Identical modular units that can connect to create robots that can stand, walk or crawl; * Leapfrog lunar landing vehicle -- A working space vehicle that provides small companies the option to explore revenue generating business opportunities on the lunar surface; * A breakthrough Alzheimer's disease therapy that uses a new way to promote neural stem cell generation in the brain to sustain the regenerative capacity and cognitive function of the brain; * The Pano Chamber -- A 9-foot in diameter, immersive, 360 degree video, motion graphic and still display interactive video and audio panoramic display environmentSaid USC Trustee Mark Stevens, Sequoia Capital partner and the naming donor of the Institute, "A chasm exists between academia and business. Although both rely on innovation, the academic world pursues publication, societal impact, and betterment of humanity while the business community generally pursues a return on investment, financial gain and competitive edge. With USC Stevens designed to bridge the gap between the academy and society in such a unique manner, USC has demonstrated its pioneering spirit in redefining what it means to be a major research university in the 21st century."A Unique ApproachThe primary focus of USC Stevens is on developing, supporting and nurturing both the innovator and the innovation. To that end, USC Stevens plans to soon announce specific awards, grants and educational programs to support student innovators."The greatest innovation transfer we can do as a university to make an impact on society occurs every May, when we graduate thousands of future innovators from USC," said Krisztina Holly, Vice Provost and Executive Director of USC Stevens. "Our approach centers on ensuring our researchers and student innovators are empowered with the tools and support necessary to continue to make societal impact, now and in the future."To expand on our effectiveness, USC Stevens will build cross-functional teams within the staff and volunteer network, in thematic areas of interest, to design specific programmatic support within each area based on unique needs. The first team will be in Arts and Media, followed closely by Life Sciences, which will launch in conjunction with the opening of the USC Stevens office on the HSC campus.USC Stevens will soon open an office on the USC Health Sciences Campus to serve the specific needs of the health science researchers, particularly at the Keck School of Medicine and School of Pharmacy.USC Stevens will grow to nearly 30 staff, and will begin to offer a variety of programs to USC researchers and students, including workshops, educational programs, student groups, and resources in innovation; intellectual property management; IP protection and licensing for USC-owned IP; information on volunteer, investment, and sponsored research opportunities at USC; and community-building events to connect innovators and investors. Programs will be built over the next several years in response to needs identified in various thematic areas.About USC Stevens Institute for InnovationUSC Stevens Institute for Innovation is a university-wide resource in the Office of the Provost, designed to harness and advance the creative thinking and breakthrough research at USC for societal impact. USC Stevens identifies, nurtures, protects, and transfers the most exciting innovations from USC to the market, and in turn, provides a central connection for industry seeking cutting-edge innovations in which to invest. Furthermore, USC Stevens develops the innovator as well as innovations, through educational programs, community-building events, and showcase opportunities. From the biosciences and technology to music and cinematic arts, USC Stevens connects faculty, students, and the business community to create an environment for stimulating and inspiring the process of innovation across all disciplines.

Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm

2006-11-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

"For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and was developed most explicitly in the work of neo-institutional economist Oliver Williamson. In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers contributing to large and small scale project, where the central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. No one "owns" the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to price signals.

In this paper I explain that while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

The paper also explains why this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the capital investment necessary for production-computers and communications capabilities-is widely distributed instead of concentrated. In particular, this mode of production is better than firms and markets for two reasons. First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to information and cultural production processes. In this regard, peer-production has an advantage in what I call "information opportunity cost." That is, it loses less information about who the best person for a given job might be than do either of the other two organizational modes. Second, there are substantial increasing returns to allow very larger clusters of potential contributors to interact with very large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and collaboration enterprises. Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators. This results in allocation gains, that increase more than proportionately with the increase in the number of individuals and resources that are part of the system. The article concludes with an overview of how these models use a variety of technological and social strategies to overcome the collective action problems usually solved in managerial and market-based systems by property and contract. "

http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html

Natalie Shell

Ten Steps to Take Advantage of the Public's Yearning for Community

2006-11-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

“Ten steps for political, business, and religious leaders who want to take advantage of the public’s yearning for community:

1. Clearly define your purpose. It’s what galvanizes your community.

2. Give your staff the clear sense that they’re vital to achieving a common purpose.

3. Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down. Technology makes grassroots organizing easier than ever.

4. Give your customers/voters/worshipers a say in how the product/campaign/church is marketed. Recognize that the consumer has more control than ever.

5. Tap into existing networks when possible. Create networks where none exist.

6. Be true to your purpose. Authenticity, accountability, and trust are the keys to building a bond or a brand.

7. Join the online community of bloggers to catch the first whiff of a crisis and to make sure your message is heard in the cyberspace community.

8. Wherever possible, make your enterprise a Third Place, a community outside home and work for people in search of connection.

9. Donate time and money to community causes. Customers are inclined to support civic-minded companies such as Home Depot, according to Bridgeland, the former head of UDSA Freedom Corps.

10. Identify the community’s leaders (Navigators) and get them on your side. Better still, use the Internet and other tools to create products that draw people together in online communities.”

Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community
Douglas Sosnik, Matthew Dowd and Ron Fournier
Simon & Schuster (2006)

Innovation Commons Summary

2006-08-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

The following two presentations summarize the work to date on the innovation commons. Download the presentation and then view the presentation while listening to the audio:

Creating an Innovation Commons
CreatingInnovationCommons (pdf, 208 kb)
CreatingInnovationCommons (mp3, 58 mb)

Trends in Organizational Creativity and Innovation
InnovationTrends (pdf, 169 kb)
InnovationTrends (mp3, 49 mb)

A Failure of Collaboration

2006-06-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

Little Red Hen found a grain of wheat.

"Who will plant this?" she asked.

"Not I," said the cat.

"Not I," said the goose.

"Not I," said the rat.

"Then I will," said Little Red Hen.

So she buried the wheat in the ground. After a while it grew up yellow and ripe.

"The wheat is ripe now," said Little Red Hen. "Who will cut and thresh it?"

"Not I," said the cat.

"Not I," said the goose.

"Not I," said the rat.

"Then I will," said Little Red Hen.

So she cut it with her bill and threshed it with her wings.

Then she asked, "Who will take this wheat to the mill?"

"Not I," said the cat.

"Not I," said the goose.

"Not I," said the rat.

"Then I will," said Little Red Hen.

So she took the wheat to the mill, where it was ground.

Then she carried the flour home.

"Who will make me some bread from this flour?" she asked.

"Not I," said the cat.

"Not I," said the goose.

"Not I," said the rat.

"Then I will," said Little Red Hen.

So she made and baked the bread.

Then she said, "Now we shall see who will eat this bread."

"We will," said cat, goose, and rat.

"I am quite sure you would," said Little Red Hen, "if you could get it."

Then she called her chicks, and they ate up all the bread.

There was none left at all for the cat, or the goose, or the rat.

http://www.ongoing-tales.com/SERIALS/oldtime/FAIRYTALES/littleredhen.html

Wisdom of Crowds

2006-06-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

From Publishers Weekly
While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. "Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge. Surowiecki's style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.

Handwriting on the Wall

2006-05-02T14:06:00.000-07:00

The article below, from eSchool News online, is among the most devastating pieces of "handwriting on the wall" I have ever scanned. The force behind of the handwriting is SCORM (great acroname for an all-powerful messianic force). And the target of the message is the textbook publishing industry.

SCORM stands for "Sharable Content Object Reference Model: and is a rapidly emerging object-oriented coding standard for all instructional and learning management software. SCORM assures the interoperability, accessibility and reliability of all e-learning materials - including video, PowerPoint, simulations, or music, etc. - whether produced by George Lucas, the local 7th grade social studies teacher, or a bunch of high school students. What's more, SCORM compliant programs can be searched by key word or by subject and grade. Instructors are permitted to incorporate all or parts of SCORM materials into their coursework at no cost. Schools and school systems are rapidly building up repositories of materials for use by their faculties or by affiliated institutions.

The first half of the attached piece is devoted to describing the history, purpose and current uses of SCORM, while t he second half deals almost exclusively with the implications of SCORM for text book publishers. In particular, the experts quoted in the article urge text publishers to "objectivize" the content of their books, noting that DoD already requires all of its instructional materials to be "SCORM conformant" and that the Department of Education is expected to follow DoD's lead.

These folks are enthusiastically describing education without textbooks in five years as a natural trajectory of the accelerated e-learning adoption rate made possible by SCORM. The authors of the article point out that pure eLearning players "are not waiting for the traditional textbook providers to dictate how educational content will be used in the future," and that they mean to replace "subject-oriented" curriculum with "object oriented" curriculum. The authors also mention that textbook publishers did not return their calls for comment on the article. I suspect that's because the publishing industry does not have a viable strategy for responding to the competitive threat from eLearning.

I think that the traditional publishers should concede the market for the industrial-era K-12 basic skill set to the pure eLearning vendors. The content of the current basic K-12 skill set is so well known that the competitive marketplace advantage in that market from now on will rest with the designers of superior e-delivery systems, who (one suspects) will typically NOT be in the traditional publishing houses. The core competitive competency of the established publishing houses is their content development capacity. Rather than devoting that expensive capacity to repackaging "See Spot run" "1+1=2," "What I did last Summer," they should be developing the new basic K-12 skill set for the post-industrial workplace - e.g. teamwork, problem analysis, spatial literacy, cybernautics, systemic thinking, etc.

Many of these new skills are not yet will defined, but employers have begun to express interest in them. Tom Abeles and I have convinced the publisher of On The Horizon to devote an entire issue of the Journal to defining the basic post-industrial K-12 skill set. We have begun to envision the future of K-12 education in which the old basics are taught almost entirely via e-learning, freeing up classroom time to address the NEW, high order basic skills of the post-industrial age.

David Pearce Snyder
www.the-futurist.com
E-Mail

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/PFshowstory.cfm?ArticleID=6249

Book recommendation: Wealth of Networks

2006-04-16T00:20:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Lessig recommends us to read Yochai Benkler's 'The Wealth of Networks': How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Genes, Memes and the Innovation Commons

2006-03-20T12:50:00.000-08:00

To make the next step in our organizations and societies, we need to develop cooperation within ever widening systems. And, if we are ever to develop "innovation commons", we must master cooperation and trust. An "innovation commons", calling on the old idea of a common pasture for a town where all the residents could graze their animals, is a place where ideas can exist, like the early molecules in the primeval sea, free to combine and reproduce to create even more complex ideas. A place where the stability of the complex ideas can be tested and their survival gauged. "Innovation commons" will be required to foster the trans-disciplinary innovation necessary for the merging of information, biological and nanometric technologies on our horizon. "Innovation commons" are needed now to handle the sociopolitical, economic and demographic problems we face amidst growing partisanship and yes, even hatreds. And, we must assure that we don’t fall prey to the "failure of the commons" where an individual or entity exploits the commons to the detriment of all others, and eventually themselves.

In the Selfish Gene, Dawkins writes, "In the beginning was simplicity. It is difficult enough explaining how even a simple universe began. I take it as agreed that it would be even harder to explain the sudden springing up, fully armed, of complex order – life, or being capable of creating life. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is satisfying because it shows us a way in which simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they end up manufacturing people."
Dawkins uses the phrase "selfish gene" not in the sense that the gene has a motive or emotion, but in the sense that it is convenient to express the actions of genes in human terms. Genes behave as though they were selfish. His perspective is that we humans are "survival machines" for our genes. His revolutionary concept is that genes use our bodies for reproduction and not the other way around. Dawkins asks the question, is there a general principle of all life, even radical life forms unknown now? He answers his own question writing, "…all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating machines."

If our bodies are survival machines for the genes within us, that does explain a lot of human behavior. Some individuals kill, steal, rape, dominate and otherwise consider only their own survival and well being. But, on the surface it does not seem to explain other, higher forms of human behavior – altruism, care for others, cooperation, collaboration and other humanistic traits we have.

The Selfish Gene, The Moral Animal and The Origins of Virtue address this issue from various viewpoints and offer at least two different perspectives. In addition they provide an insightful look at human behavior in general, and worthy of your study.

"Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another: ‘My hereditary material is the most important on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain and even death’. And, you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity" comments Robert Wright, The Moral Animal.

The basis for cooperation according to Wright and Matt Ridley, The Orgins of Virtue, depends upon our awareness of with whom we share genes. Clearly we share genes with our children and it is advantageous to the survival of our genes that we care for our children and assure their survival. But we do not share genes with our mates. We care for them because they can help in the survival of our own genes through our children. We also share genes with our extended families and likewise will help them survive because it increases the probability of the survival of some of our genes.

I’ve done a lot of consulting work with small towns and I often hear the same phrase, "I like it in a small town because people care for one another. You don’t get that in big cities." In a small town "everyone is related." This is of course not strictly true, but is largely true. People in a small town do share a lot of the same genes. It’s in the gene’s interest to help assure the survival of people who share some of the same genes. This is not true of large cities.

The next factor that comes into play is that our genes dictate cooperation when it is beneficial to the survival of our genes if the group survives. "If a creature puts the greater good ahead of its individual interests, it is because its fate is inextricably tied to that of the group: it shares the group’s fate," writes Ridley. He continues, "A sterile ant’s best hope of immortality is vicarious reproduction through the breeding of the queen, just as an aeroplane passenger’s best hope of life is through the survival of the pilot." This also explains cooperative behavior in families and small towns. And, it is useful in understanding why people come together under threat or attack.
One of the more successful of the "innovation commons" experiments is Open Source. Open Source is a project to collaboratively develop software operating systems and applications that are free, available to anyone and not controlled by Microsoft. It has been successful in part probably because the group that joined together to create these programs felt threatened.
The more that you perceive that you as an individual are part of an interconnected web of life, the more likely you are to act selflessly. Random acts of kindness, heroic loss of life in a cause and ecological mindedness are all examples of this enhanced sense of interconnectedness and dependence.

"Our minds have been built by selfish genes," writes Ridley, "but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. That is the paradox that this book has tried to explain. Human beings have social instincts. They come into the world equipped with the predisposition to learn how to cooperate, to discriminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to commit themselves to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to divide labor. In this we are on our own. No other species has been so far down this evolutionary path before us, for no species has built a truly integrated society except among the inbred relatives of a large family such as an ant colony. We owe our success as a species to our social instincts; they have enabled us to reap undreamt benefits from the division of labor for our masters – the genes. They are responsible for the rapid expansion of our brains in the past two million years and thence our inventiveness. Our societies and our minds have evolved together, each reinforcing trends in the other."

These thoughts lead to two conditions for a successful "innovation commons". Participants must perceive that cooperation in the commons – the exchange of ideas and information – helps the individuals assure their genes thrive, and their own genes' survival depends upon the group’s survival. Secondly, a system of trust must exist within the network of participants. The development of workable trust systems will be an essential building block to a successful "innovation commons".

Game theory plays an important role in understanding the types of trust systems that will work. Several different people have proven that the "tit for tat" game survives best in computer simulations. "Tit for tat" says that everyone starts with trust in the participants. Sharing occurs until there is demonstration that an individual is not giving back the equivalent to what they are taking. When this occurs, the person taking more than they are giving is no longer trusted. This is exactly how it worked in a real commons. If someone overgrazed the common meadow, he or she was shunned by the community cutting them off from the benefits of the community and possibly imperiling they ability to survive.

Dawkins writes, "What has all this to do with altruism and selflessness? I am trying to build up the idea that animal behavior, altruistic or selfish, is under the control of genes in only an indirect, but still very powerful sense. By dictating the way survival machines and their nervous systems are built, genes exert ultimate power over our behavior. But the moment to moment decisions about what to do next are taken by the nervous system. Genes are primary policy makers; brains are the executive."

The basis for cooperation according to Dawkins goes beyond. Dawkins introduces the concept of "meme", an idea replicator. Memes are the thought equivalents of genes. Genes last only a few generations before individual gene combinations that make up a characteristic of a person are lost. J. S. Bach’s genes, as prolific as he was (he had 20 children) are no longer present in any recognizable way. But his music continues to exist. Not only does it exist, it continues to replicate itself through all composers that have ever studied his music even after over 300 years. And, even a Bach music lover, has some of his melodies embedded like a virus in their brains ready to spring forth when prompted. Whether this is immortality or not is inconsequential. The point is that memes, the creations of our minds, once released from our minds, join in the generative dance of replicators in the primordial sea of memes awash in the world.

Dawkins writes, "But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong."

"Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over," Dawkins remarks. He stops short of concluding that the sharing of ideas is the equivalent of the sharing of our genes through sexual reproduction in order to secure their survival, but it does not seem much of a stretch to postulate that. We have many cases where individuals were so driven to spread their memes into the world that they gave up their lives to do so. Artists and writers who live in poverty in order to pursue their art. Zealots who gave their lives to promote an idea. Inventors who died broke because they dedicated their lives to their invention.

The individuals who have dedicated their lives to their memes strive for their survival. They also seek to be identified with their memes. It isn’t enough just to have the meme live beyond them. An "innovation commons" must have some system for tagging the meme with the person who originated it. In the scientific world there is a strict cultural code of referencing and footnoting the work. Like a family tree, with this kind of system, the heredity of the idea can be traced. The more often a meme is referenced the more important the meme is likely to be. Plagiarism usually results in severe shunning.

Memes can bind people together. Musical pairs like Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rogers and Hammerstein created many successful meme complexes. Business partners are often held together by meme complexes that tightly bind like genes. Business and entrepreneurial teams are also held together by their memes. Musical groups like the Beatles are also bound together by their memes and the promise of the creation of many more. These teams, pairs and groups stay together as long as the magic is there (the creation of meme complexes) and there is continued trust among the members. When one or more of the members begins to feel that others are taking more than they are giving, the bond is usually broken. "Innovation commons" will hold together as long as the magic is still in the air. A successful "innovation commons" will either be one that has a known limited life or his built in mechanisms to keep it fresh.

Very powerful meme complexes can keep many people together for long periods of time. This is probably another reason why Open Source has been successful. Its vision is very grand. Think of the metaphor of the movie "The Fifth Element" where a cab driver, a young boy, a "priest" and a woman from outer space join together to bring down Zorg and his "evil empire." Other movies like Star Wars and The Ring have similar elements. The United States has been held together by a meme complex created over 200 year’s ago. Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman upon leaving the constitutional convention what type of government we had. He replied, "A republic madam. The question is, can we keep it?" Another principle for a successful "innovation commons" is that the meme complex must be grand to achieve longevity.

Memes can also control us like genes. We are inculcated with meme complexes through our families, tribes and our cultures. These memes can unconsciously control our actions with respect to cooperation and altruism, making an "innovation commons" difficult to obtain.
An ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) in evolutionary genetics is a strategy that does well against copies of itself. There are four generally recognized conditions for ESS – longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity. Fecundity is more important than longevity of a particular copy. If memes are like genes, then how many brains it can infect is critical to its survival. Unlike genes, that have a particulate nature and high copying-fidelity, memes seem to be quickly morphed into new forms, just as I am writing this and putting my own thoughts into the writing and shading it to make the points I wish to make. But the fundamental ideas are those of the original authors.

There are therefor then two additional principles for a successful "innovation commons". It must be a safe environment constructed with the tools and methodologies that allow individuals to breakthrough their limiting memes to become an active member of the network. And, it must provide the equivalent of the primordial sea to allow the memes to freely combine. Survival of individual memes or meme complexes will in all likelihood be governed by ESS.

"We do not have to look for conventional biological survival traits like religion, music and ritual dancing though these may also be present. Once genes provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over," writes Dawkins.

He continues, "One unique feature of man, which may or may not have evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. Selfish genes (and if you allow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight. They are unconscious blind replicators."

This leads us to another principle of a successful "innovation commons". It has to include and foster foresight.

Later Dawkins writes, "… even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight – our capacity to simulate the future in imagination – could same us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-tem benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’, and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."

Our problems today have a high degree of complexity. In the future, they will be even more complex. We do need "innovation commons".

About the Author
Paul Schumann is an innovation coach, consultant and speaker. He is also the editor and publisher of The Innovation Road Map Magazine. For help in organizational creativity and innovation, or to discuss the concept of an "innovation commons", contact him at 512.302.1935 or paul@theinnovationroadmap.com.

References
The Origins of Virtue
Matt Ridley
Penguin Books, 1996, paperback, 295 pages

The Moral Animal
Robert Wright
Vintage Books, 1994, paperback, 466 pages

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
Oxford University Press, 1976 (1990), 368 pages

The Goose and the Commons

2006-02-22T13:58:00.000-08:00

The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the commons,
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the commons from the Goose.
Anonymous folksong, 1764

Orchestrating Collaboration

2006-02-16T06:40:00.000-08:00

I've been writing lately about creativity at work and collaborative creativity, and those are the subjects of the book Orchestrating Collaboration At Work: Using Music, Improv, Storytelling, and Other Arts to Improve Teamwork by Linda Naiman and Arthur Van Gundy, both well-known in creativity and innovation circles. The book was published in 2003 by
Wiley/Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, but is now available through Linda's website as a .PDF download for $48.99.

This is a hefty book -- 265 pages -- chock full of exercises that can be used for teambuilding, ice breakers, energizers, and to stimulate creativity, to teach teams to work through change, think strategically, and collaborate more effectively. I downloaded it, printed it out, and had it comb-bound, and now my copy is now is full of sticky notes on exercises I've vowed to try for various client projects and training sessions.

Those who have to defend the use of the arts in business will find a lot of help here as well. The first part of the book lays out th authors' argument that the arts are just what business needs today. A sample:

"Businesses today want to break away from their limitations, aim higher, and be a creative force for good in the world. We need the transformative experiences that the arts give us to thrive in a world of change."

This section includes interviews with luminaries such as John Seely Brown, and case studies from companies such as the World Bank and Lexis-Nexis.

Van Gundy and Naiman did not make up every single exercise -- approximately 35 others contributed exercises as well. The resulting variety is a welcome breath of air after the shelves of books available that set forth a theory for creativity and then offer exercises that don't vary much. In addition to many exercises, the authors' contribution is in the extremely useful and clear presentation of these exercises. They're divided into section according to the art form used -- music, drawing, painting, collage, storytelling, improv, poetry, and others. And each one includes a clear statement of the objectives, the uses (team-building, change management, etc.), the time required and materials needed.

Bottom line -- this is well worth the $48.99. I have spent many times that amount to go to week-long conferences that didn't give me anywhere near this much useful information that I could take back to my work.

Orchestrating Collaboration At Work:
http://www.creativityatwork.com/CWStore/OCAWe-book.htm

Renee Hopkins Callahan
Idea Flow

Social Forms

2006-01-03T07:50:00.000-08:00

Quote to think about:

"The first of all moral obligations is to think clearly. Societies are not like the weather, merely given, since human beings are responsible for their form. Social forms are constructs of the human spirit."

Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

Urban Shaman

2005-12-16T12:59:00.000-08:00

Serge Kahili King's view on openness in Urban Shaman is refreshing. "Widely spread knowledge actually has more potency than secrets locked up and unused. Knowledge held secret is about a useful as money under a miser's mattress. And the sacredness of knowledge lies not in its reservation for a few, but it's available to many. He goes on to say, "...shamans recognize no hierarchy or authority in matters of the mind; if ever a group of people could be said to follow a system of spiritual democracy, it would be the shamans of the world."

To read the book review, go to The Illuminated Innovant.

What is the question?

2005-12-05T21:16:00.000-08:00

There is a story I can't get out of my head. It is the one that is told in the movie What the Bleep. Whether or not the story is 'true' seems less relevant to me as the more I learn about story I see that the power IS the story. Like the power IS the circle.

The story:
""When Columbus’s armada landed in the Caribbean, none of the natives were able to see the ships, even though they existed on the horizon. The reason that they never saw the ships was because they had no knowledge in their brains, or no experience, that clipper ships existed. So the Shaman starts to notice that there are ripples out in the ocean, but he sees no ships. And he starts to wonder what’s causing the effect. So every day he goes out and looks and looks and looks. And after a period of time, he’s able to see the ships. And once he sees the ships, he tells everybody else that ships exist out there. Because everybody trusted and believed in him, they saw them also." -- Joseph Dispenza

For me, this story is a metaphor for what is going on now. If we can't see it, it [is as if it] doesn't exist. The big picture/whole/ship is not clear yet, but we (some of us, increasingly more) can see/feel its effects, the ripple. That said, we can keep focusing our attention in it and expect to see a 'vision' as we piece together various puzzle pieces, which we can then communicate to others. In providing words in our language we automatically enable people to see it. [logos meaning both language and reason, and many linguists and sociolists speak of naming things as making a construct real/exist].

As I do more and more work - reading, learning, dialogue, conversing...I sense the ship we are looking for is the question(s), not the answer(s).

In this light, here are some questions that I am finding. It may help to note that my current focus is on space and physical movement, as the time we live in does not seem to fit with the construct I know.

Some questions:
- what languages are there that have many words for space?
- how can we represent space on something other than a cartesian plane? (beyond axis models…artists and children seem to hold some keys)
- what are other ways to work with space?
- how do we create ‘dialogic’ spaces when we are not all ‘physcially’ there together but want to bring ourselves there so that we can feel the sphere of the between, the space between the space/sphere we hold (without being bogged down by media …which is merely a channel)
- what type of environment ensures good and honourable and real conversation and interconnectedness will emerge? ie what is a healthy conversation space?

Video Newsletters

2005-11-23T13:11:00.000-08:00

I have been on a quest to learn how to develop video and send it via the internet for my Creative Thinking Business. I plan to send out monthly “Video Newsletters” that are short 3-5 minutes pieces that talk about creativity and innovation. I am also in the process of making a “Video Press Kit” for my business as well as some e-learning/distance learning programs.

You can view my 1st one here;

Solar Sailor - Combination Creativity

I have learned more about Flash, QuickTime, .flv, .fla., .swf. HTML wrappers, skins, Sorenson Squeeze, video converters, Cameras, Lighting, Audio, RSS, Ipod casting and a host of other stuff no sane businessman should ever have to learn. My wife said it is official;….you have become a computer nerd. Ouch! I vouched never to do that :)

Obviously I am still learning; I have been playing with pop up windows, html delivery, compression, various players, browsers, etc. trying to find what works best for the actual delivery of the video. That is the hardest part. Trust me I have done a lot or research on this and there are no “agreed on” best practices, that I can find.

As of today, I think (hope) I have figured out most of the web delivery issues. This has taken me several hundred hours :(

I will pass on all of my findings in a future post for those who are interested in how to do it themselves.

If you would like to receive future Video Newsletters from me, simply download my free e-book at www.slyasafox.com and that will put you on the list. You can opt- out anytime.

Thanks

MLF

The Hothouse Effect

2005-11-10T08:08:00.000-08:00

Barton Kunstler wrote a book, The Hothouse Effect: Intensify Creativity in Your Organization Using Secrets from History's Most Innovative Communities. I haven't read the book (got it ordered), but I did read an article by the author "The Hothouse Effect: A Model for Change in Higher Education", On the Horizon, V 13 # 3, 2005. In his book he identifies 36 causative factors for innovative communities. In the article he selects nine factors for elaboration:

Values are "lived" throughout the environment, rather than being imposed from above
Members continually challenge and re-create the fundamental assumptions of their disciplines
The group's mission aspires to universal, even cosmic, application
Group members work closely with experts across disciplines and departments, and utilize many fields of knowledge when seeking solutions
Practitioners use sensory and body-centered techniques to stimulate creativity
Inquiry into fundamental principles of perception and learning are central to the group's work
Surroundings are saturated with information and materials intended to stimulate idea development
The community experiences sudden and rapid engagement with a much larger and more complex "meta-system" early in the hothouse cycle and is exhilarated by the subsequent possibilities without being overwhelmed by the larger system
The community strives to create beauty in one form or another

This is worth more study

What is an Innovation Commons?

2005-10-27T14:09:00.000-07:00

To listen to an audio blog by Paul Schumann on the innovation commons concept, click on the link below:

http://www.theinnovationroadmap.com/ICBlog.mp3 (22:20 minutes, 21.4 mb)

If this file is too large for your system, you can order a CD by clicking here.

Swarmcasting

2005-10-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

A team of students at the University of Texas at Austin is set to release a software tool designed to turn any Internet-connected computer into a TV station.

The software, called Alluvium, uses peer-to-peer technology to let people stream video to multiple users nonstop -- even without high-speed Internet connections. It's not just for tech enthusiasts and struggling artists, says Joseph T. Lopez, a graduate student who co-founded the software project. Alluvium, he says, could serve plenty of prosaic purposes -- like letting parents broadcast their childrens' soccer games for family members, or helping community groups find a high-tech alternative to public-access TV.

From article writtten by Brock Read, The Chronical

The Tuft of Flowers

2005-10-26T08:56:00.000-07:00

I went to turn the grass after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the leveled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be as he had been,---alone.

"As all must be," I said within my heart,
"Whether they work together or apart."

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night,
Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flowers lay withering on the ground,

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook.

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a ready brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to known them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And felt spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him I worked as with his aid,
And, weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

"Men work together," I told him from the heart,
"Whether they work together or apart."

Robert Frost
The Tuft of Flowers
American Poetry, A. B. de Mille, Allyn & Bacon (1923)

I often pick up one of my books and open it randomly looking for insight or inspiration. I let my intuition choose the book. I open the book randomly (although some would say that the page I open it to is also chosen by my intuition). The other day I picked a book of poetry that had been one of my mother's. It was published in 1923 when my mother would have been 11.

The poem I found was one by Frost that I had no recollection of ever having read before. The application of the main message of the poem to the innovation commons is obvious. Whether we work together or apart, at the same time, or asynchronously, we all work together. The innovation commons is just trying to find clues as to how to make what is a fundamental truth practical.

There are other clues within the poem.

The first workman was skilled at his job. The cut was even and clean, so much so that the speaker listened for the sound of the whetstone used to sharpen the blade.

The speaker is on a hero's journey or quest described by Joseph Campbell. A messenger appears - the butterfly. The speaker is attentive and gets the message. However, as is often the case in life, attention is not paid to the messenger, and the message is lost. Intuition again?

The first workman practices non-attachment. He is completely aware as he works and discovers a patch of beauty. He leaves the beauty not for anyone else, or to draw attention to his role in the discovery of beauty, but just because they are beautiful and he wishes them to flourish.

Likewise in an innovation commons, participants must not become so attached to their creations that they hold them back, but rather let them go so that can flourish.

Remember the bumper sticker "Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty"? Practical types criticized it. I would rephrase this motto to "Practice intuitive acts of kindness and sagacious beauty."

I often discover tufts of beauty in my work - thoughts, ideas, constructs or insights left by someone who has worked the field before me. The discovery provides me with great joy. I feel connected with a fellow worker. And, I try to share how the new ideas are integrated into my thinking.

We work together,
Whether we work together or apart.

Meta Collab Wiki

2005-10-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

Meta Collab is an open research, meta collaboration (a collaboration on collaboration) with the aim to explore the similarities and differences in the nature, methods and motivations of collaboration across any and every field of human endeavour.

Meta Collab’s primary objectives are to:

create a continuously developing repository of knowledge surrounding collaboration;
develop a community of researchers and individuals interested in furthering an understanding of collaboration; and to
work towards the development of a general theory of collaboration.

http://collaboration.wikicities.com/wiki/Main_Page

Wikiversity

2005-10-24T08:58:00.000-07:00

Wikiversity is a proposed project to create a university that will bring together a community of students and teachers by making use of wiki software.

http://collaboration.wikicities.com/wiki/Wikiversity

Software for a Cause

2005-10-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

Software for a Cause: Open Source Geeks and Nonprofits Gather at Texas Penguin Days to Make Better Software and the World a Better Place

Software developers, activists and nonprofits gather at Penguin Days (www.penguinday.org) in Austin and San Antonio to demystify open source software for social change.Penguin Days explore open source software for nonprofits and help socially-minded 'geeks' find ways to support public interest organizations.

According to Jon Lebkowsky of Polycot Consulting, a local organizer of Penguin Day Austin, "Texas nonprofit and Open Source communities are obvious partners, but they don't always make the connection. Penguin Day will demystify the technology for the nonprofit participants, and help bring those communities together."

Dean McCall with Salsa.net calls the event "One of the really great hidden secrets of the Open Source and Non Profit communities...with the rising cost associated with running a nonprofit it will really be a welcome treat to the San Antonio community!"

Katrin Verclas of Aspiration (www.aspirationtech.org), co-organizers of the national movement of Penguin Days, said, "Non-profit organizations are in need of specific software to manage volunteers, raise funds, and mobilize their constituents. Open source software can be less costly for these groups. We convene Penguin Days to challenge software developers to provide flexible and useful open source software. Penguin Days also empower nonprofits to communicate their needs and be active partners in the use of open source technology."

Open source software can be freely shared, distributed, and modified so that organizations can adapt software programs to suit their very specific needs.

Since 2004, Penguin Days have been held in Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon; London, England; Toronto, Canada, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. Hundreds of nonprofit staff, programmers, and activists have attended Penguin Days.

Penguin Days feature humorous "speed geeks" (modeled after speed-dating) to bring programmers and organizations together to change the world--one byte at a time. Organizers say that here is a growing group of programmers who are interested in making their skills and technical knowledge available for a cause.

The Penguin is the symbol adopted in the early days of Linux as the mascot of this growing software movement. Texas Penguin Days are scheduled in Austin on November 4 and San Antonio on November 5. Other upcoming Penguin Days are scheduled in Portland, Oregon on October 15 and in Montreal, Canada on November 20.

More information on Penguin Days is at www.penguinday.org.

Registration for the Austin or San Antonio events at:

Austin (Ventana del Soul, 1834 E. Oltorf): https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/Aspiration/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=979&t=penguin.dwt

San Antonio (Urban 15, 2500 S. Presa): https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/Aspiration/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=981&t=penguin.dwt

The Texas Penguin Days are sponsored by Polycot Consulting, the Austin Community College Center for Community-Based and NonProfit Organizations, EFF-Austin and SalsaNet, and supported with in-kind support from local nonprofits and many volunteers.

About Aspiration: Aspiration, www.aspirationtech.org , connects nonprofit organizations with software solutions that help them better carry out their work. We want nonprofit organizations to obtain and use the best software to maximize their effectiveness and impact so that they, in
turn, can change the world. We identify what is available and what is missing in NGO software arena, and foster relationships, delivery systems, and sustainability strategies between NGOs around the world.

The Power of Passion in a Networked World

2005-10-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

We are moving to a more responsive, interactive, collaborative world, which is already disrupting conventional business models and releasing energies and new ways of doing things that create new solutions and opportunities. Personal interest, energy, passions, ideas and opinions - and little or no direct personal financial gain - are fuelling everything from Linux software to distributed computing in support of big science projects, to Wikipedia to blogs to indexed photo collections to and scientific publishing would appear to be next in line.
But, companies too can benefit from similar passion, if they respond effectively; as Lego found out recently. A group of its adult fans hacked into one of their design tools, but instead of shutting them out, the company welcomed them in: to collaborate and discuss options and ideas. Lego managed their boundaries and privacy flexibly to create committed pro-sumers. (see Hacking's a snap in Legoland; News.com)

Tim O'Reilly described the changes at the recent Web 2.0 conference "Web 2.0" stands for the idea that the Internet is evolving from a collection of static pages into a vehicle for software services, especially those that foster self-publishing, participation, and collaboration" (see Web 2.0 has arrived; Technology Review.com) as one of the best illustrations is the difference between the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia. Other characteristics and indicative products of this new world can be found at What Is Web 2.0 (tim.oreilly.com)

Collaborative science projects using distributed desktop PC downtime to create sufficient computing power to support big projects, such as the project looking for life in outer space were an early example, back in 2000 (see Home computers add grunt to scientific discovery; (ABC)These were hotly followed by the development of Wikipedia in 2001 - which still has only one full time employee, but over 770,000 essays in English, nearly half a million contributors, 2 billion hits per month and is funded by donations.

Sheila Moorcroft, Research Director, Shaping Tomorrow

Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm

2005-10-12T14:32:00.000-07:00

by Yochai Benkler

For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and was developed most explicitly in the work of neo-institutional economist Oliver Williamson. In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers contributing to large and small scale project, where the central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. No one "owns" the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to price signals.

In this paper I explain that while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

The paper also explains why this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the capital investment necessary for production-computers and communications capabilities-is widely distributed instead of concentrated. In particular, this mode of production is better than firms and markets for two reasons. First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to information and cultural production processes. In this regard, peer-production has an advantage in what I call "information opportunity cost." That is, it loses less information about who the best person for a given job might be than do either of the other two organizational modes. Second, there are substantial increasing returns to allow very larger clusters of potential contributors to interact with very large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and collaboration enterprises. Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators. This results in allocation gains, that increase more than proportionately with the increase in the number of individuals and resources that are part of the system. The article concludes with an overview of how these models use a variety of technological and social strategies to overcome the collective action problems usually solved in managerial and market-based systems by property and contract.

Full Text (.pdf)

Wiki Wikis

2005-10-12T07:55:00.000-07:00

From The Gurteen Knowledge Letter

There is a quiet revolution going on. If you thought Wikipedia was awesome then take a look at Wikibooks - open-source digital textbooks on any topic, in any language, available to anyone, anywhere, for free!

Wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org

In the longer term, along with open access journals, this is really going to shake up the academic publishing world.

Open Access Journals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

And take a look at the Wikiversity Project - read the vision statement - the potential is enormous.

Wikiversity: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity

More on Wikibooks: http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/wikibooks

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia which to my mind makes this video interview with him - complete with transcript - a must read.

How many full time employees? ONE!

How many page views per month? Two billion!

How is Wikipedia funded? Through donations!

The Interview: http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1042

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org

For more about David Gurteen: http://www.gurteen.com

To subscribe to his excellent newsletter:

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/knowledge-letter

The Desent of Man

2005-10-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

From Jim Ronay

You hear a lot about biodiversity and how certain species are dying out. Could the same be true with certain types of people?

Are we witnessing the end of intellectual diversity and the demise of the individual mind? We are fortunate enough to be alive during what is almost certainly a second renaissance. The first (16th century) renaissance was brought about by the clash and movement of ideas caused by the invention of moveable type and printing. This second renaissance is being caused by a clash of cultures and information, this time caused by globalization and the Internet. But where are all the renaissance men and women? The answer, it seems, is at work. One of the key features of the first renaissance is how disciplines, experience, technology and ideas cross-fertilized each other to create new knowledge. This requires freedom and intellectual promiscuity. Crucially, it also requires men and women who know a little about a lot. But we are stuck in an educational paradigm where people are rewarded for learning a lot about a little.

Ref: Technology Review (US), May 2005, ‘Whither the renaissance man?’, M. Hawley. http://www.techreview.com

Types of Commons

2005-10-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

From Gregg Edwards

Conflicted commons – established forces, inertia, institutional, inwardly focused
Pragmatic commons – recognition that trades can be made
Intellectual commons – legal, ethical, procedural
Creative commons – exchange, supportive of other structures
Imagination commons
Context making commons

Co-Intelligence

2005-10-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

Healthy communities, institutions and societies -- perhaps even our collective survival -- depend on our ability to organize our collective affairs more wisely, in tune with each other and nature.

This ability to wisely organize our lives together -- all of us being wiser together than any of us could be alone -- we call co-intelligence.

Co-intelligence is emerging through new developments in democracy, organizational development, collaborative processes, the Internet and systems sciences like ecology and complexity. Today millions of people are involved in co-creating co-intelligence. Our diverse efforts grow more effective as we discover we are part of a larger transformational enterprise, and as we learn together and from each other.

Visit the Co-Intelligence Institute web site.

Education and Community: The Collective Wisdom of Teachers, Parents and Community Members

2005-10-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

Education seems to have become everyone's business. Everyone has a stake in education yet everyone doesn't have access to the educational process. Most frustrating has been the lack of real interaction between schools and their communities. Those schools that succeed all have a common thread: community involvement. Connecting all schools to their local communities in a viable way has been physically impossible. It is the contention of this paper that real connections between communities and schools can be made by the Internet. The Internet not only connects scholars in the schools to outside resources, but it also allows the community to observe the performance of its local scholars as telementors. Telementoring ultimately connects communities to their schools and creates more effective learning environments for all.

Ted Nellen

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_2/nellen/

The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons

2005-09-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

"When two attorneys enraged millions of Internet users by publishing identical advertisements on six thousand unique network discussions known as "newsgroups," they were attacking a tradition of cooperation. Now the same attorneys are flogging a book and trying to convince readers of op-ed articles that they have been the victims of elitist attacks by Internet intellectuals who oppose honest business on the Net. Citizens on and off the Internet need to understand exactly how these hucksters are trying to deceive us, before we lose a precious resource.

For many people, these thousands of newsgroups have constituted a worldwide, multimillion member, collective thinktank, available twenty-four hours a day to answer any question from the trivial to the scholarly. If you have a question about sports statistics, scientific knowledge, technical lore -- anything -- someone has the answer. This magical knowledge-multiplying quality comes from the voluntary effort of many people who freely contribute expertise. That power of a large group of people to act as a thinktank for each other is vulnerable to misuse. A small number of malefactors can mess up a good thing for a large number of cooperative citizens."

Later in the blog...

"The lawyers' actions conveyed the message that their personal commercial ambitions were more important than the value of the commons. And that is the message they have been preaching -- get yours while you can, and ignore the protests of those who value the online culture of information-sharing. If these carpetbaggers prove successful, will others follow? How far can a network of cooperative agreements be pushed by the self-interest of individuals before it loses its value? When a flood of irrelevant announcements swamps newsgroups and mailing lists, what will happen to the support networks for cancer patients and Alzheimers' caregivers?"

The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons, Howard Rheingold, http://www.well.com/user/hlr/tomorrow/tomorrowcommons.html

Law, Custom and the Commons

2005-09-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

Law, Custom, and the Commons
by Randy T. Simmons

Dr. Simmons heads the political science department of Utah State University and is a senior associate of PERC (Political Economy Research Center) in Bozeman, Montana.

"Free and unregulated access to scarce resources has long been recognized as a serious problem. Two thousand years ago Aristotle wrote: What belongs in common to the most people is accorded the least care: they take thought for their own things above all.

More recently, the biologist and human ecologist Garrett Hardin argued: Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society which believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Fortunately, however, there are ways to avoid such ruin.

Hardin used an example of a pasture to illustrate how the commons can produce tragedy. As long as grazing on the commonly owned pasture is below carrying capacity, each herdsman may add another cow without harming any cows—they all still have enough to eat. But once carrying capacity is reached, adding the additional cow has negative consequences for all users of the common pasture.

The rational herdsman faced with adding the extra cow calculates his share of the benefits of an additional cow. It is 100 percent. He also calculates his share of the cost. It is 1/n herdsmen; that is, it is the cost divided by the number of herdsmen. So he adds another cow. And another . . . as do all the other herdsmen. Each may care for what is common but can do nothing about it, since one person exercising restraint only assures himself a smaller herd, not a stable, preserved commons.

Thus, the commons is a trap—an individual acting in his self-interest makes himself, along with everyone else, worse off in the long run. Yet acting in the group interest cannot stop the inevitable ruin.

If the commons inevitably leads to tragedy, humans should have killed themselves off thousands of years ago. Instead, people developed ways of making individuals responsible for their own actions.

Responsibility is created by moving people out of a system of open access and creating rights of access and use. Creating such use-rights, therefore, means that a resource is no longer everybody’s property. But use-rights are meaningless unless they are protected or enforced with some degree of legal or customary agreement. The most effective system of responsibility is private property rights because owners are responsible for their own costs and benefits. If you degrade your own property, you suffer the consequences because your wealth is reduced.

If, instead, you improve the property, your wealth is increased. You capture the benefits of your actions and pay the costs of them as well. The only exception is when you create costs to others by what you do on your own property, such as damming a stream or polluting the air. Legal institutions not only protect people’s rights to do what they want with their property but also protect the rights of others (third parties) to be free from harm caused by others. "

Complete document found at http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=3690

Inventing the Innovation Commons

2005-09-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

"The Internet is both the result of and the enabling infrastructure for new ways of organizing collective action via communication technology. This new social contract enables the creation and maintenance of public goods, a commons for knowledge resources."

"Before the word "hacker" was misappropriated to describe people who break into computer systems, the term was coined (in the early 1960s) to describe people who create computer systems. The first people to call themselves hackers were loyal to an informal social contract called "the hacker ethic." As Steven Levy described it, this ethic include these principles:

Access to computers should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority - promote decentralization."

Howard Rheingold
Smart Mobs
Basic Books, 2002

Cooperation

2005-09-16T14:08:00.000-07:00

In the emergence of food sharing, "the Inuit knows that the best place for him to store his surplus is in someone else's stomach."

There is a tension between self-interest and collective action. Yet, symbiosis and cooperation have been observed at every level from cell to ecosystem. There are some genetic reasons why this is so. It was that stream of thought that originated my interest in the subject of an innovation commons (Creating an Innovation Commons).

When we get to the level of human interaction, factors other than genetics play a vital role. Game theory is a tool that has helped us understand how and why we cooperate.

Howard Rheingold treats the subject in Smart Mobs. He writes, "Game theory is based on several assumptions; that the players are in conflict, that they must take action, that the results of the actions will determine which player wins according to definite rules, and that all players (this is the kicker) are expected to always act rationally by choosing the strategy that will maximize their gain regardless of the consequences to others. These are the kind of rules that don't fit real life with predictive precision, but they do attract economists, because they map onto behavior of observable phenomena like markets, arms races, cartels, and traffic."

The game that has attracted a lot of attention is Prisoner's Dilemma. Moreover, it is of interest to us because it has something to say about cooperation.

Basically, Prisoner's Dilemma story is this:

Two are charged with the same crime and are being held separately by the police. The prisoners cannot communicate with each other. The prisoner who testifies against his/her partner will go free, and the partner will be sentenced to three years in jail. If both prisoners decide to testify against each other, they each will get a two-year sentence. And, if neither testifies, they will both get a one-year sentence.

Clearly if they both pursue their common interest, collectively they serve the shortest amount of time, 2 years. The other solutions are 3, 3 and 4 years collectively. However, if one decides to purse their self-interest, i.e. think only of them self, they could go free. But, if both act in what they perceive to be their own self-interest, they maximize their loss, individually and collectively.

The game became really interesting, on both a practical and theoretical level, when they began to model the Interactive Prisoner's Dilemma. The game is not played just once, but many times. In this case, history matters. What happened the time before, or all the times before, does influence the present game. Also, the future impacts the present. How might the other player react in the future to my actions now? In Rheingold's words, "'Reputation' is another way of looking at this 'shadow of the future.'"

This is a game simulation ideal for computers. In a now famous experiment Robert Axelrod proposed a "Computer Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament" wherein various strategies of playing the game, represented by computer programs, would play against each other. "He ran fourteen entries against each other and against a random rule over and over. 'To my considerable surprise,' Axelrod reported, "the winner was the simplest of all the programs submitted, TIT FOR TAT. TIT FOR TAT is merely the strategy of starting with cooperation and thereafter doing what the other player did on the previous move.'"

Axelrod repeated the experiment with professors of evolutionary biology, physics and computer science. He made them all aware of the results of the first experiment. The results were the same.

These results raised the question of how a cooperative strategy could gain a foothold in a predominant uncooperative environment. Axelrod's experiments showed that, "Within a pool of entirely uncooperative strategies, cooperative strategies evolve from small clusters of individuals who reciprocate cooperation, even if the cooperative strategies have only a small proportion of their interactions with each other. Clusters of cooperatives amass points for themselves faster than defectors can. Strategies based on reciprocity can survive against a variety of strategies, and 'cooperation, once established on the basis of reciprocity, can protect itself from invasion by less cooperative strategies. Thus the gear wheels of social evolution have a ratchet.'"

"Cooperatives can thrive amid populations of defectors if they learn how to recognize one another and interact with one another," he concludes. "Cooperators who clump together can out compete noncooperative strategies by creating public good that benefit themselves but not the defectors...Reciprocity, cooperation, reputation, social grooming and social dilemmas all appear to be fundamental pieces of the smart mob puzzle."

If it is the best strategy for an Inuit to store his surplus of food, a scarce resource, in the stomach of another, surely it is better to store knowledge, an abundant resource, in the minds of others. The food gets used up. The knowledge generates new knowledge.

Resources:

Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold, Basic Books, 2002, pages 38 - 46
Game Theory - Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory (9 pages)
Game Theory, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/ (40 pages)
Prisoner's Dilemma, http://www.iterated-prisoners-dilemma.net/, an iterated prisoner's dilemma game and simulation

Governing Common Pool Resources

2005-09-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

Howard Rheingold, in his great book, Smart Mobs, writes about the governance of common pool resources (CPR), "In 1990, sociologist Elinor Ostrom argued that external authorities might not be necessary in governing what she called common pool resources (CPRs)." Ostrom made a series of studies of the ways in which people cooperated in the management of commons throughout the world. "In comparing the communities, Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

Group boundaries are cleanly defined
Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions
Most individuals affected by theses rules can participate in modifying the rules.
The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
A system for monitoring members' behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
A graduated system of sanctions is used.
Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
For CPRs that are parts of larger systems, appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

..."Ostrom provided an ample and specific agenda for future research; "All efforts to organize collective actions, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principles who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems. These have to do with coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules."

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Howard Rheingold
Basic Books, 2002

Virtuous Circle

2005-09-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

A virtuous circle or cycle is a condition in which a favorable circumstance or result gives rise to another that subsequently supports the first.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle) explains "In many parts of economics there is an assumption that a complex system of determinants will tend to lead to a state of equilibrium. When this tendency is absent we use terms like virtuous circle and vicious circle (or virtuous cycle and vicious cycle) to describe these unstable pattern of events. Both circles are complexes of events with no tendency towards equilibrium (at least in the short run). Both systems of events have feedback loops in which each iteration of the cycle reinforces the first (positive feedback). The difference between the two is that a virtuous cycle has favorable results and a vicious cycle has deleterious results. These cycles will continue in the direction of their momentum until an exogenous factor intervenes and stops the cycle. The prefix "hyper" is sometimes used to describe these cycles. The most well known vicious circle is hyperinflation."

Wikipedia gives an example of a virtuous circle resulting from innovation:

"Economic growth can be seen as a virtuous circle. It might start with an exogenous factor like technological innovation. As people get familiar with the new technology, there could be learning curve effects and economies of scale. This could lead to reduced costs and improved production efficiencies. In a competitive market structure, this will likely result in lower average prices. As prices decrease, consumption could increase and aggregate output also. Increased levels of output leads to more learning and scale effects and a new cycle starts."

What would a virtuous and a vicious circle look like for an innovation commons? This after all is the heart of the matter. It could assist us in understanding the question that started the whole effort, "Why are some innovation commons successful and others fail?"

Inclusive Innovation

2005-09-15T13:47:00.000-07:00

Jeff de Cagna wrote in a Fast Company blog, "As I read some of the BlogJam posts, I cannot help but ask the following question:

If I'm not "personally brilliant," is there a role for me to play in the work of innovation?

I certainly hope and believe the answer is yes. If we're going to talk about distributed, collaborative "open innovation" that transcends the old-school proprietary R&D approach, then we need to think about how to make innovation as inclusive as possible, allowing everyone to connect to the work in ways that feel personally authentic to those individuals. I don't believe that we should try to limit involvement in innovation (intentionally or otherwise) to only the select few people who possess the "right" combination of genetic traits, personal attributes or learned skills.

As I wrote in a post yesterday, not everyone working on innovation needs to be a wild-eyed, right-brain creative power-brainstomer/prototyper. Innovation demands all kinds of talents, and I think we should look for ways to capitalize on all of them. Our organizations truly cannot afford to waste any brain cells!"

http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2005/08/09/inclusive_innovation.html

Democratic Innovation

2005-09-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

Jeff de Cagna writes in his blog, "Associations today face a potent and relentless adversary: profound change. Yes, it’s true, we’ve always faced change in our organizations, but not like this. The very nature of change itself is changing. Change today is more constant than episodic, more complex than clear, more non-linear than cyclical and it is occurring at a greatly accelerated pace. We find that in this environment many of the tried-and-true heuristics of association management are remarkably ineffectual and, sometimes, counterproductive. Unfortunately, far too many association leaders continue to struggle with the politics of incrementalism, cost-cutting and risk avoidance as they try to come up with fresh answers about what to do next.

In face of such harsh and unforgiving realities, staff and volunteer association leaders must respond in a way that is just as forceful and unyielding. But that response cannot come in the form of tips, tools or techniques for "managing change" or "doing more with less." That is just so much tinkering around the margins. Instead, what we need is a new ideology, a different system of beliefs that challenges us to rediscover the "plausible promise" of our organizations and to act confidently and decisively to make them relevant, renewable and resilient for the 21st Century.
For me, that ideology is what I call "innovation democracy." It is grounded in the fundamental conviction that, at their core, both innovation and associations are about freedom. Associations are about the freedom to collaborate, to serve and to act collectively on behalf of a worthwhile vision of what the world can be. And that is where innovation comes in. Innovation is about the freedom to imagine what is possible, to create it and, in so doing, make an enduring contribution to the world in which you live. In my view, one that is largely contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy of the association world, innovation and associations are intimately, if opaquely, connected."

He goes on to elaborate six principles of democratic innovation:

Strategy is a coherent portfolio of experiments developed across the association
Technology supports the social architecture of association innovation
Association culture remains vibrant by emphasizing variety, transparency and inclusion.
Curiosity, inquiry and discovery shape the association's intellectual property.
A high "return on engagement' in the association drives financial investment.
Association leaders create leaders by distributing responsibility for innovation.

The complete blog is available at http://www.associationinnovation.com/associationinnovation/innovation_democracy/index.html

The Commons

2005-09-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

"Effective debate requires a shared set of references and metaphors. The expansion of culture and knowledge depends on linguistic and conceptual shorthand based on shared knowledge and experience. Collaborative, innovative discussion is impossible if every item must be expanded and reduced to so-called first principles. This body of knowledge, experience and ideas has come to be known as a commons.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. (Thomas Jefferson)

Another aspect: the Internet may be considered a commons or public network, though there is persistent threat of enclosure (transferring resources from the commons to individual ownership) based on enforcement of intellectual property and distribution rights. However no one owns the Internet, and no single national entity has jurisdiction, so it remains an open, accessible platform for all kinds of activity, including the evolution of the social commons described above."

Joichi Ito, "Emergent Democracy", Chapter 1, Extreme Democracy, edited by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe, http://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20One-Ito.pdf

For more information visit Extreme Democracy, http://www.extremedemocracy.com/

Co-Intelligence

2005-09-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

Tom Atlee, founder of the non-profit Co-Intelligence Institute, has written and spoken for twenty years on politics, democracy and cultural transformation. His two resource packed websites – http://www.co-intelligence.org/ and http://www.democracyinnovations.org/ – capture his innovative thinking and provide a treasure-trove of resources about collective process and participatory democracy. His recent book, The Tao of Democracy, http://taoofdemocracy.com/, describes his concept of co-intelligence and offers an amazing compilation of initiatives that highlight how citizen dialogue and deliberation are powerful ways to help us solve our common problems

Healthy communities, institutions and societies -- perhaps even our collective survival -- depend on our ability to organize our collective affairs more wisely, in tune with each other and nature.

This ability to wisely organize our lives together -- all of us being wiser together than any of us could be alone -- we call co-intelligence.

Co-intelligence is a capacity that goes far beyond individual IQ-based intelligence. Co-intelligence is intelligence that's grounded in wholeness, interconnectedness and co-creativity.It is collective, collaborative, synergistic, wise, resonant, heartful, and connected to greater sources of intelligence.

Co-intelligence is emerging through new developments in democracy, organizational development, collaborative processes, the Internet and systems sciences like ecology and complexity. Today millions of people are involved in co-creating co-intelligence. Our diverse efforts grow more effective as we discover we are part of a larger transformational enterprise, and as we learn together and from each other.

The Co-Intelligence Institute works to further the understanding and development of co-intelligence. It focuses on catalyzing co-intelligence in the realms of politics, governance and cultural evolution. We research, network, advocate, and help organize leading-edge experiments and conversations in order to weave what is possible into new, wiser forms of civilization.

Open Space Technology

2005-09-15T09:05:00.000-07:00

What is an Open Space Technology meeting?

Open Space Technology has been defined as:

a simple, powerful way to catalyze effective working conversations and truly inviting organizations -- to thrive in times of swirling change.
a methodological tool that enables self-organizing groups of all sizes to deal with hugely complex issues in a very short period of time.
a powerful group process that supports positive transformation in organizations, increases productivity, inspires creative solutions, improves communication and enhances collaboration.
the most effective process for organizations and communities to identify critical issues, voice to their passions and concerns, learn from each other, and, when appropriate, take collective responsibility for finding solutions.

The goal of an Open Space Technology meeting is to create time and space for people to engage deeply and creatively around issues of concern to them. The agenda is set by people with the power and desire to see it through, and typically, Open Space meetings result in transformative experiences for the individuals and groups involved.

What is Open Space Technology best used for?

Open Space Technology is useful in almost any context including strategic direction setting, envisioning the future, conflict resolution, morale building, consultation with stakeholders, community planning, collaboration and deep learning about issues and perspectives.

When is Open Space Technology the best meeting format to use?

Any situation in which there is:

A real issue of concern
Diversity of players
Complexity of elements
Presence of passion (including conflict)
A need for a quick decision

Open Space will work under all of these circumstances. It is only inappropriate when the outcome of the meeting is predetermined or if sponsors are not prepared to change as a result of the meeting.

What outcomes can I expect from an Open Space Technology Meeting?

Open Space Technology meetings can produce the following deliverables:

Every single issue that anybody cares about enough to raise will be "on the table".
All issues will receive as much discussion as people care to give them.
All discussion will be captured in a book, and made available to the participants.
All issues will be prioritized.
Related issues will be converged.
Responsibility will be taken for next step actions.

In meetings of one and a half or two and a half days duration, all of these deliverables will be achieved with deep conversation and commitment to action. Meetings of a shorter duration will have many of these positive effects, but typically in meetings of a day or less, there is more emphasis on conversation and less on action.

How does an Open Space Technology meeting work?

Open Space operates under four principles and one law. The four principles are:

Whoever comes are the right people
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
When it starts is the right time
When it's over it's over

The Law is known as the Law of Two Feet:

"If you find yourself in a situation where you are not contributing or learning, move somewhere where you can."

The four principles and the law work to create a powerful event motivated by the passion and bounded by the responsibility of the participants.

From Chris Corrigan, Consulting in Organizational and Community Development, web site, http://www.chriscorrigan.com/openspace/whatisos.html

Oliver Markley (www.olivermarkley.org) brought Open Space to my attention. I have to read and study it before I can apply it to an Innovation Commons, but this web site summarized the process so well that I wanted to pass it along quickly.

There is also a Wiki at
http://www.openspaceworld.org/wiki/wiki/wiki.cgi?AboutOpenSpace

Beauty

2005-09-15T08:50:00.000-07:00

In 1995, Donna Prestwood, Barbara Benjamin and I, created, produced and hosted 8 two-hour live satellite TV broadcasts for the National Technological University (NTU) on leadership, which we entitled "Leadership in the Interactive Age."

In the session called, Personal Ingenuity and Emerging Technologies, we described three characteristics of inevitable opportunities in technology:

The space between
Synergy
Beauty

My point was, as I presented these three criteria, that if a technology operated on the space between people (things, ideas, concepts), enhanced synergy, and was beautiful (elegant), it probably had a good chance of being a success. I would probably add time shifting now, and still think it's a pretty good list.

I want to focus on beauty right now, because I think it is imperative that we keep our eye on this criteria as we move to more collaborative, emergent behavior types of human systems.

Rollo May was an existential psychologist and a philosopher. I read several books of his in the 1980s. In My Quest for Beauty, May wrote, "Poincare, the great contemporary mathematician, sounds like Plato when he asks the question of how new mathematical discoveries are made. Then he answers,

'The useful combinations are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know...But only certain ones are harmonious, consequently, at once useful and beautiful.'

Writing about Shiller, May comments, "...we best let him speak for himself.

'Beauty alone confers happiness on all, and under its influence every being forgets that he is limited.'

Shiller hastens to add that this forgetting is temporary, however, for the sense of limitations is crucial to our creating beauty. We actually create beauty out of the endeavor to come to terms with the paradox on the one hand of freedom and on the other of destiny. Our limits come from both nature and spirit, finite and infinite, objective and subjective."

May agrees with Shiller that beauty is born in play. "Play is the one activity where the fusion of inner vision and objective facts is achieved. Out of this comes the living form which is beauty. This living form is vital, alive, dynamic; and at the same time it gives serenity and repose..."

May remarks, "Artists wrestle with fate in the endeavor to make objective their inner subjective vision." And, in order to do that people must be psychologically healthy. Beauty is a result of creativity that is driven by the engine of paradox, the duality of opposites (finite/infinite, life/death, yin/yang, right/left brain). "Death is the mother of beauty", wrote Wallace Stevens.

"Thus creativity brings together what Freud summed up as the two purposes of life: to love and to work. (Otto) Rank was only going further than Freud by pointing out that both of these, love and work, are aspects of creativity."

May later writes, "Let us explore the human mind as it engages in the creative act. The capacity to create - which we all have, although to varying degrees - is essentially the ability to find form in chaos, to create form where there is only formlessness. This is what leads to beauty, for beauty is that form.

Beauty reveals a form in the universe - the harmony of the spheres, as Kepler called it. It is a form which is present in the circling of the planets. It is a form which is felt in the curves and balance of our own bodies. And it is present especially in the way we see the world, for we form and reform the world in the very act of perceiving it. The imagination to do this is one of the elements that make us human beings."

But what is form? "Form is a pattern, an image and an order given to what would otherwise simply be chaos. Form is the nonmaterial structure of our lives, on the basis of which we live and on which we base our own particular character." Henry Miller wrote of creative people that they want "to make of the chaos about them an order that is their own."

In another seeming paradox, May points out that "the form dictates the content." We select a form "because the content can best be formed out of the chaos" and put into "whatever form seems to fit." "Form", he continues, "is nonmaterial, and has its existence only as things are related to other things." Writing about Pythagoras, he explains, "he held that the fundamental element (of the universe) was no substance at all, but was really the form in which everything in nature is related to everything else."

At a personal level, our own quest for beauty through our creativity gives us grace. May writes, "Creativity gives us grace in the sense that it is balm for our anxiety and a relief from our alienation. It is grace by virtue of its power to reconcile us to our deepest selves, to lead us to our own depths where primary and secondary functions are unified. Here the right brain and the left brain work together is seeing the wholeness of the world."

Chaos is essential for creativity and thus beauty. Too much order will stifle creativity. The role of the artist changes depending upon the environment. If too much chaos exists, the artist creates new order. If too much order exists, the role of the artist is to create chaos.

If you have any doubt about beauty being a serious objective of any undertaking, listen to what Rollo May has to say. "Beauty is the expereince that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings give us joy and afterwards a peace, but in beauty these are the same experience. Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one's sense of being alive. Beauty gives us not only a feeling of wonder; it imparts to us at the same moment timelessness, a repose - which why we speak of beauty as being eternal.

Beauty is the mystery which enchants us. Like all higher experiences of being human, beauty is dynamic; its sense of repose, paradoxically, is never dead, and if it seems to be dead, it is no longer beauty."

Innovation commons, as well as other open, collaborative systems, are by their very nature chaotic systems. The goal is to find the order in the chaos through the individual and collective creativity of its members. This will happen if their is a shared vision, will and significance in the group. The balance of order and chaos is extremely important, as well as the timing of that balance, which should change from more chaotic to more ordered over time, or else the effort will not be productive. The group has to collectively and individually be on a quest for beauty, in addition to functionality, in order to avoid building a termite mound.

My Quest for Beauty
Rollo May
Saybrook, 1985

The Limits of an Innovation Commons

2005-09-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

In 1979 I saw a lecture by Phillip Morrison, an MIT professor, on PBS entitled "Termites to Telescopes". The implications of that lecture have haunted me ever since. Morrison described how African termites build very large and complex mounds for their nests.

Communication among termites is not completely understood. Since they live and work in darkness, they are blind, as we know the term. Smell and touch seem to be the preferred form of communication. Termites build nests from a material that they make with body chemicals and cellulose, wood fiber. Big termite nests, like those found in Africa or Australia, can be several feet high and last decades. A nest may contain millions of individuals. Termites require carefully controlled humidity and temperature conditions inside the nest. The structure and material provide this function. Function and form are in consonance.

Construction of a nest follows a simple procedure. At some point for reasons unknown, and by mechanisms unknown, upon sensing a "signal" of some sort, termite workers start producing the pellets of material they use to construct nests. The termites begin to pile these pellets, each working individually, cementing them together with an adhesive they produce.

At some later time, sensing another "signal," the workers "look" around them. If they see a pile of pellets larger than theirs in the immediate vicinity, they abandon their project and go work on the higher pile. Through this process they select those piles they will work on.

A little while later, sensing still another "signal," the workers "look" around to see if there is a pile of nearly the same height within a specified distance of the pile they are working upon. If not, they abandon their pile and search for two piles that are close together. Again, after time has elapsed, termite workers begin to form the arch at the top. This process is repeated many times until an interlocking web of randomly constructed arches is completed.

In this process there are no high-performing termites. The entire process can be written in the form of a set of simple logical instructions - a program. There is no plan. Randomness plays an important role. The instructions and the responses seem to be genetically programmed into the termite worker. Signals do not seem to be given by anyone. Environmental conditions dictate the start of the process. When it is time to build a nest, a nest is built. The processes can be defined logically, analytically. Time may even play a role in the behavior changes once the building has begun. No one has a vision of the outcome. Everyone follows the rules and the result is functionally correct, but not elegant.

I wonder what a city landscape would look like if it was populated with buildings that all looked like this. To me, it would look like an artist version of an alien planet.

The question that haunts me in this age of peer to peer collaborations, with dependence upon emergent behavior from a large group of individuals, is the results may be functional, but will they be beautiful? Or, is beauty as a concept simply going to disappear? Or will we see functionality as beauty?

Morrison was interested in another question, "Could the termites eventually build a telescope?"
Even though termites can construct arches, could they ever build a cathedral?
More to the point, could we, if we operated in like manner?

What are the limits of free, open collaborative systems? It's hard to image any of modern civilizations greatest projects being completed in this manner.

Problems with the Values Survey

2005-09-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

The values survey is dificult. The comments I receive will be in this blog.

From David Pearce Snyder

After first learning survey design at RAND, I sent out several Delphi polls quite similar in content and length to your Value Survey. Everyone responded to the first several surveys, with considerable grumbling, because they were required to respond. After that, my typical response rates were 1% to 3%, and my RAND mentor, Olaf Helmer, told me that, unless there were tangible incentives, people simply wouldn't respond to such lengthy inquiries. Market researchers routinely offer rewards to get folks to respond to much shorter polls.

With respect to your particular survey, I (myself) would not find the 126 (!!) dimensions covered by your inquiry relevant to my decision to participate in an innovation commons. The 4 criteria that motivate my interest/desire to participate in a collaborative dialogue are:

[1] Does the subject matter merit the commitment of my limited time and attention?

[2] Do I have something valuable to contribute on the topic?

[3] Do I currently have the time and attention available to devote to creating meaningful input, given the other immediate demands on my time and attention?

[4] If I do not put in my particular 2-cents, is it likely that others will do so? (In other words, is my input likely to be unique?)

Were I to have answered "Yes" to my own 4 questions with respect to your values survey, it would have taken me a weekend or more to have agonized over how I felt about each of your subtly nuanced categories: e.g. "Community/Personalist" vs. "Community/Supportive." These criteria may have meaning to other folks, but I haven't any way of judging their feelings. For me, the 4 criteria listed above are all that matter. And, the value survey only gets a "yes" answer from my Question #1.

My bottom line assessment of the survey is that it's waaay tooo loooong and much too me-tic-u-lous to evoke meaningful/useful responses from anybody.

From Mark Fox

The reason I didn't take the survey is because I am too stupid to understand it :) I read the questions and had to re-read them several times. Then I couldn't easily make a connection with what I thought the question meant related to an innovation commons. I guess I don't understand the intent. I was confused on how a question abount morales, likeability, and religious beliefs applied to an innovation network.So because I didn't understand it really, I chose not to complete it and throw in meaningless answers.Just my feedback, I can go look at it again.

A Poetic Thought

2005-09-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

The Light Within

I stood one day beside the sea
And watched her waves roll in.
I saw them swell and rise and curl,
And then collapse within.
Again! Again! They'd come and break,
And drift up on the shore;
And when quite spent, their place retake
Amid the constant roar.
And I could not but wonder then
What keeps the rolling in,
Until I noted on the break,
The light they held within.
You see it just as they have raised
The brine where it will go-
You see it for a moment fine,
And then the undertow.
And yet, that moment of their height-
When light is held within-
Must be the reason, when they fall
They rise to try again.
The light brigade of another realm,
They reach as they are told,
And question not the tidal helm,
For duty makes them bold.
And too, they know-- I'm sure they must--
That someone's made them more,
And so they rise and fall and hold,
Their lights just off the shore.

© Dillon McKinsey
rimer777@aol.com

It's A Free World After All

2005-08-31T12:45:00.000-07:00

I used to send newsletters monthly to my subscribers of my Creative Thinking and Innovation web sites. They are www.slyasafox.com and www.systematic-idea-generation.com. For some time now, I have been kicking around the idea of doing something different with the newsletters. I wanted to do a “Video Newsletter”, a 2 minute or so video that describes one of the tools I teach in workshop or just some interesting story about Creativity and Innovation.

But I am not a technology guru (although lately I am starting to feel a little more like a nerd) so the whole video thing started to scare me a little. So I decided to do some investigation and see what I could learn. I discovered a few months earlier that editing video from a technical point of view is a whole lot easier that I thought it was. For those of you that don’t know, Windows Movie Maker II is already on your computer for free if you have Windows XP. Just look under “Programs” and “Accessories” on your computer.

Also I bought Pinnacle Studio 9 http://www.pinnaclesys.com for about $70 which is really cool as well.

Now I didn’t really know anything about blogs, so I started there. I went to www.blogger.com and set up a simple site. Ironically I picked the same template Paul uses for this Innovation Commons. My site is http://slyasafox.blogspot.com don’t pick on the site, it’s just a test to see if I can figure out this whole video thing.

Now here is the really cool thing. Are you ready? I found you can store all of the text, pictures, music, and VIDEOS you want on the internet for free!

Here is the story. I was doing some research on video blogging and found the web site www.rocketboom.com. (for the guys out there, she is not too bad on the eyes either). Rocketboom is one of the most popular videoblogs on the internet.

I asked Amanda about videoblogging and how to get started. She told me to go to http://www.freevlog.org/ and watch the tutorials. OK this guy is a little goofy, but the tutorials are a great help.

Now watching the videos I learned you can store all of you video and any other content to www.archive.org for free. I have been familiar with this site for a long time. The original intent of this site was to be the “Digital Library of Congress.” They go out and scan web sites and make a historical record of them.

They have a cute name for it, “The Wayback Machine”, you remember “Professor Peabody and his pet boy Sherman.”

This www.archive.org thing is backed by the Smithsonian, National Science Foundation, private investors and bunch of others as far as I can tell. I read that they are adding 20 Terabytes of data a month and that was a few years ago ! You can do you own research on the genesis and story behind it..

I knew you could always upload material to www.archive.org, but it was a major pain in the #%^%! And you had to be an IT guru, … = Nerd.

Not anymore.

This free interface called www.ourmedia.org allows you to upload stuff real easy. This is their tag line “We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.”

So here’s the steps to build a simple web site and upload anything you want for free;

#1 Go to www.freevlog.org and watch the tutorials. Free

#2 Go to www.blogger.com and set up a blog if you don’t have one already. It will take you 5 minutes. Free

#3 Go to www.archive.org and set up an account, again only a few minutes. Free

#4 Go to www.ourmedia.org and set up an account. Ditto and you can use the same password. You guessed it..Free.

Now just writing this article and searching for all of the web addresses again, I found a ton of other sites that talk about the same stuff. For example, this one http://creativecommons.org/ I haven’t even had time to look at it myself.

Got to go, I’ve got some more research to do.

p.s. Yes my spelling and grammar sucks, please let me know and I’ll fix it.

Mark L. Fox
Discover Something New
www.slyasafox.com

What is an Innovation Commons?

2005-08-30T07:50:00.000-07:00

An innovation commons is a space (physical or virtual) that enables innovation through the mutual and interdependent creativity of its members. It has the following characteristics:

Open system (bounded)
Everyone contributes
Everyone can use the results
Members who don’t contribute are excluded
Fluid & flexible
An abundant resource system

Other names that people have used to describe this type of system are open source, open innovation, democratic innovation, inclusive innovation, peer to peer (P2P), smart mobs and free agent collaboration. I think that the innovation commons concept, whatever it ends up being named, is one of the most important developments in how people work together.

Some attempts at creating an innovation commons have been successful, but most have failed. Why? What are principles of a successful innovation commons?

The Stranger

2005-08-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

Strangers play important roles in our life. Sometimes they are a threat. Sometimes they provide a missing part of a puzzle we're working on. And, sometimes they become long term friends.

People who study mythology and psychology have indicated that the core of our mixed feelings about the stranger goes back to early conceptions of god. God is the ultimate stranger, the ultimate other. God's power is so immense that we must be separate from it. Is that power a threat? Will that power provide a boon? Or will I travel through life hand in hand with that power?

Tribal societies taught their children to view strangers as threats. We still do the same thing with our children. Wild rumors and myths inflame our fear of strangers, like the myth about poisoned candy at Halloween (it never happened). Nations and societies treat the other as threats and turn them into enemies. It seems our world is full of that right now.

The movie Virgin Spring had an immense impact on me as a young person. Ingmar Bergman was a master of creating lasting images, in this case of fear. In this movie, a young woman is raped and murdered by strangers who were befriended by the girl's father. In a fit of rage, he tracks them down and kills them, fighting all three at once in hand to hand combat. These kind of moral tales fill our history and exist into our present.

In the hero's journey, strangers provide the first two roles. Sometimes they are enemies to be vanquished and sometimes they are there to provide a boon - a clue, information, a linkage to someone else, a key, a magic elixir, a tool, a weapon, etc. The involvement may be very brief, or the stranger may travel with you for awhile on your quest until it becomes time for them to continue or their quest, or leave you to go your way alone. You must encounter the stranger to complete your journey.

Many of the Western movies are based on this concept. Consider The Lone Ranger, Shane and many of the Clint Eastwood movies. In "Just Plain Shane", William McIntosh wrote, "Mythic energy surrounds the stranger as a type; he might represent an entry into a higher level of consciousness, or the original state of man on earth, or the coming power of the future, or a possibility of unseen change."

Sometimes this brief meeting with a stranger is called synchronicity. In reality the opportunity for the benefit (or threat) of a stranger is always there for us, if we are on a quest and we are open to what the world is providing to us.

In a few rare cases the stranger becomes a long time friend, maybe even a lifelong friend.

Some societies consider the youth of their society strangers. In way they are. They do not know the customs, the rituals, the ways. The young stranger goes through an initiation into the society, sometimes even with sexual union being part of the process. At the fundamental level, young stranger represents new blood into the society and their initiation may end with the process of creating new life. Also, the young represent new ideas, new ways, that will be integrated in the tribe.

Nouk Bassomb, an African storyteller and student of Central African cultures reported in "The God with Two Faces", quoting an elder's response about the stranger, "when people await a cat, the stranger manifests himself as a lion, and when the village prepares for the lion, here comes a cat, or a hyena, laughing in the night." "A god, the stranger is the spirit of the world in motion," he wrote.

Mark Nepo in the "Bridge of Well-Being" wrote, "One of the great paradoxes of being is that each of us is born complete and yet we need contact with life in order to be whole. This, then, is the purpose of the stranger; to enliven what is dormant within us. It is our responsibility to maintain that newly awakened consciousness, and to integrate the fibers of hard-earned expereince into the fabric of a living spirit.

The word stranger denotes a living embodiment of that which is strange - from the Old French, estrange, extraordinary. Thus the stranger functions as an unexpected messenger who can embody or mirror what is extraordinary within us, what is possible but yet unlived."

In the "Stranger as a Pathfinder", Elaine Jahner writes that societies prove "...their continuing vigilance over processes that contemporary psychologists recognize as anxiety arising from our response to the uncanny, an anxiety all too easily projected onto the figure of the stranger or foreigner. In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva analyzes this experience from a psychoanalytic and historical perspective. She advances her belief that we need a cosmopolitanism, which recognizes that our encounters with strangers are always bound up with how we encounter evidence from our own unconscious.

'Neither the apocalypse on the move nor the instant adversary to be eliminated for the sake of appeasing the group, [the stranger or foreigner] lives within us; he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself.'

She engages in historical analysis to show how different societies have taught people to understand what a stranger might signify. The contemporary world, though requires that we become conscious of how we react in relation to the stranger and that we unlearn some old habits; 'by recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside.' Learning how to relate to the stranger and/or foreigner is the most pressing of our contemporary concerns."

Learning how to relate to the stranger and/or foreigner is the most pressing of our contemporary concerns. We now know that the contribution of strangers to collaborative groups is essential. We've known for years that the presence of the stranger takes creativity in new directions, as the ancient knew it did our generativity. An innovation commons must be safe so that strangers can welcomed without the threat of harm. And, we have to unlearn what we've been socialized to learn, to fear the stranger.

A Simpler Way

2005-08-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

A Simpler Way
Margaret Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers
Berrett-Koehler, 1996

This is a beautiful book with beautiful pictures and mental images. It is a hopeful book, and it is a profound book. Its mission is no less than to change our paradigm from competition to collaboration in how we perceive, think and act in all that we do. The authors' opening line is "We want life to be less arduous and more delightful. We want to be able to think differently about how to organize human activities."

They question the "survival of the fittest" paradigm for evolution and our mechanistic view of the world. "The mechanistic image of the world is a very deep image, planted at subterranean depths in most of us. But it doesn't help us any longer."

The authors pose the question, "How could we organizes human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?" They have six beliefs about human organizations and the world in which they come into form:

"The universe is a living, creative, experimenting expereince of discovering what's possible at all levels of scale from microbe to cosmos.

Life's natural tendency is to organize. Life organizes into greater levels of complexity to support more diversity and greater sustainability.

Life organizes around a self. Organizing is always an act of creating an identity.

Life self-organizes. Networks, patterns, and structures emerge without external imposition or direction. Organization wants to happen.

People are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, and meaning seeking.

Organizations are living systems. They too are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, meaning-seeking."

They argue that life has a natural and spontaneous tendency towards organization. "Whatever chaos is present at the start, when elements combine, systems of organization appear. Life is attracted to order - order gained through wandering explorations into new relationships and new possibilities."

The central part of the book is organized around a poem by A. R. Ammons:

"I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper - though
that, too - but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours."

The authors write, "Life is creative. It plays itself into existence, seeking new relationships, new capacities, new traits. Life is an experiment to discover what's possible."

They believe Darwinism has led us to believe that life wasn't supposed to happen, that it was an accident, and that life has to fight to continue to exist. In their view, "Life is about invention, not survival. We are here to create, not defend."

They point out that all of us are trying to describe our reality to others. But reality outside of us, in an absolute sense, evades us. "We peer out through our senses, describing our experiences of what we think reality to be. We choose images to convey our expereince. We create metaphors to connect what we see. We explore new ways of understanding what seems to be happening and what we think it means."

Peering out at the world, they describe seven principles of life's process of creating:

"Everything is in a constant process of discovery and creating. Everything is changing all the time: individuals, systems, environments, the rules, the processes of evolutions. Even change changes. Every organism reinterprets the rules, creates exceptions for itself, creates new rules.

Life uses messes to get well-ordered solutions. Life doesn't seem to share our desires for efficiency or neatness. It uses redundancy, fuzziness, dense webs of relationships, unending trials and errors to find what works.

Life is intent on finding what works, not what's 'right'. It is the ability to keep finding solutions that is important; any one solution is temporary. There are no permanently right answers. The capacity to keep changing, to find what works now, is what keeps any organism alive.

Life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities. There are no 'windows of opportunity', narrow openings in the fabric of space-time that soon disappear forever. Possibilities beget more possibilities; they are infinite.

Life is attracted to order. It experiments until it discovers how to form a system that can support diverse members. Individuals search out a wide range of possible relationships to discover whether they can organize into life-sustaining system. These explorations continue until a system is discovered. The system then provides stability for its members, so that individuals are less buffeted by change.

Life organizes around identity. Every living thing acts to develop and preserve itself. Identity is the filter that every organism or system uses to make sense of the world. New information, new relationships, changing environments - all are interpreted through a sense of self. This tendency toward self-creation is so strong that it creates a seeming paradox. An organism will change to maintain its identity.

Everything participates in the creation and evolution of its neighbors. There are no unaffected outsiders. No one system dictates conditions to another. All participate together in creating the conditions of their interdependence."

"There is no ideal design for anything, just interesting combinations that arise as a living thing explores it space of possibilities", Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers write, a combination of words that could be used to describe how an organization innovates.

Their assertion is that "life tinkers itself into existence". "It tinkers toward order - toward systems that are more complex and effective...Almost always what begins in randomness ends in stability...generates systems that sustain diverse individuals." But they conclude, "Life seeks order in a disorderly way."

"All this messy playfulness creates relationships that make more available...," they write. "Who we become together will always be different that who we were alone. Our range of creative expression increases as we join with others. New relationships create new capacities."

"Life invites us to create not only the forms but even the process of discovery," they conclude. "The environment is invented by our presence in it. We do not parachute into a sea of turbulence, to sink or swim. We and our environments become one system, each influencing the other, each co-determining the other." Living systems they believe create more possibilities and more freedom for individuals.

In this systems behaviors emerge. "Science writer Kevin Kelly describes these systems as a 'messy cascade of interdependent events ...What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important'."

One of the important features of viable living systems is simultaneity. "Simultaneity reduces the impact of any one error. More errors matter less if the actors are not linked together sequentially. The space for experimentation increases as we involve more minds in the experiment, as long as they can operate independently. What links people together is their focus on a needed solution. But in discovering what works, they are not waiting for one another to act."

They very carefully describe the discipline of play required for success. "Playful tinkering requires consciousness. If we are not mindful, if our attention slips, then we can't notice what's available or discover what's possible. Staying present is the discipline of play. Great concentration and focus are required." As a result, "Playful enterprises are alert. They are open to information, always seeking more, yearning for surprises."

Over and over again they stress the role that diversity plays in creation. "Parallel process requires both diversity and freedom. There is more than one workable solution, and these solutions arise from many different forms of self-expression...Life is not driving us toward one solution. The world is interested in pluralism. Only in this way can it discover more about itself...The world's desire for diversity compels us to change."

Systems offer the possibility for more stability. But in a curious paradox, that stability for the system depends upon its member's ability to change. "When individuals fail to experiment or when a system refuses their offers of new ideas, then the system becomes moribund. Without constant, interior change, it sinks into the death grip of equilibrium. It no longer participates in coevolution. The system becomes vulnerable; its destruction is self-imposed...This broad paradox of stability and freedom is the stage on which coevolution dances. Life leaps forward when it can share its learnings. The dense web of systems allow information to travel in all directions, speeding recovery and adaptation."

If systems of life are self-organizing then we don't have to design how they will organize. We live in a universe where we get order for free. "If order is for free, we don't have to be the organizers. We don't have to design the world. We don't have to structure its existence."

And, in a prescription for systems that has a lot to do with an innovation commons, "As we organize, we need to keep inquiring into the quality of our relationships. How much access do we have to one another? How much trust exists among us? Who else needs to be in the room?"

"Stability is found in freedom - not in conformity and compliance. We may have thought that our organization's survival was guaranteed by finding the right form and insisting that everyone fit into it. But sameness is not stability. It is individual freedom that creates stable systems. It is diffferentness that enables us to thrive," they propose.

In writing about self, they suggest, "Life wants to happen. It calls itself into existence. Out of all information and all possibilities, an entity comes into form. An identity emerges. A self has created itself...No externally imposed plans or designs are required. The process of invention always takes place around an identity. There is a self that seeks to organize and make its presence known. The desires of self set a self-organizing world into motion."

Research suggests that we perceive the world based on who we have decided to be, "...at any moment, what we see is most influenced by who we have decided to be...At least 80 percent of the information that the brain works with is information already in the brain." The corollary to this is that "We will change our self if we believe that the change will preserve the self."

In answering the question about what conditions will allow self-organization to flourish, they state "We need to trust that we are self organizing...We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structures or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around...Identity includes such dimensions as history, values, actions, core beliefs, competencies, principles, purpose, mission...Identity is the source of organizations. Every organization is an identity in motion, moving through the world, trying to make a difference."

In search of that illusive concept of emergence, they write, "Emergence is the surprising capacity we discover only when we join together. New systems have properties that appear suddenly and mysteriously. These properties cannot be predicted. They do not exist in the individuals who compose the system. What we know about the individuals, no matter how rich the details, will never give us the ability to predict how they will behave as a system. Once individuals link together they become something different.

One of the current quandaries facing free, open collaboratives is compensation. It is very clear that participants benefit in many other tangible and intangible ways from the collaboration. However, in our present form of capitalism, no standard form of monetary compensation has emerged. The authors don't provide much hope of one being developed, "Once systems are called into the world by our individual explorations, it becomes impossible to work backwards. Systems cannot be deconstructed. We can't figure out cause and effect or who contributed what. There are no heroes or permanent leaders in an emergent, systems creating world. There are too many simultaneous connection; individual contributions evolve too rapidly into group efforts."

We often talk about synergy in a group, where 1 + 1 > 2. Their paradigm revolutionizes the way to think about a system, "A system is an inseparable whole. It is not the sum of its parts. It is not greater than the sum of its parts. There is nothing to sum. There are no parts. The system is a new and different and unique contribution to its members and the world. To search backwards in time for its parts is to deny the self transforming nature of systems. A system is knowable only as itself. It is irreducible. We can't disentangle the effects of so many relationships. The connections never end. They are impossible to understand by analysis."

In amplifying their concept that self-organizing systems merge through trust, they write, "Every act of organizing is an experiment. We begin with desire, with a sense of purpose and direction. But we enter the expereince vulnerable, unprotected by the illusionary cloak of prediction. We acknowledge that we don't know how this work will actually unfold. We discover what we are capable of as we go along. We engage others in the experiment. We are willing to commit to a systems whose effectiveness cannot be seen until it is in motion...in systems of trust, people are free to create the relationships they need. Trust enables the system to open. The system expands to include those it had excluded. More conversations - more diverse and diverging views - become important. People decide to work with those from whom they have been separate."

We long for meaning in our lives. "Each of us embodies the boundless energies of life. We are creating, systems-seeking, self-organizing, meaning-seeking beings. We are identities in motion, searching for the relationships that will evoke more from us."

Sobornost'

2005-08-23T14:14:00.000-07:00

I just recently read the book by James Billington, Russia: In Search of Itself. This is a great book, very readable with wonderful insights into Russia's past, present and potential futures.

This is not a book review for this short piece could not do justice to this important book. Rather this essay develops just one line of thought from the book about the concept of sobornost' - an idea that may have some bearing on the innovation commons.

In the 1920s, Vladimir Vernadsky developed "his increasingly visionary idea that man was not only an organic part of the biosphere but also an immaterial force in the 'noosphere', where everything is determined by the interaction between the human mind and the material world. Multiple conferences and even special institutes have arisen in post Soviet Russia to discuss the moral and spiritual implications of living in the noosphere. The discussion has involved more people more deeply in Russia than did the earlier consideration of the similar ideas of Teilhard de Chardin in the West."

Later, Billington writes, "Ivanov sees in the concept of the noosphere the key to global collaboration both in solving common problems and in restoring the imbalance in modern culture between the two hemispheres of the brain. 'The current high status of the left side of the brain' results from the written, alphabetized means of communication that supplanted humanity's earlier oral and pictorial ways of communicating. The new audiovisual culture of the late twentieth century opens up the possibility of restoring the right side of the brain to a co-equal role. Harmony within the individual could facilitate harmony in the noosphere."

He continues, "In the later Soviet era, V. V. Ivanov had helped pioneer the innovative movement of humanistic scholarship called semiotics (the science of signs). Seeking to apply the discipline of linguistics to other forms of human thought and expression, this informal school met in the relatively free atmosphere of Tartu, Estonia... Semiotics was seen as a means of unifying knowledge, and of rendering the noosphere intelligible as a 'semiosphere'."

In March 2002 Alexander Dugin, in describing his new Eurasia political party, believed that "Intensive scientific development in this Union will lead Eurasia both forward to economic modernization and back to traditional village values. And the Internet will permit economic activity to return from decadent cities to healthy rural locations."

In writing about Russia's travails in search of a democratic identity, Billington writes, Some advocates of a democratic rather than an authoritarian future for Russia buttress their case with new theories about the 'noosphere'. The prolific economist Yury Yahovets argues that all past theories about inevitable conflicts and the rise and fall of civilizations are now obsolete. The broad cycles in human affairs (the sociosphere) and in the natural world (the biosphere) are being superceded by the interaction of the human mind with the cosmos (the noosphere). All of mankind is now reaching 'through the storms to the stars'.

The ecological crisis has become global and cannot be resolved by either arrogant central planners or the 'uncontrollable randomness of the market'. Nor can one rely on the naive 'eco-centrism' of those who see science and technology as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Questions must now be resolved collaboratively between nations and disciplines in the noosphere, 'the sphere that determines the influences of human thought and activity on biospheric processes'.

...Russia has the resources and talent to replicate this model on a larger scale and validate it for multiethnic countries - and perhaps even for the world as a whole."

Later, he introduces the concept of sobornost', "The spirit of togetherness engendered by local, cooperative activity was seen by many Russians as the expression of an indigenous tradition that they call sobornost'. This is a Slavophile-originated term derived from the word sobor, a word with multiple meanings of cathedral, council, and the simple gathering in of people or of things that had previously been scattered. It expresses a desire to find a measure of common purpose for a people and a culture long rent with splits and schisms. It provides a post-Soviet generation with a social ideal that is different from either Eastern collectivism or Western individualism. And it suggests that there is a spiritual dimension to nonpolitical, small-scale human community.

The basic human embodiment of the sobornost' ideal is the family. Family happiness was the ideal of much nineteenth-century Russian literature. The persistent integrity of the family throughout the twentieth century protected the Russian people from some of the intrusive inhumanity of the Soviet system. But sobernost' is thought to be exemplified in a wide variety of communal undertakings ranging from the camaraderie of pioneering construction work in harsh climates to the intense discussion of proscribed ideals in small urban circles.

Semion Frank, one of the most important neglected thinkers of the late imperial period, argued in the emigration that sobornost', 'the choral principle in Russian life', was not just an ideal from the past but a force for the future. Sobornost' overcame the potential hostility between the I and Thou with a kind of organic, spiritual unity that differed from 'sociality' (obshchestvernost') in which isolated individuals are aggregated into materialistic interest groups.

...sobornost' describes the kind of communion with others that is open to an individual seeking to discover what St. Augustine described as that which is within me which is deeper than myself. For others seeking a 'third way' between socialism and capitalism, sobornost' represents an indigenous communitarian ideal on which to base a humane, social democratic future."

In his conclusion, Billington writes, "Frank's belief that sobornost' begins with spiritual transformation within individuals rather than material changes in society...All of these Russian thinkers - and many others yet to be discovered - contribute not just to their own, but also to European and world civilization."

Russia: In Search of Itself
James H. Billington
Woodrow Wilson Press, 2004

Inclusive Innovation

2005-08-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jeff De Cagna in Fast Company

If I'm not "personally brilliant," is there a role for me to play in the work of innovation?

I certainly hope and believe the answer is yes. If we're going to talk about distributed, collaborative "open innovation" that transcends the old-school proprietary R&D approach, then we need to think about how to make innovation as inclusive as possible, allowing everyone to connect to the work in ways that feel personally authentic to those individuals. I don't believe that we should try to limit involvement in innovation (intentionally or otherwise) to only the select few people who possess the "right" combination of genetic traits, personal attributes or learned skills.

As I wrote in a post yesterday, not everyone working on innovation needs to be a wild-eyed, right-brain creative power-brainstomer/prototyper. Innovation demands all kinds of talents, and I think we should look for ways to capitalize on all of them. Our organizations truly cannot afford to waste any brain cells.

http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2005/08/09/inclusive_innovation.html

P2P and Human Evolution

2005-08-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

P2P and Human Evolution: Peer to Peer as the Premise of a New Mode of Civilization
Michel Bauwens

"The following essay describes the emergence, or expansion, of a specific type of relational dynamic, which I call peer to peer. It’s a form of human network-based organization which rests upon the free participation of equipotent partners, engaged in the production of common resources, without recourse to monetary compensation as key motivating factor, and not organized according to hierarchical methods of command and control. This format is emerging throughout the social field: as a format of technology (the point to point internet, file sharing, grid computing, the Writeable Web initiatives, blogs), as a third mode of production which is also called Commons-based peer production (neither centrally planned nor profit-driven), producing hardware, software (often called Free Libre Open Sources Software or FLOSS) and intellectual and cultural resources (wetware) that are of great value to humanity (GNU/Linux, Wikipedia), and as a general mode of knowledge exchange and collective learning which is massively practiced on the internet. It also emerges as new organizational formats in politics, spirituality; as a new ‘culture of work’. This essay thus traces the expansion of this format, seen as a "isomorphism" (= having the same format), in as many fields as possible. But it does more than that: it tries to provide an explanatory framework of why it is emerging now, and how it fits in a wider evolutionary framework."

This is the first paragraph of an extraordinary essay written by Michel Bauwens. He considers P2P as the technological framework of what he calls "Cognitive Capitalism", a new evolutionary form of capitalism (the first two being merchant capitalism and industrial capitalism), P2P in the economic sphere, P2P in the political sphere, P2P in the cosmic sphere, P2P in the sphere of culture and self, and P2P and social change. The essay is 44 pages loaded with new thoughts. Ideas and networks of ideas spin fluidly from his writing. At this point, I have no way of knowing whether is right or not, but his ideas are provocative and certainly worth learning and discussing.

He makes the bold assertion that "P2P is nothing less than a premise of a new type of civilization that is not exclusively geared towards the profit motive."

The framework he uses is based on Ken Wilber's four quadrant system - subjective (evolution of self and subjectivity), materiality of a single organism (objectivity), intersubjective (the interaction of groups of subjectivities and the worldviews and cultures they create), and interobjective (behaviors of groups).

"My modified form of the four-quadrant system starts with the 'exterior-individual', i.e. single objects in space and time, i.e. the evolution of the material basis of the universe, life, and mind (the evolution from atoms to molecules to cells etc..), but in my personal modification, this quadrant includes technological evolution, as I (and others such as McLuhan) can legitimately see technology as an extension of the human body. Second, we will look at the systems (exterior-collective) quadrant: the evolution of natural, political, economic, social and organizational systems. Third, we will look at the exterior-collective quadrant: human culture, spiritualities, philosophies, worldviews. In the fourth quadrant we will be discussing the interior-individual aspects, and we look at changes occurring within the sphere of the self. However, in practice, despite my stated intention, I have found it difficult to separate individual and collective aspects of subjectivity and they are provisionally treated in one section. That this is so is not surprising, since one of the aspects of peer to peer is it participative nature, which sees the individual always-already embedded in social processes."

He defines peer to peer in this way. " It is a specific form of relational dynamic, is based on the assumed equipotency of its participants, organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good. P2P is a network, not a hierarchy; it is decentralized; it a specific form of network using distributive intelligence: intelligence is located at any center, but everywhere within the system. Assumed equipotency means that P2P systems start from the premise that 'it doesn't know where the needed resource will be located', it assumes that 'everybody' can cooperate, and does not use formal rules in advance to determine its participating members. Equipotency, i.e. the capacity to cooperate, is verified in the process of cooperation itself. Validation of knowledge, acceptance of processes, are determined by the collective. Cooperation must be free, not forced, and not based on neutrality (i.e. the buying of cooperation in a monetary system). It exists to produce something. These are a number of characteristics that we can use to describe P2P systems 'in general', and in particular as it emerges in the human lifeworld. To have a good understanding of P2P, I suggest the following mental exercise, think about these characteristics, then about their opposites. So doing, the radical innovative nature of P2P springs to mind. Though P2P is related to earlier social modes, those were most in evidence in the early tribal era, and it now emerges in an entirely new context, enabled by technologies which go beyond the barriers of time and space. After the dominance during the last several millennia, of centralized and hierarchical modes of social organization, it is thus in many ways now a radically innovative emergence, and also reflects a very deep change in the epistemological and ontological paradigms that determine behavior and worldviews."

His conclusion is that "P2P networks are the key format of the technological infrastructure that supports the current economic, political and social systems."

He explains that P2P is a result of abundance - the abundance of information and its flow. Hierarchical systems create bottlenecks in the flow of abundant information. "Hierarchy only works with scarcity, and in a situation where the control of scarce resources determines the end result of the zero-sum power games being conducted. In a situation of abundance, centralized nodes cannot possible cope. Information, I probably do not need to remind the reader of this, is different from material goods, in that its sharing does not diminish its value, but on the contrary augments it."

He makes the key point that with an abundance of information and its relationship to complexity, P2P systems are the most effective and efficient means of solving problems. "Abundance is again both a cause and a consequence of complexity. In a situation of a multiplication of flows, flows that no longer follow predetermined routes, it cannot possible be predicted, where the 'solution' for any problem lies. Expertise comes out of a precise combination of experience, which is unpredictable in advance. Thus, systems are needed that allow expertise to unexpectedly announce itself, when it learns that it is needed. This is precisely what P2P systems allow to an unprecedented degree."

Later, Bauwens describes the work of Benkler and Krowne providing background for the emergence of P2P:

"Yochai Benkler, in a famous essay, 'Coase's Penguin', has given a rationale for the emergence of P2P production methodologies, based on the ideas of 'transaction cost'. In the physical world, the cost of bringing together thousands of participants may be very high, and so it may be cheaper to have centralized firms than an open market. This is why earlier experiences with collectivized economies could not work. But in the immaterial sphere used for the production of informational goods, the transaction goods are near-zero and therefore, open source production methods are cheaper and more efficient.

Aaron Krowne, writing for Free Software magazine, has proposed a set of laws to explain the higher efficiency of CBPP (= Commons-based peer production) models:

(Law 1.) When positive contributions exceed negative contributions by a sufficient factor in a CBPP project, the project will be successful.
This means that for every contributor that can 'mess things up', there have to be at least 10 others who can correct these mistakes. But in most projects the ration is 1 to 100 or 1 to 1000, so that quality can be maintained and improved over time.

(Law 2.) Cohesion quality is the quality of the presentation of the concepts in a collaborative component (such as an encyclopedia entry). Assuming the success criterion of Law 1 is met, cohesion quality of a component will overall rise. However, it may temporarily decline. The declines are by small amounts and the rises are by large amounts.

Individual contributions which may be useful by themselves but diminish the overall balance of the project, will always be discovered, so that decline can only be temporary.

(Corollary.) Laws 1 and 2 explain why cohesion quality of the entire collection (or project) increases over time: the uncoordinated temporary declines in cohesion quality cancel out with small rises in other components, and the less frequent jumps in cohesion quality accumulate to nudge the bulk average upwards. This is without even taking into account coverage quality, which counts any conceptual addition as positive, regardless of the elegance of its integration.

Krowne has also done useful work to define the authority models at work in such projects. The models define access and the workflow, and whether there is any quality control. The free-form model, which Wikipedia employs, allows anyone to edit any entry at any time. But in the owner-centric model, entries can only be modified with the permission of a specific 'owner' who has to defend the integrity of his module."

The author's view is that the owner-centric model is better for quality, but takes more time, while the free-form model increases the scope of coverage and is very fast.

He makes the point that scarcity is a construct of people. " We should also see that scarcity is in many ways a social construction. Nature was abundant to the tribal peoples, but when it was transformed into land that counted as property, land became scarce and a resource to be fought for. The enclosures movement in England was designed to precisely that. Out of land, previously plentiful resources were taken, and transformed into the form of property known as capital. Capital became scarce and to be fought for. Similarly today, the plentiful information commons that we produce, is being fought, so that it can turn into intellectual property, that can artificially be rendered scarce."

To explain the evolution of cooperation, he uses Edward Haskell's model - adversarial, neutral and synergistic cooperation. He points out that premodern imperial and feudal forms of society were based on adversarial form of cooperation. Cooperation was obtained by use of force. It was win-lose and the sum of 1 + 1 is always less than 2 in this type of cooperation. Capitalism introduced the neutral form of cooperation - the exchange of labor for fair compensation and a fair price for goods. At best capitalism is average. "Participants give just their money's worth. Neither participant in a neutral exchange gets better, 1 plus 1 equals 2."

However, P2P can result in synergistic cooperation, where 1 + 1> 2. "By definition, peer to peer processes are mobilized for common projects that are of greater use value to the wider community (since monetized exchange value falls away). True and authentic P2P therefore logically transforms into a win-win-win model, whereby not only the parties gain, but the wider community and social field as well. It is, in Edward Haskell's definition, a true synergetic cooperation. It is very important to see the 'energetic' effects of these different forms of cooperation, as I indicated above: 1) forced cooperation yields very low quality contributions; 2) the neutral cooperation format of the marketplace generates average quality contributions; 3) but freely given synergistic cooperation generates passion. Participants are automatically drawn to what they do best, at the moments at which they are most passionate and energetic about it. This is one of the fundamental reasons of the superior quality which is eventually, over time, created through open source projects."

Bauwens introduces the concept of rapport. "Arthur Coulter, author of a book on synergetics, adds a further twist explaining the superiority of P2P. He adds to the objective definition of Haskell, the subjective definition of 'rapport' based on the attitudes of the participants. Rapport is the state of persons who are in full agreement, and is determined by synergy (S), empathy (E), and communication (C). Synergy refers to interactions that promote the goals and efforts of the participants; empathy to the mutual understanding of the goals; and communication to the effective interchange of the data. His "Principle of Equivalence" states that the flow of S + E + C are optimal when they have equivalent status to each other." From this, he concludes that an egalitarian-supportive attitude is congenial to the success of P2P.

The author succinctly describes the difference between a market and P2P. "A market is based on the exchange of scarce goods, through a monetary mechanism. This is not the case for P2P products, which can be downloaded for free. They are not made for the profit obtained from the exchange value, but for their use value and acceptance by a user community."

In discussing freedom, he writes, "P2P is predicated on the maximum freedom. The freedom to join and participate, to fully express oneself and one's potential, the freedom to change course at any point in time, the freedom to quit. Within the common projects, freedom is constrained through communal validation and consensus (i.e. the freedom of others). But individuals can always leave, fork to a new project, create their own. The challenge is to find affinities, to create a common sphere with at least a few others and to create effective use value. Unlike in representative democracy, it is not a model based on a majority imposing its will on a minority."

He asserts that there is an emergence of a new form of power. "With the emergence of the Internet and peer to peer processes, yet a new form of power emerges, and Kumon calls it the Wisdom Game. In order to have influence, one must give quality knowledge away, and thus build reputation, through the demonstration of one's 'Wisdom'. The more one shares, the more this material is used by others, the higher one's reputation, the bigger one's influence."

He considers P2P as a new form of social exchange, "...what it reflects is an expansion of ethics: the desire to create and share, to produce something useful. The individual who joins a P2P project, puts his being, unadulterated, in the service of the construction of a common resource. Implicit is not just a concern for the narrow group, not just intersubjective relations, but the whole social field surrounding it.

Imagine a successful meeting of minds: individual ideas are confronted, but also changed in the process, through the free association born of the encounter with other intelligences. Thus eventually a common idea emerges, that has integrated the differences, not subsumed them. The participants do not feel they have made concessions or compromises, but feel that the new common integration is based on their ideas. There has been no minority, which has succumbed to the majority. There has been no 'representation', or loss of difference. Such is the true process of peer to peer.

An important philosophical change has been the abandonment of the unifying universalism of the Enlightenment project. Universality was to be attained by striving to unity, by the transcendence of representation of political power. But this unity meant sacrifice of difference. Today, the new epistemological and ontological requirement that P2P reflects, is not abstract universalism, but the concrete universality of a commons which has not sacrificed difference. This is the truth that the new concept of multitude, developed by Toni Negri and inspired by Spinoza, expresses. P2P is not predicated on representation and unity, but of the full expression of difference."

To read the entire essay, click here.
http://www.networkcultures.org/weblog/archives/P2P_essay.pdf

A Gaudier Future that Almost Blinds the Eye

2005-08-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

A review of Lawrence Lessig's book The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Daphne Keller in the Duke Law Journal

" In The Future of Ideas, Professor Lawrence Lessig argues compellingly that the Internet has proven value as a commons for innovation, and that we are in the process of destroying that value. In a sort of reverse tragedy of the commons, he argues, extending private property rights over the Internet's constituent parts will stifle -- or outlaw -- the very creativity that built "cyberspace" in the first place. Lessig, a preeminent legal scholar and attorney, here follows up on the foundation laid in his important first book, Code.

The Internet's potential as a platform for innovation, Lessig argues, ultimately depends on how free access and private control over the network's underlying resources are configured. Lessig outlines actual and possible property regimes in Internet resources using Professor Yochai Benkler's three-layer model. He conceptually divides the Internet into a layer of physical infrastructure, a layer of logical coordinating protocols or code, and a layer of content conveyed over the Internet. The Internet's potential as a platform for continuing innovation, he argues, depends on the balance of public access and private control over each of these three layers. The property regime that we have known so far, Lessig says, has preserved sufficient access to ensure a space for innovation. A regime that upsets the balance by expanding property rights and private control at the expense of the commons, though, will stifle innovation. We are rapidly moving, Lessig argues, toward a regime that sacrifices opportunities for innovation in favor of private control.

The Future of Ideas is timely, disturbing, and persuasive. Lessig convincingly illustrates the danger of applying economic lessons learned from real property or widgets to the novel communications resource that is the Internet. He synthesizes the traditional concerns of communications law (who has access to the communications infrastructure?) with those of intellectual property law (to what extent can forms of information themselves be owned?), and demonstrates that the two fields are converging significantly with respect to the Internet. His argument for preserving the innovation commons suggests that, as a matter of resource management and property theory, the two sets of questions have been closely connected all along. In both fields, the law accounts for the unusual characteristics of communications resources by adjusting the usual rules of private property.

At times, however, Lessig's argument is snarled by the complexity of the Internet's underlying resources. The Internet includes both resources that are nonrivalrous (meaning that they are capable of being shared by all without depletion) and resources that are rivalrous (meaning that they are congestible or exhaustible by overuse). The property law that best takes advantage of nonrivalrousness may be inappropriate for rivalrous resources, and vice versa. Similarly, lawmakers might arrive at different optimal property regimes for the Internet, depending on whether they prioritize the network's role as a platform for human communication or its foundation in physical components built by costly private investment. The three-layer model for the Internet would seem to resolve these tensions by allowing different property rules for different constitutive resources: economic-value-maximizing rules for finite physical layer resources and participation-maximizing rules for those nonrivalrous resources at the code and content layer which are more directly linked to speech and democratic participation. Yet the neat division set forth at the start of The Future of Ideas, in which physical resources such as wires and cables are controlled private property while resources at the Internet's code layer are commonly accessible, does not quite play out in the book's more detailed discussions. Lessig ultimately defines the code layer so expansively that he undermines any fully independent property regime in the physical layer.

---

"According to Lessig, some resources are most valuable when held in common such that all people have equal access, while other resources are best managed as private property. The Internet, he argues, contains resources of both kinds, and has been a source of valuable innovation because of a property regime that combined common access to some resources (such as technical protocols) with private control over others (including part or all of the Internet's physical infrastructure). The Future of Ideas develops a careful model of this mixed, innovation-maximizing property regime, using a three-layer model. The book's aim, Lessig writes, "is to understand how this mix produced the innovation that we have seen so far and why the changes to this mix will kill what we have seen so far." "

---

"Lessig's definitions of the terms "free" and "commons" are distinct from some more economically conventional uses of the same terms. In The Future of Ideas, a commons may be a paid-access resource, so long as the terms of access are neutrally imposed; this varies from the widely used definition of the commons as a regime of pure privilege, in which the resource may be used by any person free of charge. Similarly, for Lessig, "free" resources include both those which are available without payment and those which are available subject to liability rules, under which some form of collective valuation determines a fair and neutrally imposed price. As Professor James Boyle has pointed out, this focus on "freedom from the will of another, not freedom from the background constraints of the economic system," diverges from other accounts of the Internet's commons as requiring costless access to some resources."

---

"If a software developer wants to build a new application for the Internet, she will need a computer, access to the Internet, and skills. But she will not need anyone's permission, because the network is incapable of excluding any compatible application. If she builds it, it will run. This, to Lessig, is part of the genius of the Internet and perhaps the single most important factor accounting for its success. The code layer of the Internet, the protocols which set terms and conditions for content to flow across the network, could have been architected to permit exclusion (by keeping certain users or applications off the network) or discrimination (by giving certain users or applications slower or more expensive service, for example). Instead, the original code layer established the Internet as a commons open to any who wish to use it.

This technical inability to exclude or discriminate was a conscious design choice by the Internet's earliest developers, Lessig claims, implementing a design principle now known as end-to-end. Following end-to-end design, the "dumb" machines at the center of the network, such as routers, perform only the minimal, simple functions necessary to transfer data between "smart" machines. Complex functionality is relegated to the edge of the network -- to machines that serve web content, for example, or reassemble that content in a browser window. The simplicity and flexibility of the underlying Internet protocol for "dumb" data transmission has important consequences for innovation, Lessig argues. New applications, including applications unforeseen by the Internet's earliest developers, can run without any adjustment to the machines making up the network's center. And, crucially, the end-to-end Internet is a neutral platform -- it cannot exclude or discriminate against any application built to run on the Internet. Anyone -- from a highly paid programmer in Redmond to a child at her parents' computer in Jakarta -- can try something new and share it with the rest of the network. The productivity of this innovation commons has been nothing short of astonishing, as decentralized crews of technological, cultural, and economic innovators have converged online to create everything from Apache server software to ebay. End-to-end design "renders the Internet an innovation commons, where innovators can develop and deploy new applications or content without the permission of anyone else . . . . The system is built -- constituted -- to remain open to whatever innovation comes along."

Code layer end-to-end principles, as embodied in the Internet, provide Lessig's model for innovation commons on an open network. He has a countermodel, too -- an innovation graveyard on a closed network, as it were. This model is the telephone system as administered by AT&T for much of the last century. While its monopoly lasted, AT&T had legal authority to accept or reject any devices added to the telephone network. The company's own labs were responsible for remarkable developments, but at the same time AT&T was a bottleneck for all evolution of the telephone system. As Lessig notes, "there was nothing one could do with one's innovation unless AT&T bought it." In fact, one innovation rejected by AT&T was a proposed digital packet-switching technology much like that eventually made successful by the Internet. These two models, the Internet and the AT&T phone system, respectively represent extremes of freedom and control at the code layer.

Comparing innovation in the two systems, Lessig draws a lesson: we may expect more productive innovation from systems that lack centralized control over creative tinkering. Thus, if we expect a resource to be most valuable as a platform for innovative new uses, as is the case when future uses of a technology are uncertain, then the most productive property regime is one of open access. "Plasticity -- the ability of a system to evolve easily in a number of ways -- is optimal in a world of uncertainty." Moreover, entities interested in preserving the status quo should not be given control over a resource most useful as a platform for new developments.

Read the entire book review.

The End of Innovation?

2005-08-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

On openp2p.com, Richard Koman interviewed Lawrence Lessig on his talk "Preserving the Innovation Commons".

"The Internet under its original design built a platform that induced lots of innovation in applications and content. And it did this by embracing an end-to-end principle, which meant that the network would remain as simple as possible and push all of the intelligence and, therefore, innovation to the end. This is the vision that is now enabled by a peer-to-peer architecture, and it's the environment that has inspired the greatest amount of innovation around the Internet in its history.

Now this architecture threatens existing interests, business interests and Hollywood interests, and in response to that threat there have been a number of changes that have occurred in both the technical and legal environment, aiming to undermine this platform for innovation, aiming to change it into a platform where it's easier for certain interests to exercise control over innovation on that platform. And the changes at the technical level include changes to the architecture, enabling network owners to exercise more control or discrimination over content that flows across their network or for applications that run on the network. And in the legal environment, the change is brought about by changes in copyright law essentially -- also patent law, but let's start with copyright law -- that radically increase the extent to which copyright holders can exercise control over their content."

Read the entire interview.

Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere

2005-08-11T12:17:00.000-07:00

De Chardin was a Jesuit Priest and a paleontologist/biologist. He was born in 1885 and died in 1955. He spent his life attempting to rationalize his religious beliefs and his acceptance of evolution. Unfortunately he was censored by the church and not allowed to publish or teach about his thoughts for most of his life.

He saw the earth as having three spheres - geosphere, biosphere and the noosphere. He posited that the earth evolved through the geosphere to the biosphere and predicted that it would be moving to the noosphere long before anyone else thought about the Gaia hypotheses or before the Internet.

Rev. Phillip J. Cunningham writes (http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/cunning.html):

In the seeming myriad of entities around us, Teilhard perceives a unity: "My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material, organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him." Moreover, that unity reaches back in time and continues into the future: "If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness."

---

In 1925, Teilhard wrote in an essay entitled Hominization: "And this amounts to imagining, in one way or another, above the animal biosphere human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls (the noosphere, if you will)" It was a neologism employing the Greek word noos for "mind."

---

Teilhard maintains that evolution has a definite direction, an "Ariadne's Thread" as he calls it. That "thread" is the increasing complexity of living beings, the focus of which is their nervous systems, more precisely, their brains. Following the growth in "cerebralization" we are led to the mammals and, among them, the anthropoids. The complexity of their brains is paralleled by the complexity of their socialized behaviour. Recent studies of the great apes has only increased our appreciation of their remarkable acuity. Yet, though we are not a radical departure physically or genetically from these marvelous creatures, we nevertheless transcend them in some essential manner.

And just what is the source of this transcendence? For Teilhard, it is "thought" or "reflection." He describes it as "the power acquired by a consciousness to turn it upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but to know oneself; no longer merely to know but to know that one knows."

Now the same question rises which confronted us in discussing biogenesis: Does noogenesis have a direction? In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard posits: "In truth, a neo-humanity has been germinating round the Mediterranean for the last six thousand years" He thought that a "new layer of the noosphere" would soon be formed. "The proof of this lies in the fact that from one end of the world to the other, all peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them." Teilhard was convinced that the shape of the noosphere's future would be determined by those developments he saw taking place in the Europe and the U.S.

It was his opinion: "We are, at this very moment, passing through a change of age. Beneath a change of age lies a change of thought." That hidden change would at first influence only a few but it would continue to expand. "I know of no more moving story nor any more revealing of the biological reality of a noogenesis than that of intelligence struggling step by step from the beginning to overcome the illusion of proximity." Humanity had lived (and many still did) in a narrow world, unaware of the true dimensions of time and space. Moreover these dimension bore no relationship to each other. Now a new realization arose: "Time and space are organically joined again so as to weave, together, the stuff of the universe." What brought this transformation about?

Teilhard attributes it to the rise of an evolutionary point of view:

"Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, as systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow."

---

Teilhard was convinced that geogenesis moved in the direction of an ever increasing conscious that brought about a biogenesis that evolved in the same direction. The process then led to the advent of though/reflection. However, the process did not cease there. "Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself." The direction then was toward such a growth in consciousness.

Teilhard was also convinced that a further and even more profound change had taken place. On the one hand we could see humanity simply swept along in a evolutionary stream into the future over which he had no control. Or, we could see that an evolution conscious of itself could also direct itself. "Not only do we read in our slightest acts the secrets of [evolutions] proceedings; but for an elementary part we hold it in our hands, responsible for its past to its future." Noogenesis moves ever more clearly toward self-direction; it is now something we determine.

---

It was Teilhard's conviction that should humanity lose hope for the future, the hope of transcending the barriers to human unity and peace, noogenesis would cease. "Between these two alternatives of absolute optimism or absolute pessimism, there is no middle way because by its very nature progress is all or nothing." Yet, does not evolution itself offer hope. It has gone from geogenesis to biogenesis and has entered up noogenesis. Will it now be frustrated at this stage and fail to evolve further into the future? Teilhard clings to hope, "there is for us, in the future, under some form or another, a least collective, not only survival but also super-life." In 1950, Teilhard made what was a final attempt to get his observations published. He wrote a short work, Man's Place in Nature, which summarized what he felt was his scientific position.

---

Crucial to the process of human evolution, i.e. to progress is, in Teilhard's view, scientific research. In the past such investigations were isolated, sometimes no more than the hobbies of individuals. "Today we find the reverse: research students are numbered in the hundreds of thousands-soon to be millions-and they are no longer distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community." One can't but think of today's "Internet," yet this was written forty-six years ago.

Anodea Judith writes (http://www.gaiamind.com/Teilhard.html):

...he suggested that the Earth in its evolutionary unfolding, was growing a new organ of consciousness, called the noosphere. The noosphere is analogous on a planetary level to the evolution of the cerebral cortex in humans. The noosphere is a "planetary thinking network" -- an interlinked system of consciousness and information, a global net of self-awareness, instantaneous feedback, and planetary communication. At the time of his writing, computers of any merit were the size of a city block, and the Internet was, if anything, an element of speculative science fiction. Yet this evolution is indeed coming to pass, and with a rapidity, that in Gaia time, is but a mere passage of seconds. In these precious moments, the planet is developing her cerebral cortex, and emerging into self-conscious awakening. We are indeed approaching the Omega point that Teilhard de Chardin was so excited about

---

"It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts. . . . Humanity. . . is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?"

And, the Noosphere web site comments (http://noosphere.cc/):

The Noosphere Website monitors and aims to inspire the transition of mankind from the secondary into the tertiary evolutionary stage. Whereas the secondary stage is characterized by an organization, based upon power (of the Rulers over the Multitude) exerted by military, monetary and/or moral coercion, the tertiary stage is organized by intellectual and factual cooperation of conscious and creative individuals, aiming at developing constructive systems where the largest number of individuals are healthy and happy. From their intellectual integration and Peer to Peer cooperation, the Noosphere is emerging.

Is the innovation commons a step in the direction envisioned by de Chardin?

Second Life

2005-08-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

If You Virtually Build It, They Will Virtually Check It Out

Second Life is a 3-D online virtual world with a program called "Campus Second Life," which encourages professors to teach courses inside Second Life's confines.

The program provides free semester long access for the teacher and students as well as virtual land for the class to "build" any structures they choose.

In a spring 2004 class an urban planning, Brockett Davidson, then a fourth year architecture student, was given an assignment to create an object, space or event in the virtual world that would foster interaction. Interested in the role of religion and spiritually, he decided to build a "sacred space" where denizens could come to discuss such issues.

Mr. Davidson chose has site - a serene virtual nature preserve - carefully, and spent 16 hours using the program's built-in tools to construct an attractive domed and pillared open-air space. He then organized an event to discuss spirituality in Second Life, drawing a dozen or so participants.

The space worked just as he had hoped, first fostering a group discussion in the central, circular chamber, and later on one-one exchanges in the alcoves he had built expressly for the purpose - a kind of direct feedback not available with drawings restricted to pencil and paper, Mr. Davidson noted.

"In my other classes, I'll make digital models, but none of those designs get built," he said. "Here, the exercise is itself a building that will actually affect people "

Ethan Todras-Whitehill
New York Times, 8/3/05

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

2005-08-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
By Thomas Friedman

This book is a must read for anyone interested in an innovation commons. Much of the book revolves around and depends upon the successful creation of innovation commons in many different forms. The following are some excerpts from the book that seem to me to be most directly related to the subject of the innovation commons.

"…Satyam Cherukuri, of Sarnoff, an American research and development firm, has called ‘the globalization of innovation" and an end to the old model…" p29-30

His premise is that the "world is now flat", i.e. the global competitive playing field is being leveled. The world is being flattened. He identifies ten driving forces for leveling of the competitive playing field. The first three are events that marked the change:

When the walls came down and the windows went up
When Netscape went public
Work flow software

The next six represent the new forms of collaboration, which the new platform created by the first three forces made possible:

Self organizing collaborative communities
Outsourcing Y2K
Offshoring
Supply chaining
Insourcing
In-forming

The last force is an enabler:

The steroids: Digital, mobile, personal and virtual

Quoting Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM, "This emerging era is characterized by the collaborative innovation of many people working together in gifted communities, just as innovation in the industrial era was characterized by individual genius." p93

In discussing some of the problems of an innovation commons, he raises the following question:

"If everyone contributes his or her intellectual capital for free, where will the resources for innovation come from? And won’t we end up with in endless legal wrangles over which part of any innovation was made by the community for free, and meant to stay that way, and which part was added on by some company for profit and has to be paid for so that the company can make money to drive further innovation." p96

"How do you push innovation forward if everyone is working for free and giving away their work?…if innovators are not going to be rewarded for their innovations, the incentive for path-breaking innovation will dry up and so will the money for the really deep R&D that is required to drive progress in this increasingly complex field." (Paraphrasing Microsoft) p100

"Open source is an important flattener because it makes available for free many tools, from software to encyclopedias, that millions of people around the world would have had to buy in order to use, and because open source network associations – with their open borders and come-one-come-all approach – can challenge hierarchical structures with a horizontal model of innovation that is clearly working in a growing number of areas." p102

Writing about the power of search engines for collaboration: "How does searching fit into the concept of collaboration? I call it ‘in-forming’. In-forming is the individual’s’ personal analog to open sourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, supply chaining and offshoring. In-forming is the ability to build and deploy your own personal supply chain – a supply chain of information, knowledge and entertainment. In-forming is about self collaboration…" p153

"…this tenth flattener - the steroids – is going to amplify and further empower all the other forms of collaboration. These steroids should make open-source innovation that much more open, because they will enable more individuals to collaborate with one another in more ways and from more places than ever before." p 170-171

He then introduces the concept of the triple convergence: "First, right around the year 2000, all ten flatteners…started to converge and work together in ways that created a new, flatter, global playing field. As this new playing field became established, both businesses and individuals began to adopt new habits, skills and processes to get the most out of it. They moved from largely vertical means of creating value to more horizontal one. The merger of this new playing field for doing business with the new ways of doing business was the second convergence, and it actually helped to flatten the world even further. Finally, just when all this flattening was happening, a whole new group of people, several billion in fact, walked on the playing field from China, India and the former Soviet Union. Thanks to the new flat world, and its new tools, some of them were able to collaborate and compete directly with everyone else. This was the third convergence." p175

Writing about the parallel between the work of economists of the impact of major technologies on productivity, he stated: "The same thing is happening today with the flattening of the world. Many of the ten flatteners have been around for years. But for the full flattening effects to be felt, we needed not only the ten flatteners to converge, but also something else. We needed the emergence of a large cadre of managers, innovators, business consultant, business schools, designers, IT specialists, CEOs and workers to get comfortable with, and develop, the sorts of horizontal collaboration and value creation processes and habits that could take advantage of this new, flatter playing field. In short, the convergence of the ten flatteners begat the convergence of a set of business practices and skills that would get the most out of the flat world. And then the two began to mutually reinforce each other." p178

"In the future globalization is going to be increasingly driven by individuals who understand the flat world, adapt themselves quickly to its processes and technologies, and then start to march forward…They will be of every color of the rainbow and from every corner of the world." p183

"The flatter the world gets, the more we are going to need a system of global governance that keeps up with all the new legal and illegal forms of collaboration." p217

"In the flat world, the division of labor is steadily becoming more and more complex, with a lot more people interacting with a lot of other people they don’t know and may never meet. If you want to have a modern complex division of labor, you have to put more trust in strangers." p326

Rhetoric

2005-08-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

In times of general economic expansion based upon population growth and the extension of mature technologies, many fundamental future realities are forecastable with reasonable certainty. Moreover, the imperatives and opportunities arising from these realities are also largely extensions of past experience, and are thus fairly straightforward to anticipate. In such times, the essence of strategy is to "exploit the inevitable", and it is purposeful to engage in long range planning.

In tines of multi-variable change, on the other hand, many long-term realities are obscured and their consequences made less certain by short term turbulence arising from society’s largely unpredictable adaptation to change. In such times, the essence of strategy is to make order of confusion, a task for which long-range planning has proven fruitless and counter-productive. Instead of a plan, to lead an institution or a community through times of uncertainty and change, a group’s decision makers must establish a "creative commons" – a shared set of expectations about future external realities and the diverse range of plausible possibilities which these realties pose – that they, the decision-makers, agree they must address, exploit, forestall or otherwise deal with.

…the futurist/facilitator/leader must help each organization or community evolve its own "creative commons", a conceptual space within which all stakeholders can envision the potential realization of outcomes that will be both publicly and personally desirable.

From "Rhetoric: The Language and Logic of Leadership"
By David Pearce Snyder and Gregg Edwards, Snyder Family Enterprises

Innovation Commons Definition

2005-08-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

A network of thought and truth.

Workable Design Criteria for Use when Competing Ideologies Collaborate

2005-08-09T12:14:00.000-07:00

(Suggested for use, either where strongly competing ideologies or turfs exist, or where chronic problems involving communication and decision-making lead to suspicion and low trust.)

Agreement regarding the nature of outcome
Although they disagree on many of the factors that will shape the outcome (such as the underlying values, the types of data that are seen as most relevant or the relative weight given to conflicting evidence), it is important that participants agree on what their collective efforts will lead to – e.g., a report, a management policy, etc. This can include things as "simple" as deciding how to manage issues such as the question "who decides who decides" in any given situation.
Personal commitment to successful outcome
Each participant needs to have a personal stake in the successful reaching of the outcome noted above. Otherwise, it becomes easy to subvert or sabotage the efforts of the group, even if done surreptitiously.
Limited time
If interminable debates regarding ideologically based differences are to be avoided, it is important that the agreed upon outcome be required within a reasonable short time frame.
Agreed upon method(s) of conflict management
Note that the phrase conflict "management" rather than resolution. It is useful to have various methods, each of which work well in differing situations, and a facilitator who can focus on both:
- Covert conflicts that are as yet unrecognized, but whose management is critical to a successful outcome; and
- Overt conflicts that are using up time, but are relatively trivial and should be ignored.

By Oliver Markley, Inward Bound

The World is Flat

2005-07-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

Thomas Friedman in his book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, proposes that we have had three great eras of global transformation:

Globalization 1. 0 (1492-1800) - "Globalization 1.0 was about countries and muscle. That is in Globalization 1.0 the key agent of change, the dynamic force driving the process of global integration, was how much brawn - how much muscle, how much horsepower, wind power, or later, steam power - your country had and how creatively you could deploy it. In this era, countries and governments (often inspired by religion or imperialism or a combination of both) led the way to breaking down walls and knitting the world together, driving global integration."

Globalization 2. 0 (1800-2000) - "In Globalization 2.0, the key agent of change, the dynamic force driving global integration, was multinational companies."

Globalization 3.0 (2000-?) - "And while the dynamic force of Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 - the thing that gives it its unique character - is the new found power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally."

If he is correct, and I have no reason to doubt his analysis (it has the clear ring of crystal), then an innovation commons is one of the essential building blocks of Globalization 3.0.

He also states that "Self Organizing Collaborative Communities" is one of the ten forces that flattened the world (#4)

Any comments or elaboration?

Principles of the Commons

2005-06-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, led many people to think that all commons are self-destructive. But Hardin’s essay was misleading.

Hardin assumed there’s only one kind of commons, the unfenced pasture or waste dump with no management system. In such a situation, overuse can lead to destruction.

What Hardin overlooked is that there are many kinds of commons and many ways to run them. For example, you can have a fenced commons with a gate-keeper, or fishing limits with licenses, or a cultural commons with infinite possibilities. There’s no tragedy inherent in these and many other commons. (See Working Models for a sampling of successful American commons.)

Still, the proper way to manage a commons isn’t always obvious. So let’s explore some basic principles, beginning with a look at standard business management.

There are two sets of rules for managing private assets. One applies to corporations, the other to trusts such as pension funds, charitable foundations and family estates.

The goal of corporate rules is to maximize short-term return to capital. The goal of trust rules is to preserve assets for the long term and assure that beneficiaries receive their due. It’s these latter rules that merit attention here.

Over centuries, several principles of trust management have evolved. These include:

Managers have a fiduciary responsibility to beneficiaries. If a manager fails this obligation, s/he can be removed and penalized.
Managers must preserve the principal. It’s okay to spend income, but don’t invade the corpus.
Managers must assure transparency. Information about money flows should be readily available to beneficiaries.

As with private trusts, the goal of commons management is to preserve assets and share benefits. Hence, the basic principles of commons management are similar to those of private trusts.

Commons managers must, first and foremost, protect shared assets for the long term. They must also assure that the benefits flowing from the assets are widely shared.

Beyond these basic principles, specific rules for commons management vary from one commons to another. Broadly speaking, they depend on the level of use society wishes to allow or encourage.

If a commons needs to be off limits to all but the most non-invasive use — a wilderness area, for example — the guiding rule is, ‘No trespassing.’

If a commons has no inherent limits on use — like the Internet or the cultural commons — the guiding rule is, ‘The more the merrier.’ Use should be as free as possible, and management’s main job should be to minimize private toll booths.

If a commons can be used up to, but not beyond, some physical threshold — fisheries, aquifers and the atmosphere are examples — management’s job is to set and enforce sustainable use limits. In economic terms, its challenge is to live off income without diminishing capital.

In managing physically limited commons, it’s often desirable to cap total use and charge users a fee. Such caps and prices assure preservation, let markets sort out competing uses, and generate revenue for social and environmental needs.

Setting a total usage cap can be controversial. If the physical threshold is uncertain, a critical question is, "Which side should we err on?" Under the precautionary principle, if the potential harm from overuse is substantial (e.g. the polar ice caps could melt), the cap should be set with safety as the guide.

The process of protecting and sustaining a commons involves several steps. The asset must first be identified and given a legal and/or institutional structure. In some cases, usage caps and new kinds of property rights may be necessary. It may also be necessary to appoint trustees and acquire pre-existing property rights.

Once a commons is protected and given a proper management regime, markets can come into play.

Source: Friends of the Commons
http://www.friendsofthecommons.org/understanding/principles.html

Commons

2005-06-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

In England and Wales, a common is a piece of land over which other people -- often neighbouring landowners -- could exercise one of a number of traditional rights, such as allowing their cattle to graze upon it. The older texts use the word common to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the word "common" for the land over which the rights are exercised.

The fact that land is common land does not mean it has no owner -- all land in England and Wales is owned by someone. Those who have a right to exercise a right of common are known as 'commoners. Historically most rights of common were "appurtenant" to particular plots of land. So the commoner would be the person who, for the time being, was the owner of the land. Some rights of common were said to be "in gross" in that they were unconnected with ownership or tenure of land. This was more common in regions where commons were more extensive, such as in Northern England or in the Fens.

Example rights of common are:

common pasture (right to pasture cattle, horses, sheep or other animals on the

common land)common piscary (the right to fish

common turbary (the right to take sods of turf)

estovers (the right to take sufficient wood for the commoner's house or agriculture)

Rights of common grazing might also be held over privately owned arable strips in some open field manors; this right was excercised either after the harvest or during a fallow year. Rights of grazing in the open fields was most valuable in manors with relatively little other grazing.

It is often thought that a common is somehow owned by everyone, or at least by "the community" in some sense. While that may have been true more than a thousand years ago, when waste would be used for grazing by the local community and over which there would not be, nor would there need to be, any particular limit or control of usage; since at least late Anglo-Saxon times, the right to exercise a right of common has been restricted to a commoner. Since the right of common would have some natural limitations itself, commons never suffered from the tragedy of the commons.

Thus the word is now used in the sense of any sets of resources that a community recognizes as being accessible to any member of that community. The nature of commons is different in different communities, but they often include cultural resources and natural resources.

While commons are generally seen as a system opposed to private property, they have been combined in the idea of "common property", which are resources "owned" equally by every member of the community, even though the community recognises that only a limited number of members may use the resource at any given time.

The act of transferring resources from the commons to individual ownership is known as "inclosure."

Commons are a subset of public goods; specifically meaning a public good which is not infinite. Commons can therefore be land, rivers and, arguably, money. "The Commons" is most often a finite but replenishable resource, which requires responsible use in order to remain available. A subset of this is a commons which requires not only responsible use but also active contribution from its users, such as a school or church funded by local donations.

In order to ensure responsibility of the users, there must be a system of management. Such models include the Hobbesian "Leviathan" model, where there is a central authority that monitors the behaviour of the users and can sanction abusers. There are also many other models, some of which can require no maintenance -- for instance, if it is known that the collective consists mostly of contingent cooperators, then once responsible behaviour has been established, it will most likely continue without management. Another model is reputation management.

"Commons", Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons

Smart Mobs

2005-05-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

This book review is long. So if you don’t want to read a long review of the book and its implications, let me tell you in the first paragraph, “This is a must read book!” It’s well written, exciting and scary. The technologies that the book is about have many potentially positive and negative outcomes. If you believe that society will still be dominated in the future by “zero sum” philosophies, at the individual, corporate and governmental level, then the outcome looks very scary. If you believe that society is ready to adopt “non-zero sum” games then the outlook is exciting and enormous changes will result that are positive.

Non-zero sum games are behaviors that include “the unique human power and pleasure that comes from doing something that enriches everyone, a game where nobody has to lose for everyone to win.” Zero sum games are best typified by our sports. There is a winner and there is a loser. When the rules are bent or broken, then tragic results can occur, i.e. Enron, which is zero-sum corporate behavior personified. Or, a present nemesis, spam. Spam is where one person wins and everyone else looses.

Robert Write wrote in “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny”, “New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature*) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential – that convert nonzero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and size.”

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Howard Rheingold, Basic Books, 2002, Paper Back,
266 pages

Read Review

Extra-prenuership

2005-04-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

Extra-preneurship: Reinventing Enterprise for the Information Age
David Pearce Snyder
The Snyder Family Enterprise

Physical technologies -- machinery, electric power, structures, etc. -- are the products of how we organize physical materials, forces and processes. Social technologies -- laws, institutions and communities -- are ways in which we organize people, capital and information. The continuing interplay of our co-evolving physical and social technologies is the forge of human progress!

Read the Article (PDF, 10 pages, 198 KB)and please comment on it's implications for an innovation commons.
Paul

Trust and Respect

2005-01-14T13:07:00.000-08:00

These two values seem to be the most important criteria for developing an innovation commons or elearning environment that flourishes because believing that others in the blog or commons will enable me to share my thoughts and to heed the advice or feedback offered. How can we replicate the rapid, intuitive judgements we make in an in-person, collaborative setting via the faceless, impersonal internet. On the one hand, saying exactly what you think can be easier in a setting where you don't know all of the participants and may never meet face-to-face; however, revealing your idea in the first place and then trusting and respecting the feedback obtained is likely difficult when we don't know the players involved. Without consciously knowing it, most of us rely quite heavily on our "gut" to tell us whether or not to trust someone with our most important thoughts and ideas and whether or not to listen to and act upon the advice of different individuals.

Some possible solutions to help bridge the lack of face-to-face meetings could include some phone or call-in sessions, as hearing different peoples' voices can be a powerful help in determining a level of comfort in sharing information with the group. Also, numerous organizations make the profiles of their members available to all participants. Requiring photos, answers to a variety of questions that give you a sense of the personality and experience of the members, and so on could provide participants with knowledge about who the person is behind the name at the bottom of the posting or email.

Collaborative E-learning & Generative Conversation

2004-12-10T22:36:00.000-08:00

In recent posts Paul observed that "conversation, as a generative process, is the prerequisite for all creativity" and "to create new realities, we must create new contexts, new domains of consensus." These ideas resonate with the work I am doing in the area of collaborative e-learning. I am looking at ways online courses and/or learning activities can be designed and facilitated to promote generative conversation in the virtual domain. I am interested in ways the online class itself can serve as a new context for learning by doing-- learning to converse, communicate, solve problems and generate new ideas and solutions.

If others in the Innovation Commons are interested in this approach, I hope you will join me for a real-time dialogue on the ICT Literacy Community (http://www.ictliteracy.info/ICT-Community.htm)

December 14, at 10-11 AM Pacific Time OR
December 16, at 5-6 PM Pacific Time.

We'll use the Taxonomy for Collaborative E-Learning as a conceptual framework for our discussion.
(http://www.vision2lead.com/Taxonomy.pdf) See http://elearn2lead.blogspot.com/ for more info.

The Internet as an Innovation Commons

2004-12-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Internet is often referred to as an innovation commons. Does it function as an innovation commons? Why or why not?

Internet and Artistic Creativity

2004-12-10T08:49:00.000-08:00

From Renee Hopkins at IdeaFlow:

"This past Monday the Pew Center for the Internet and American Life released the study Artists, Musicians and the Internet. Media coverage of the study was focused primarily on one finding: Most artists don't view unauthorized swapping of music and movies as a threat to their livelihood, even if many think it should be illegal."

"...artists and musicians have embraced the Internet as a tool that helps them create, as well as helps them promote and sell what they’ve created."

"And, 'artists and musicians are more likely to say that the Internet has made it possible for them to make more money from their art than they are to say it has made it harder to protect their work from piracy or unlawful use.'

Half of the artists and musicians said that copyright regulations benefit purveyors of creative work more than they benefit the original creators."

Read Her Comments

Download the Report

Consortia

2004-12-09T15:02:00.000-08:00

A consortium is a speacial kind of innovation commons. It has limited memebership and there are strict agreements about how the intellectual property can be used and who owns it. Some like Sematech have been very sucessful. What are the principles that result in a sucessful consortium?

Individual Characteristics

2004-12-06T13:46:00.000-08:00

What role does the type of brain functioning, personality or temperament play in an innovation commons?

Open Source

2004-12-06T13:44:00.000-08:00

I'm looking for comment here about how Open Source works and why.

Communication

2004-12-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

Communication between and among people is very complex. There are many channels and nuances. However, for the purpose of innovation, I have found the following simple model useful. It is based on knowledge and values.

If people seeking to communicate have the same knowledge and the same values, communication is very easy. This is what happens between friends. It's comfortable. However, if you really have exactly the same knowledge and values, the transactions carry no real meaning. Nothing new can be created.

If the people have the same knowledge but different values, when communication is attempted, an argument usually results. Operating on the same knowledge with different values results in different interpretation and prioritization of the knowledge. This quite often happens in politics and religion. (And, it may be going on in America right now.)

If people have different knowledge and values, not much communication can take place. If an attempt at communication is made, a lack of understanding results, or at best a misunderstanding occurs.

If people have different knowledge but the same values, a conversation can result. In a conversation, innovation can occur.

Click here to see matrix.

The key strategy in any communication endeavor is to try to move toward a conversation. In the real world, the situation is not as black and white as I have depicted it. People almost always have some shared values or knowledge. The key to creating a conversation is to find some shared values and use these to build a conversation based on the different knowledge.

The more different the knowledge and values are, the higher the potential is for breakthrough innovations. The less different the knowledge and values are, the more likely incremental innovation will result.

For a copy of a presentation on these principles as well as MBTI in communication, click here(PDF).

Markets

2004-12-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

A market is a type of commons as well, and in some cases may even be considered an "innovation commons".

I have read about mythology, anthropology and history, but I am by no means expert. Over the years I've developed a sense of the development of markets that I want to share. Much of this has been developed through conversations with people, especially my partner, Donna Prestwood. It is not rigorous research, but I do want to share the story I've developed. I've put this Italics, because it is a story, not a history.

During times when our ancient ancestors were hunter/gatherers and lived in tribes, the concept of territory was developed (See I told you it was a story. I started with "once upon a time".) Knowledge of what existed outside the territory was limited. The "other" who lived outside your territory was either enemies or strangers. Both were feared. An incursion into your territory was almost surely to provoke an attack, even if the incursion was not an attack itself.

As the boundaries of the territory became established and known or even marked, the "other" avoided incursion unless intent upon an attack. Paths of travel began to be developed along the boundaries of the territories. The first paths bypassed the territories of the tribes.
Sometime during this development people got the idea of bringing gifts to the boundary of their own territory, to the edge of the known. The gifts were left a s a peace offering. Among some tribes this led to the development of concept of potlatch. The tribes brought gifts to the boundary in a type of asynchronous exchange. Potlatch cultures developed when winning meant giving the better gift. Either as peace offerings or potlatch, the practice did reduce the amount of physical conflicts.

Since strangers passed along these boundaries in transit around the territories, it was only natural that somehow they began to enter into the mix. The resulting development led to the creation of markets along these boundary/paths. And, eventually this led to the concentration of villages around the markets, especially at crossroads.

Early in our development, humans developed the sense of having to bring gifts to the edge of the known. In some cultures this ended up as sacrifices. In others, it was food or precious goods. We carry that tradition on now in the form of gifts brought to the altar of our religion. The altar representing symbolically the boundary between what is known and the unknowable.

As a result, the original concept of a market was that it was held on "sacred" ground; it was safe. The boundary was not a place for war. It was a place of peace. Markets today should be "sacred" in that sense. This may be why we are so incensed when someone violates the trust of the market and cheats, lies, or steals.

In some cultures the concept of exchanging gifts at the borders, (Still celebrated by the way every Friday evening in the fall at Texas high school football games with the students of the two schools exchanging gifts at the 50 yard line before the start of the game. Apparently the gifts don't work to bring peace and hostilities have to be undertaken however ritual the hostilities are.) led to the development of a bartering system. From that came the concept of the development of value for different types of goods. Note that adding strangers into the mix brought different types of goods into the market not indigenous to the tribes.

In what sense is a market an innovation commons? Goods produced or manufactured are the embodiment of knowledge. In the ancient market, an individual skilled in making axes could teach the "other" how to make the ax. But, it's more efficient and rewarding to exchange the ax for other things needed or money. Even if the goods are grown, harvested, hunted or extracted, their presence at the market embodies the application of knowledge. Information was also exchanged at a market as well, in a loose bartering sense.

One of the things that makes a market work is the mechanism of valuing goods and services. Another is the trust and safety. Others? I welcome comments.

Are we now at a point in the development of civilization where an innovation commons would work? If so, what are conditions or principles that would assure its success? What can we learn from successful markets?

What can we learn from e-Bay? I don't know enough about it to comment, so I would welcome other comments. One element of e-Bay I do know about is the rating system. Buyers and sellers rate each other after the transaction. A bad reputation prevents you from further participation in the market.

Idea Journal

2004-11-22T21:41:00.000-08:00

I recently read up on this interesting concept of saving ideas in a journal or other storage method. Presently, I have been writing my inspirational ideas on a note card and tossing it in a box for review at a later date. (The trouble is there never seems to be that future date to do the review!)

I'm interested in hearing how others store their ideas and if anyone has a systematic method to review them. Charles Cave had some interesting ideas on his blog.

I also am wondering if possibly this is the place to begin when trying to introduce innovation to a business where it is not systematically practiced.

Scenario Planning

2004-11-22T14:43:00.000-08:00

An area of specific interest to me is scenario planning -- that is, the methodologies used for brainstorming and developing forecasts. It would be my hope that the Commons would engage in some "big thinking" scenario planning to guide us in our later thinking.

If this is also of interest to the group, I can post further information on the research I've done, as well as general scenario planning resources.

Twelve Step Programs

2004-11-19T13:37:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine mentioned this morning that I might want to look at the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, an Alcoholics Anonymous book. His comment after listening to my discussion of what an innovation commons was that AA meetings are an innovation commons where the innovation is change in participants. If so this is a very successful example of a specifically focused innovation commons. He said to look at the Traditions to find keys to how it works, so here they are:

The Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous
1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.
2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
3. The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.
4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.
5. Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
6. An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
7. Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.
8. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.
9. A.A., as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.
10. Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.
11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.
12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.

They do seem to look like some of the principles we're developing. You can find a good review of the book at http://www.epinions.com/book-review-7CFB-C1947EB-3A3A0D26-prod1

The Failure of the Commons

2004-11-19T11:48:00.000-08:00

"The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component:

The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.
The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effect of overgrazing is shared by all the herdsmen, while the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all (Hardin, 1968).

The lessons of the Tragedy of the Commons have been learnt many times over the millennia, but apparently have been forgotten as often. According to Hardin (1968), such tragedies have been repeated over the course of the human history. This is because human beings had suffered from a natural tendency of psychological denial as individuals continued to try to gain the maximum individual benefits at the cost to the society, whose sufferings extended to the individuals concerned. One of the solutions for Hardin is through education whereby such awareness and knowledge about the Tragedy of the Commons gets refreshed by generation after generation so that such wrong doings are to be avoided (Hardin, 1968). In conclusion, Hardin stresses that freedom in the commons brings ruin to all and the only solution is "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon."(Hardin, 1968; 1992).

Interestingly (from a research point of view), for Hardin, the notion of the Tragedy of the Commons can be generalised and applied in a wide range of spheres in our life. Where he has suggested that such a notion may be used to enlighten a class of human problems which can be called "no technical solution problems"(Hardin, 1968). One member of this class of problems is the pollution problem. As Hardin puts it:

'In a reverse way, the Tragedy of the Commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in—sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air; and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.'

The Tragedy of the Commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the Tragedy of the Commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favours pollution. The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream—whose property extends to the middle of the stream—often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past his door. The law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to adapt it to this newly perceived aspect of the commons (Hardin, 1968). "

A selection from Dr. Jin's thesis. Complete document found at

http://www.geocities.com/sonicjin/newthesis.doc

Patents

2004-11-18T10:03:00.000-08:00

"The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."
Abraham Lincoln

The first written argument in England for a patent was provided by Jacobus Acountius, a citizen of Trent, in 1559 in a petition to Queen Elizabeth:

"Jacobus Acountius to the Queen. Nothing is more honest than that those who, by searching, have found out things useful to the public should have some fruits of their rights and labors as meanwhile they abandon all other modes of gain, are at much expense in experiments and often sustain much loss as has happened to me. I have discovered most useful things, new kinds of wheel machines, and of furnaces for dyers and brewers when known will be used without my consent except there be a penalty and I poor with expenses and labor, shall have no returns. Therefore, I beg a prohibition against using any wheel machines, either for grinding or bruising, or any furnaces like mine without my consent."

This argument, although 445 years old, still provides insight into why we have patents. Examine the argument carefully. What Jacobus Acountius says is that he has invested time, money, and creativity into devising something new. He also implies that his machines are novel because he had to discover them, not obvious because he had to search, and useful.

Is it not right, he states that I should be given protection for my work, because of my investigation? The answer, still found in our patent system, is yes - if you agree to teach others what you have learned. This unique arrangement of exchanging a temporary monopoly on the use of an invention for revealing the concept has stood the test of time and is a valuable ingredient to our economic system.

In antiquity, the patent concept was very broad. It was granted by monarchy to establish rank, precedence, land conveyance, monopoly, and invention. The earliest known monopolies were granted to cooks in about 500 BC in Sybaris, Greece for unique dishes.

The patent concept, as we know it, evolved from this through Greece, Rome, Germany, France, and England. There was much abuse of patents as they were handed out to friends of the ruling monarch even if they did not do the work on the invention. Patent law precedents for the current system were most influenced by Queen Elizabeth in England.

Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States, includes this statement:

"The Congress shall have Power...To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

A "patent" protects an "invention." Every year there are more than 100,000 people who have ideas that they feel should be rewarded with a patent. That is where the patent system plays a vital role in today's economy. As Dr. Chester Carlson (the inventor of xerography) said:

"It takes patience to stay with an idea. In my case, I am sure I would not have done so if it were not for the hope of eventual reward."

To read the whole article, click here.

Patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets are all essential ingredients in our economy. The idea of an innovation commons flies against tradition and expectations. To expect someone or the organization that person represents to contribute intellectual property without being able to secure that as property through patents, trademarks and copyrights or to hold it as a trade secret, is difficult. The concept that my organization or I will benefit more from the synergy that results from an innovation commons, that my individual contribution seems almost un-American. For once something is in the commons, it can't be protected.

Clearly there are concerns related to an innovation commons where intellectual property issues exist. How do we overcome those concerns?

I see at least four different types of commons:

Open. In a sense science commons and the Internet are open innovation commons
Organizational. All the participants are within an organization or team.
Membership. We are a membership commons. Anyone can join who will contribute.
Cooperative. In a cooperative commons, there are legal structures to control and protect intellectual property. (Like Mike Warren's Co-Innovation posting).

Science

2004-11-18T06:22:00.000-08:00

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" -- Isaac Newton in: Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675/1676*

Science has more or less successfully had an innovation commons for years. The development of the "scientific method" is credited to Roger Bacon. At times the commons has been limited to specific countries, or regions or alliances. And, at various times threats like trade imbalances, wars, the Cold War, military threats or terrorism have placed limitations upon who can participate and what types of sharing can occur. However, the trend seems to be to expand the science commons to the whole earth.

I've been thinking about this while working on the idea of an innovation commons. I have not researched this issue, I'm just drawing on past knowledge and experience, but there seems to be several principles that one can derive from science:

The very strong culture of referencing and footnoting contributions.
A strong culture against plagiarism
Mechanisms for contributions to exist for a very long time.
Mechanisms to index and file contributions
Libraries with low barriers to entry that provide access
Cultures and enablers that incent participation
Reputation systems
An inherent belief in the system not only by participants but by those who administer participants as well
Institutions that foster the creation of knowledge
Professional associations that facilitate the commons and help participants to develop
In some cases, government funding

* See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ShouldersOfGiants for more information. This quote, which I've used before, is not nearly as impressive when you understand the context. But, out of context, it makes a good point.

Co-Innovation

2004-11-17T03:39:00.000-08:00

Innovation Commons Network

Perhaps some definitions would help to put collaborative innovation in context. Here's my suggestion:

KNOWLEDGE BULLETIN Co-innovation

INTRODUCTION & DEFINITION

Co-innovation refers to extending the scale and scope of external partnerships and alliances to access and exploit new technologies, knowledge, and markets.

Concepts such as ‘supply chain management’, ‘partnerships’, and ‘networking’ are established best practice in many industry sectors. These techniques show how companies can manage their operations by collaborating within the supply chain, but they are also important to the way in which companies innovate; concepts such as ‘early supplier involvement in product development’ and ‘innovation networks’ are becoming increasingly important.

RELEVANCE & IMPORTANCE

Not all companies possess a full range of capabilities necessary for commercialising their innovations, and research indicates that firms with an intensive network of linkages to external sources of expertise are more successful than those without it. The capability of organisations to co-innovate with other organisations can be critical in sustaining their competitive position.
In many industries, firms are looking for ways to cut concept-to-customer development time, improve quality, and reduce the cost of new products. The benefits of accessing external expertise are particularly important to small firms with limited internal resources.

• In the game of competing technologies, co-innovation facilitates the formation of compatibility among technologies, which results in faster market acceptance.

• Co-innovation is one of the best means of targeting new markets – especially where trade barriers are high.

• Co-innovation with suppliers results in greater cross-fertilisation, reduced costs and improved efficiency.

• Collaborating with customers for innovation helps in the generation of product ideas, gathering information about user requirements, feedback on new product concepts, and assistance with the development and testing of prototypes.

KEY POINTS

Co-innovation inside the value chain allows companies to supplement their internal design and development activities by accessing the technical and managerial skills of customers and suppliers. Horizontal linkages, with competitors and other firms may result in cost and risk sharing, as well as accessing new markets, but this is less common in practice. Co-innovation promotes shorter product lead times due to effective collaboration among developers, customers, manufacturers and suppliers. In addition, higher customer satisfaction levels are achieved due to active customer and design chain involvement in the product development process.

RECOMMENDATIONS & PRACTICAL TIPS

• Customer/supplier co-innovation requires a detailed formal evaluation and selection of potential partners prior to consideration for involvement. Only trusted partners with a proven track record should be approached.

• Project outcome objectives should be shared and explicitly understood by all parties involved.

• Suppliers can be asked to contribute to the design and development of new products and processes.

• Customers involved in the design and development processes can help to establish the optimum price/performance combination, and therefore, the optimum specification.

• University research can be a source of significant innovation-generating knowledge.

• Government can play a network management role in brokering greater collaboration between firms.

• Technology and knowledge intensive industries have a greater need for intra- and inter-regional cooperation than industries operating on a low technological scale.

WARNINGS & POTENTIAL PITFALLS

Subcontracting out processes that add considerable value to the firm’s profitability, or those that are key to the development to the company’s core competence, may reduce the innovative capability of the buyer firm.

Firms are faced with the dilemma that on the one hand they wish to learn from their partners, however, on the other hand they want to retain their own core proprietary assets and thus prevent leakage of critical know-how.

Many firms are reluctant to enter horizontal collaborative agreements because of concerns over the ownership of project outcomes.

Entrepreneurs do not invest time and money in the development of networks unless they can expect clear profits for their business.

Further information available at http://www.greymatteruk.com/base_w.htm

Commons Definition

2004-11-16T14:31:00.000-08:00

I always find it useful to look at the roots of words when starting a discussion. The first pace I usually look is in Joseph Shipley's The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. The entire entry is quoted below. The net of it is, as I understand it, is that a commons is something that is used together, always changes but remains one. A plurality that is also unitary. The first word listed is the fundamental Indo-European root word. The II means that there were two words spelled mei that had slightly different meanings.

mei II, expanded as meig, mein, melt: change, move away; exchange, arrange for services (hence applied to public office). Gk, amoeba (a negative): changes but remains one. am(o)ebean: alternately answering, as amoebean verses. The Saturday Review (London), 25 May 1861, spoke of an "amoebean exchange of witticism between the Bench and the Bar." In March, "Spring and Winter sing an amoebean song." amoebiform: like the Old Man of the Sea, protean. (The prophetic sea god who could change his shape at will, Proteus, is from Gk protos: first; see per 1. Proteus is also a genus of bacteria.) L, meatus; and via commeatus, Fr, conge, congee.

L mutare, mutatum: change. mutation. commute, commutations and permutations. permeate. irremeable. transmute; mutable, immutable. mutual. mew, mews, mo(u)lt. The verb mew was used of birds moulting: changing feathers. Then the plural form mews (now treated as a singular) was used of the buildings where the royal hunting hawks were kept; then of the royal and noble stables on such grounds. Many short lanes and London streets today are thus called mews.

Also, common: used together. The Common: ground owned by the community, usually a central square of grass, in early days used for grazing. The Commons: British Lower House of Parliament, representatives of the "common people." communicate, excommunicate. communism, coined in 1840 by Goodwyn Barmby, who in 1841 founded the London Communist Propaganda Society. Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1847; in 1849 he came to London to study in the Museum Library, publishing the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867.

Hence, too, community and commune. municipal, municipality: first, a Roman town with its own regulations (munia capere: to hold [its own] services). munificent. remuneration. immune; immunity, immunology. Also migrate, emigrate, immigration; transmigration. remuda, on the western ranch. Gc gamaidans: badly changed; wounded. mad, maim, mayhem; mean. bemean, virtually supplanted by demean; see men II.

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch . . .
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the earth, and everything that's in it,
And-which is more-you'll be a man, my son.
-Kipling, If

"Adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense!" - Rev. Sydney Smith (d. 1845)

"Common sense is most uncommon sense."

Honesty

2004-11-16T10:35:00.000-08:00

I have a family story which illustrates how important honesty is to the idea of an Innovation Commons. My husband (when he was working) made an important innovation in the plant he was heading. His boss took a visitor through the plant and showed the visitor my husband's un-patented invention. The visitor promptly went home and patented Harold's idea. So Harold had to pay to use his own "brain child". You might use this as the first assignment for the Innovation Commons ... how to keep this kind of thing from happening or from ruining the value of the basic idea. Annie

Smart Mobs

2004-11-15T07:51:00.000-08:00

This is a must read book! It’s well written, exciting and scary. The technologies that the book is about have many potentially positive and negative outcomes. If you believe that society will still be dominated in the future by "zero sum" philosophies, at the individual, corporate and governmental level, then the outcome looks very scary. If you believe that society is ready to adopt "non-zero sum" games then the outlook is exciting and enormous changes will result that are positive. Non-zero sum games are behaviors that include "the unique human power and pleasure that comes from doing something that enriches everyone, a game where nobody has to lose for everyone to win." Zero sum games are best typified by our sports. There is a winner and there is a loser. When the rules are bent or broken, then tragic results can occur, i.e. Enron, which is zero-sum corporate behavior personified. Or, a present nemesis, spam. Spam is where one person wins and everyone else looses.

Smart Mobs

Creating an Innovation Commons

2004-11-15T07:50:00.000-08:00

Innovation Commons Network

2004-11-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

Why do some collaborative efforts succeed and others fail? What's required to create successful efforts time and time again? What role does software play? If these questions interest you then you may want to participate in a collaborative effort to develop some of the principles of a successful "innovation commons".

This group of people is developing a set of principles for a successful "innovation commons". Below is an introduction to an article I wrote on some of the principles, but I know that this is not complete and a group of people are engaged in online conversations on the topic. If this interests you, please click on this link or send me an e-mail (paul@theinnovationroadmap.com) and I will send you a copy of the article and include you in the discussion.

Paul Schumann