Yochai Benkler: „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.“ (Link)

Erste Appetit-Happen für die weitere Diskussion:

Procter&Gamble

Bombardier Transportation

I’m not usually a germophobe, but the last few months I’ve been walking around opening doors with my elbows and washing my hands constantly. I’ve been freaked out by the constant updates on Facebook about what my friends/friends’ kids have come down with now. So far, my immune system has held up pretty well, but I always worry that H1N1 is only a doorknob away.

These are trying times for corporate immune systems too. The economic meltdown has exposed corporations to all sorts of risks they don’t deal with in the regular course of business. Many corporate immune systems have failed, putting millions of people out of work. It begs the question: how resilient is your company? And how can you make your corporate immune system stronger?

I got to thinking about this corporate immune system concept after reading the new book The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It by Joshua Cooper Ramo. In this fantastic book, Ramo (former foreign editor of Time Magazine, now a foreign policy/strategy consultant at Kissinger Associates) offers his thoughts on what we as a society need to do to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Ramo talks a lot about the idea of creating a stronger global immune system. Here’s what he means:

“What we need now, both for our world and in each of our lives, is a way of living that resembles nothing so much as a global immune system: always ready, capable of dealing with the unexpected, as dynamic as the world itself. An immune system can’t prevent the existence of a disease, but without one even the slightest of germs have deadly implications.”

Ramo presents this in idea in the context of how we protect ourselves from a scary world– terrorists, rogue nations, nuclear proliferation, and all that, but the concept applies well to the corporate world as well– tough competitors, fickle customers, shrinking budgets– we corporate folks have our own demons.

So how do we shore up the ol’ immune system? Ramo refers to the philosophy of building resilience or “deep security” into the organization.

“Learning to think in deep-security terms means largely abandoning our idea that we can deter the threats we face and, instead, pressing to make our societies more resilient so we can absorb whatever strikes us. Resilience will be the defining concept of twenty-first century security, as crucial for your fast-changing job as it is for the nation. We can think of resilience as a measure of how much disturbance a system can absorb before it breaks down so fundamentally that it can’t easily return to the way it once was.”

Not surprisingly many of the most resilient organizations Ramo mentions in the book share a lot of characteristics familiar to us from the open source way. I’ve pulled out five ideas I think may be valuable for those interested in strengthening their company’s immune system.

1. Failing fast and often makes you stronger.

According to Ramo, the most resilient organizations are constantly challenged, with either people on the inside (or sometimes enemies) seeking out “bugs” in their system. This constant challenge is the way that many terrorist organizations have become as resilient as cockroaches– when you are always under attack and your weak points are exposed, you are always looking for ways to shore up the weak spots.

Each failure, whether one you cause yourself, or one caused by outside forces, makes you stronger. The faster you push the organization to the breaking point, the stronger you can become. Ramo thinks the most resilient organizations spend much more time analyzing their failures than they do celebrating their successes.

2. Create a meritocracy where power is shared.

In the traditional organization power resides at the top. But in a resilient organization, power is distributed to the places where it can be most efficiently used, and this actually makes the whole system stronger. In the open source world, we often talk about creating a meritocracy where the best ideas rule, no matter where they come from. I always think of meritocracy as a way to ensure the best ideas see the light of day, but Ramo also believes that that power distribution can actually help the organization become more secure and resilient in a world where you can not plan for every challenge you will face.

“It involves accepting that the most important things cannot be predicted with any great accuracy. It involves radically refiguring the balance sheet of power in such a way that the aim isn’t to hoard power but to give away as much of it as possible so it can be mashed, mixed, and used in new and decent ways.”

3. Empathize with the vision.

Ramo studies some of the most successful venture capitalists in the world, including Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital. I was very interested to see the weight that Moritz puts on being able to empathize with the original vision / mission / values of the organization.

“Moritz cultivated a skill few engineers cared about: the ability to empathize with company founders. It was crucial to see their dreams exactly as they did, he believed. Even if they were deluded, you had to know how and where to adjust their imagination. And sometimes– usually in the case of the most brilliant ones– they were on to something.”

When you are on the outside, embracing the vision requires empathy. When you are on the inside, it simply requires deep understanding and passion for the mission.

4. Create a culture that naturally  “swarms” problems.

From the book:

“Swarming is, of course, the classic immune-system response. It’s what happens when your blood clots after you slice your finger cutting cucumbers, and it’s what’s going on in your sinuses when you sneeze. This kind of self-organization, the ability to pull off an “all hands on deck” reaction, exists in many of the most efficient and resilient systems in our world.”

The funny thing is, the traditional corporate organizational model makes it almost impossible to swarm a problem. How many times have “that’s not in my job description” or “I have to stay in my lane” stopped people from collaborating to solve problems that can not be tackled by one part of the organization alone?

The open source movement has many examples of problems that have been solved by contributors swarming, not just within an organization, but among organizations. The Linux operating system itself is probably the most famous. And that swarm started here (or see my analysis of it here).

5. Create a compelling architecture of participation.

It seems like every book I read these days has at least one section about open source. Here’s what Ramo had to say:

“Take, for example, what economists call “peer production,” which is the previously unimagined economic twitch for sharing work that has built Wikipedia, file-sharing systems like BitTorrent (which now accounts for at least 50 percent of all Internet traffic), or “open source” operating systems… “Peers” can be producing anything from decisions to software, but what matters is that these efforts are largely bottom-up, which, strangely, makes them more efficient rather than less.”

First Ramo talks about how peer production creates ownership and engagement in places where it didn’t previously exist:

“Once users step into active engagement, the dynamics of the system shift forever: users stop being consumers and become participants. This pushes the opportunity for innovation to the edges of a network, where users reside, instead of leaving it in the hands of some slow-moving, committee-oriented, centralized manufacturing center.”

And where most organizational architectures began to break down from stress as they get larger (think bureaucracy), a decentralized and open architecture of participation actually becomes stronger as it gets bigger.

“The more users a centralized system has, the closer it comes to exhaustion… But the more users a decentralized system has, the more efficient it becomes, since work can be spread around or picked up by whomever can do it best and fastest…. The best resilient systems… don’t just bend and snap back. They manage to get stronger because of the stress. They capture the good from avalanches of change without letting the bad wipe them out.”

So what’s the punchline? How can you strengthen your company’s immune system? My observation is that a lot of the ideas you see above will be implemented within the dark matter of organizations– in the corporate vision, the brand, the culture, the communities that surround and define what the company is all about.

Investing in these things may be the key to creating a resilient 21st century organization, yet doing so requires a leap of faith.

You may be hard pressed to find traditional business metrics that support these investments. But while you might not be able to find reliable metrics, the evidence of their impact is all around you. Seek out examples in books like this one, or The Starfish and the Spider or The Future of Management, among others.

And of course I’ll continue to bring you the evidence as I find it.

The following is an observation from @shanerguy about the future of social production in the information economy. “Although it seems to be the sentiment in our class, do you think sometimes this almost dogmatic belief that the improvement of society is payment enough will take hold in the greater public? I know not everyone does everything for money, but we all still have bills to pay. This is especially true in the current times with high un- and underemployment. I just wonder how altruistic people are when they have no income or resources and can’t find work because it’s all been crowd sourced.” I found this very thought provoking and it brought up a consideration I had not previously entertained.

Perhaps like most things there will be benefits as well as costs in a system motivated for love not money. The motivation doesn’t guarantee that the ends will be as altruistic as the means. Especially if cultural political tensions between east and west and the Muslim world are exacerbated. There is a possible conflict between the idea of social benefit and identities that perceive “good” or “worthy” societies…one of the things that Benkler points out is that the benefits provided by the networked information economy have the potential to be distributed indiscriminately because of the ease of access. In a world that is often torn apart by conflicting religions, ideologies, and dogmas will societies begin to build walls for reasons other than those of economics? Perhaps the altruistic “good for society” rational that enables peer production will also motivate peer produced protectionism.

Benkler, Yochai. “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” Yale University Press, New Haven, 200.

In his book “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom”, Yochai Benkler examines the emerging social production in the digitally networked environment and how it transformed our most fundamental understandings of our society, economy and democracy. These new ways in which we produce and share information in the digital network, not only changed all of our lives but also the way information is capitalized, emphasizing on the commons-based peer production, the collaborative efforts, such as Wikipedia, Creative Commons and open source software, which are based on sharing information. (The Wealth of Networks is itself published under a Creative Commons license)

There are three parts to the book. In the first part, Benkler explains the emerging patterns of nonmarket individual and cooperative social behavior, and how this affects the economics of information production and sharing. The second part delves into the political economy of property and analysis to claim that these emerging practices offer defined improvements in autonomy, democratic discourse, cultural creation, and justice. The third section addresses the policies and questions the future of the internet and opportunities for democratic participation, and the creation of culture.

In the industrial society, information economy has been simply described as the information and services, rather than physical goods and services, which are based on the exchange of knowledge (DFEEST, 2008). Industrial information economy is now being displaced by the networked information economy. As Chris Anderson also argues the post-industrial information economy in his book “Free: the Future of a Radical Price”, the marginal cost of every product on the digital platform approaches zero, because once it is digitized it costs almost nothing to reproduce and distribute information. Information as a good and information technologies have replaced the goods which are made of atoms, and made a radical change in the way information is capitalized.

Benkler brings forward the possibility that “a culture where information were shared freely could prove more economically efficient than one where innovation is frequently encumbered by patent or copyright law, since the marginal cost of re-producing most information is effectively nothing.” (Wikipedia, 2009) He examines this radical economic change and how social dynamics drives the information production and information sharing to a non-market and decentralized framework. Previous communication technologies centralized communication, but the Internet and the declining costs of computation, communication and storage capacity provide new ways of social sharing and exchange of information. Although social sharing and exchange of information, is not a new phenomena. It’s not the first time we do good things to each other as social beings, but It’s the first time it is having major economic impact.

Information economy is shifting from physical products to decentralized and non-market information goods. Networked information economy, is not dependant on the market strategies. The most important components of the information economy – computation, storage and communications capacity – are now in the hands of population at large.

As a modality of economic production, social sharing and exchange is decentralized authority in a non-market based production framework. Below chart shows the four transactional frameworks and where this emerging networked information economy takes its place.

Benkler's four transactional frameworks

Benkler brings four economic observations:

1- The proprietary strategies of information economy are not as dominant as it is perceived. Most of education, arts, and sciences are merit based or volunteer based. Most of information is derived from non-market based systems.

2- The proprietary strategies make access to information resources more expensive for all as ownership becomes more restrictive.

3- As the information production, storage and sharing systems become cheaper and accessible, non-proprietary peer-production and sharing models become more attractive than ever.

4- The rise of peer-production: We coproduce and exchange economic goods and services, but we do not count these in the economic census. “The pooling of human creativity and of computation, communication, and storage enables nonmarket motivations and relations to play a much larger role in the production of the information environment than it has been able to for at least decades, perhaps for as long as a century and a half.” (Benkler, 2006, pg. 464)

In conclusion, Benkler in his book, brings a solid analysis to the emerging networked information economy, a detailed explanation to the social production and sharing dynamics, and discusses the social and cultural possibilities in the future. The book covers many important issues, such as intellectual property, copyright laws, personal freedom, and democracy, and it might worth to read through the whole book for a deeper understanding of the nature of the networked information economy. However, the length of the book and his long labyrinthine sentences are intimidating. I strongly suggest readers to have a look at his interviews, talks and lectures online to get the gist of his argument and warm up, before reading the book.

REFERENCES:

Anderson, C. (2009). Free: The Future of a Radical Price. New York: Hyperion.

Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.

DFEEST (2008). “What is the Information Economy?”. Creating Online Opportunity. Information Economy. Retrieved on Nov 15, 2009 from http://www.informationeconomy.sa.gov.au/digital_engagement/jargonbuster/information_economy

Yochai Benkler. (Oct 13, 2009). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved Nov 16, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yochai_Benkler#cite_note-2

As part of the new GeekRetreat at Stanford in the Western Cape, the fabulously talented Jackie Scala (Scala Designs) volunteered her time to develop a new shiny home for the GeekRetreat. Guy Taylor (Telamenta) took Jackie’s design and built a Drupal implementation around it (helped by Noto Modungwa and Skip). We’re slowly starting to find jobs for ourselves as the GeekRetreat community matures. We have a small team working on ‘public relations’ and there are individuals working on sponsorship, nominations and helping out to develop themes and content areas on the wiki.

After working on this kind of self-organising community work for so many years, I still feel that it’s a process with very few rules, and that each time I do this, I feel like I have to start from scratch. So this time, I’m trying to build a process that someone else could follow. It’s not easy, because it seems like every new event will be different, but I’m really determined to at least get some of the way by building templates for invitations, processes, and communication.

It’s been fascinating watching the DrumBeat community at Mozilla go through a similar process. I feel like there is so much great research to do on analyzing these communities and finding easier ways of getting things done in decentralized groups. Maybe *that* would be a good follow-up for GTD in the brave new world of online communities

In the course of history we have been through so many changes. Some people went swiftly in accepting; while some went against all odds just not to adapt. As I read Wikinomics, every now and then I look back and always find myself amazed of how much everything in our world has changed and is changing.

Then I also realized, in every change that is happening there are some who will not be open and will still cling to the old ways. A techie person would ask, “Why don’t these people  accept these gadgets and Wikis and stuff? These advances make our lives easier!” I won’t be mainly talking about New Social Media per se, but I would like to delve in why people, especially people in corporations, are afraid of Peer Production; the newest trend in adaptive organizations.

Two factors are discussed in the reading. Institutional inertia and the elderly workforce. First off, rules, routines, and norms-all that is traditional- are difficult to change or to let go. It is just like in almost everything wherein we are hesitant to let go of something that has been with us for a long time. I remember our MARINA (Maritime Industry Authority) case study last year regarding communication tools. They are, in all sense, traditional. The agency is a big fan of traditional communication tools and claims that these are all effective. The group understands that the agency, and others as well, might really find these tools effective, but we cannot ignore the fact that if they just give new social media tools a chance then more likely than not, this agency and others would be more effective and efficient. Second, the elderly workforce may resist these technological advancements. They may be afraid of the unknown, and everything that is not on their sight on their generation.

But the way I see it, non acceptance of technology, Peer Production in particular is because of some other factors and reasons as well. These are implied on the readings. I find it interesting to expound on them.

Managers are afraid to lose control over their employees. Since peer production lets people do their job the way and in a setting that is most convenient to them, management’s control is set to the minimum. Power is not their monopoly anymore. Employees will not be under you because their concern is to find results on the company’s problems no matter how and what it tolerably takes. Are you this kind of manager? Maybe, it’s time to change your mindset and see that control and power is not everything. Control and power with an inefficient and dying organization is useless.

Managers are afraid to lose control and authority on decision making. Peer production requires collaboration between people. And here the decision also not lies on the manager’s hand alone. Questions can come from all directions, and solutions and decisions too, can spring out of these interlocking and interrelated discussions. Here and in the first one, the key word is DECENTRALIZATION. One word that traditional managers are afraid of.

Managers are afraid that competitors might get access to their trade secrets. This is I think the main reason why companies make themselves impenetrable. They are so much up to competition that they shut their company from the outside world; “What is ours is ours alone”. Because peer production loosens and nearly erases all these organizational boundaries and make companies and outside people in the same playing field as collaborators, it is understandable why managers are afraid. Spies may get in easily and get access to their companies’ most kept possessions.  Peer production also requires that you give out company information and maybe some tricks of the trade to the public. Traditional managers don’t want that.

But the thing that some managers don’t see is that in their shutting their companies to the outside world they are also shutting their companies to potential people, and reliable information that is what they might be really looking for. The value that they don’t see is that of collaboration. Of discussion. More input is more output. And the more problems can be solved and the more questions can be answered. And, the more things can be discovered.

This quote is already a cliche but I love it still: “The only permanent thing in this world is change.” True. When we look at history books, when we browse at science books, when we look at any book or just ask the people around us to give a thought or two about the time then and now, one concept always rises; CHANGE.

I, a student, can see how technology can boost our organizations and make people come together. Given that people of power-and everyone-use technology and new social media, and peer production wisely and responsibly, I can see a win-win situation for everyone. Maybe it’s about time managers see these, with a mind that is not self-biased; and with eyes that are open, eager, and wanting to see. Only then can they be convinced to walk through the doors of technology.

“Technology may open doors, but it can’t force people to walk through them.”  -Tapscott and Williams, 2006

Some time ago a discussion emerged in the blogosphere about the question whether 3d printing will make it to the mainstream (take a look at my post about this debate). Today 3d printers seem to be increasingly taken for granted and rightly so, especially if one looks at the scope of the products currently made with 3d printing (I recently wrote about “rapid prototyping” being an obsolete term since increasing amount of end products is being manufactured using this technology). This time the argument is about the marriage of desktop 3d printing and peer to peer communication. Apparently the debate started from Bruce Sterling saying that “objects are print-outs” at the Reboot 11 conference. Fast Company caught the topic and discussed “The Desktop Manufacturing Revolution”. However they did put an emphasis on the fact that the major change (if and when it happens) will not be about “desktop” manufacturing but rather that about “democratization” of manufacturing.

Clearly the idea is strong, but have some downsides. One of them is piracy. Designers, architects and manufacturers are likely to face the problem currently faced by music industry. Fluid Forms makes an argument in a similar line and I did as well – in a short article on design and piracy from 2008. The problem however is best captured in an abstract of “Napster Fabbing”, Marshall Burns’ and James Howison’s presentation from 2001 quoted by Ponoko blog:

“If record companies had a fit over Napster, wait ’til manufacturers find out you can download Rolex.fab or Ferrari.fab and make them yourself.”

Clearly these problems will demand a new approach. However they do open new possibilities as well. Particularly the possibility of peer production of objects and, with time, of spaces as well. It’s easy to guess that the name of this blog is derived from this notion. Companies allowing it’s customers to customize their products on-line will have to adapt first since they are the ones most likely to suffer from eventual fraud. They are less immune for two reasons:

- their products are expressed entirely in a form of a code and the code is available online.

- their products are manufactured using CAM – technologies available not only to large-scale manufacturers but to private people as well.

It means that mass customization practitioners will soon have to figure out a new business model in which a product code is shared and open-sourced to some extend. When that happens the phrase “open-source design” will gain a new meaning – one similar to meaning of “open-source” in computer science community.

Last question is how far away are we from being able to manufacture “Rolex.fab” or “Ferrari.fab” using additive digital manufacturing techniques at home? Recently published report: “Road Map for Additive Fabrication: Identyfing of Freeform Processing” might be a good start for looking for an answer (I have found it via Replicator blog. It seems that the development in additive manufacturing technology takes place on an increasingly high pace and a new multi-material 3d printer from Objet proves that.

The crowd (crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, peer production) is wise when it is focused; http://tr.im/t0tg

After the class, I was not sure how to go about this week’s blog. I only decided on what to write last thursday.

So here goes..

Wikinomics is a fun read and you would get a lot of insight from it. It gives you a lot of everything without making you hate reading. Attempting to describe how we would continue to improve in living with all these technology and chaos.

One particular concept caught my attention when I read the two chapters is PEER PRODUCTION or PEERING. It describes what happens when people collaborate to pursue improvement or growth. I also remembered one of my elective classes for this sem which is PA141 or popular culture. Peer production or even the net is a part of popular culture. It involves the collaboration and involvement between masses. People still decide how they would use the internet and what their favorites are. Reality check, even if there are a lot of social networks right now you still decide what to use (sometimes influenced by other people and your need). The rise of these social networking sites suggests as well as confirms the influence of many people combined. Facebook wouldn’t be what it is right now if people preferred not using it. It is popular since people deemed it necessary for them to engage in these kinds of technology.

—

It is a fact that we usually buy stuff if it is either very needed or very popular, that is why companies highlight these qualities when selling their products. You would often see products being demonstrated on the television telling us about the product and that we really need to buy it even if we haven’t seen it or tried using it yet.

Another check is that businesses today who sell products don’t just appeal to their consumers by providing numerous advertisements instead they involve them in the process of production and selection of ideas. Competition becomes fairly higher as more and more people become involved, no more centralized power or dictatorship. You would see different businesses using everything that is popular from A(H1N1) to Michael Jackson, people see everything as opportunities to sell. In this very bloodthirsty economy, businesses strive to survive. But how do Filipino businesses compete with the others around the world? Simply innovation and passion, with the right amount of these two components you will standout. Just like some of the Filipino all over the world that made us proud to be Filipinos, we should embrace culture and be creative.

(Example is the increasing popularity of Filipino made furniture in the global market. Many prefer the items from the Philippines since they are unique pieces made from exceptional materials.)

In making yourself known or in trying to succeed you have to become the greater thinker, the greater doer. Overall,  just try to be greater.

Lo studio dei social media e delle loro dinamiche è un’attività, per ovvi motivi, recente e le conclusioni a cui giungono le ricerche possono apparire contraddittorie.

Tra i numerosi ed interessanti paper del  Social Computing Lab, sezione degli HPLabs, due evidenziano conclusioni in apparente contrasto.

Molti studi dimostrano che, nei siti di content sharing come YouTube, Flickr o Digg, la produzione di contenuti online segue la famigerata legge di potenza: un ristretto numero di utenti – che rappresenta il vitale nocciolo duro di queste comunità – genera la stragrande maggioranza dei contenuti stessi.

Una ricerca condotta dal direttore delSocial Computing Lab, Bernardo A. Huberman,  dimostra innanzitutto che la perdita di interesse da parte degli altri membri della comunità per i contenuti di un particolare utente è strettamente correlata alla decisione di questi smettere di produrne.

Si può quindi ipotizzare, e dimostrare, che i membri più attivi, quasi devoti, che producono contenuti a ritmo continuo per lunghi periodi di tempo vengono motivati e ripagati da un’attenzione sempre maggiore; si innesca un circolo virtuoso (feedback loops of attention), in cui più un utente contribuisce, più aumenta la sua popolarità (il numero di suoi fan), più riceve attenzione, più produce.

Non è da escludere che, per ottenere questo risultato, gli stakanovisti della peer production imparino non solo a migliorare la qualità dei loro contenuti ma ad adattarli al gusto prevalente della comunità o, meglio, di una determinata nicchia.

Sarebbe tutto chiaro se un’altra ricerca compiuta dallo stesso autore analizzando le dinamiche associate a 10 milioni di video di YouTube non rivelasse che più spesso un individuo carica contenuti meno probabilità avrà di replicare risultati favorevoli di audience ottenuti in passato.

Una spiegazione piuttosto ovvia deriva dall’attenuarsi dell’”effetto novità” ma coniugare i risultati delle due ricerche è più arduo.

Posso avanzare l’ipotesi che all’aumentare dei contributi sarà sì sempre più difficile replicare grandi exploits sul singolo contenuto ma si riuscirà comunque ad acquisire una certa popolarità basata sulla qualità media dei contenuti prodotti.

This past 26 March 2009 I attended a workshop at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) entitled Modes of Governance in Digitally Networked Environments. The session was impeccably organised by Christian Pentzold and Malte Ziewitz. Once again I found myself marvelling at the sheer diversity of digital environments that social scientists are today grappling with. The starting point  here was the common misconception that digitally networked environments, as the organisers aptly put it, ‘magically govern themselves’. Particularly

when traditional modes of governance like law and centralized regulations fail, researchers tend to resort to rather vague ideas like ’self-regulation’, ‘decentralization’, ‘liberalization’, or ‘peer production’ to describe the complex interactions and mechanisms that take place in large-scale, loose-knit socio-technical networks. Moreover, the network itself is often contrasted with markets or hierarchies as a new mode of governance in its own right.

The presentations formed a rich set of governance case studies ranging from local e-government in France and Malaysia (my own example)  to an academic mailing list based in Greece, predictive consumer modelling, Wikipedia, the internet browser Firefox, the US political blog Daily Kos and the virtual world Second Life.

The question posed by the organisers that came back to me during the wrap-up session was: ‘Is there evidence for a new form of networked governance?’. My tentative reply, on the basis of the studies presented throughout the day, is that there appears to be no such emergent form of  C21 governance. Instead, what we find is a great diversity of digitally mediated practices and processes around different endeavours (blogging on issues of the day, getting a second life, editing an online encyclopaedia, governing a locality, etc.). At the same time, earlier practices and institutions (i.e. sedimented sets of practices, Giddens 1984)  have not gone away, for example, the familiar bureaucratic practices of local government that I encountered in a Malaysian suburb.

See preliminary report by Malte Ziewitz here

peer production and crowdsourcing creating new business models?

via Future of PR: When Agencies Represent Communities – not Brands

Let’s Save Some Money. Do Not Delay – Get the Benefits Today!

“We are considering the final three options to help us do cost reductions. We will make our final decision in a month’s time, and expect to implement a system by September”.

Excuse me? Why wait??

I have had this conversation three times in the last month, and each time my response has been the same. ‘Why wait?’

In today’s environment, cost reduction and control is paramount. Fortunately many enlightened companies are using the economic crisis as an opportunity to rethink their cost structure and business methods without resorting to knee-jerk headcount reductions. And yes, there are plenty of companies who have resorted to the tried and tested method of reducing headcount, but who have now found that they have to reduce costs further… and they do not have the spare headcount or time to think about, let alone implement, said cost reductions.

There is therefore a tremendous opportunity for companies to use the collective genius of their workforce – and beyond – to help them identify potential efficiency savings and process improvements. By that, I mean that they can ask a broad base of staff, practically instantaneously, for their ideas, suggestions, insights – and already implemented improvements – for submission, and to tie these submissions to a rapid review process, leading to implementation.

The key here is to change the way that companies do cost reductions. Instead of relying on, as one client called it, ‘BOGSIR’ (a bunch of guys sitting in a room) or on a bevy of highly paid consultants who troop into your firm asking everyone for their ideas, a firm goes out and uses an online system and optimized business process to harvest concepts and projects from their existing staff, wherever they may sit.

Imaginatik, my firm, pioneered this method at enterprise scale since 1998. Our expertise is in tapping into the brainpower of hundreds and thousands of people to solve problems, managing the end-to-end process from problem identification to project implementation (lightweight projects, that is).

Our firm has a long track record of successful implementations for cost reduction. At our Imaginatik User Group in Boston 2007 (held at Fenway Park), Whirlpool presented their P-200 project, using our Idea Central software to identify $38 million in expected savings by implementing improvements and process changes across seven areas of the business. This was a ‘complex project’, with its own Idea Central Portal for the project, and seven separate instances of the software set up to collect specific information around returns, distribution and other topics.

Another favorite of mine was Wal-Mart’s ‘Tapping into the Power’ project, run jointly with IBM and Imaginatik in 2008. This is a great example of ‘green for green’, using Idea Central and the brainpower of thousands to work on ideas for sustainability – and the reduction of wasted resources (in this case, electricity consumption).

Going back to my main point for this post: why wait? In the area of enterprise-scale crowdsourcing solutions for cost reduction, we have the largest market share (of paying customers) by a very long way. We have the most published case studies. We have a process method in use in over fifty firms. And we have a technology track record over more than 10 years, including winning various technology awards.

But key most of all, is that the solution to a company’s cost reduction problem – using the ‘crowd’ to help out – is well known and doable within a short number of days and weeks. Even though a firm may be new to the concept of crowdsourcing a solution, the knowledge is not new to world. And whilst there is a lot of intellectual property tied up in the knowledge of how to do this activity properly, Imaginatik has proven to be the trusted partner for many of the world’s most respected companies.

Final thought. We have one client, a major outsourcing company, who used Idea Central to yield a ‘golden list’ of cost reduction ideas. Just a subset of this golden list is generating over $1 million a day (sorry, cannot tell you where – that would be too easy – and would stop all the fun of looking). So, if you wait three months to implement a similar set of ideas, what do you lose?

As business people, we owe it to our workforce to find smarter ways of reducing costs, rather than simply wielding the hatchet. If you are reading this as an executive, I urge you to reach out to us, do your research, and work out a way of getting started. And if you are in a business, point the powers that be in our direction so they can start their own journey of enlightenment. There is power in the people – so let’s all help to fix this economic crisis.

Continuing my review of Networked Citizens (NC) by Peter Bradwell and Richard Reeves.

Social actors becoming defined by their networks

One of the most interesting things about the evolving use of social networking sites is that people are recognising that the relevancy and value of relationships to them are far more important than adding more and more connections. I’m finding the same thing too – I have culled some of people I follow on Twitter. Indeed, taking care about your online relationships is likely to become more important over time as networking influences your identity and your reputation. This recent posting by Chris Brogan goes into some useful strategies to make more of your social networks online.

One of the observations in NC is that our online presence is defined as much by others as ourselves. I think that is true. Content posted by my online friends or connections on Facebook, FriendFeed or Twine is by any measure an indicator of my online presence – in terms of the people that I connect with and the interests we may share – as well as the content that I’m directly responsible for. Anyone looking at my social networking will make judgements about me based not only on who I connect to but what content the connection produces as well.

So the social actor could be expected to be defined in part by their online networks. Understanding social action requires less of an emphasis on the individual (and individualism) and more of an emphasis on networks. As the authors of NC say “the role of networked capital is increasing, and the influence of personal reputation, history and network presence will be vital”.

Blurring boundaries between work and social interaction

NC found that organisations are aware of the way that employees experience the freedoms of network working.  Employee social networks are becoming “…bound up with the success of their careers, present and future, inside organisations and outside” (page 41).  In other words, people are linking with peers over social networks to share knowledge, contribute to group discussion, distribute their work and comment on others, publicise their credentials and gain new forms of visibility and reputation.

Actually, according to the Digital Youth Project research findings, youth in the United States are often more motivated to learn from their peers than from adults. They like the freedom and autonomy to explore in social networking online, which stands in contrast to rigidities of classroom learning that is set by predefined goals. I would say these ways of learning and inter-working with peers online are starting to operate within the work place too. The implications for organisations are significant: it’s a case of not what the organisation can to to improve organisational learning, it’s more a case of what social networks can do for the organisation.

NC found that organisations that develop their own social networking platforms have had variable success with their implementation and impact. Inhouse networks “…provide too formal a script for people’s interactions, writing out the connections between internal and external networking, between work and social life” (page 44). In other words, those organisations simply do not get it. Those organisations have not figured out that they can no longer be in control of work-related networking that utilises employee social networks online. NC found that the most innovative responses by organisations to social networking online is to go with the grain of networks. That is very useful advice indeed.

However, it is not just a case of going with the flow in terms of networking platforms, the nature of the relationship between employee and employer must also adapt to embrace social interaction online. It’s about embracing peer-relationships and peer production. Organisations need to look beyond financial remuneration to connect with employees and their peers. Organisations need to work with the freedoms that come from self-directed exploration and self-expression within peer-to-peer relationships. Or, as Charlene Li might say, it’s about having conversations with employees, not issuing commands that come out of centralised management processes.

Social capital

Another important distinction to make between traditional networking within and between organisations, and social networking online, is that there is no ownership online, either in terms of the employer or individual. Sure, an individual increases their social capital value from networking online, but they do not own the data or the connections contributed by others. Questions about who owns your data are raging right now, and I’m not going to get into that right now. Suffice to say that, just as organisations must free-up some control over their relationships with employees, organisations cannot claim an intellectual property right on the value arising from the blurred social/work networks.

The online marketing world is a strange place. It's where two very different fields come together to provide new avenues for marketing opportunities. These two fields are technology and marketing. The people in these fields could not come from more different planets. They even speak two completely different languages. However, as different as they are, they do have something very important in common: everything starts with an idea.

Being idea driven folk, both camps have their arsenal of BUZZ WORDS!! When understood, buzz words can be very helpful in explaining and understanding an idea. When they are not understood, look out. They can cause confusion and cloud good ideas with misinformation. This new series will help demystify common tech and marketing buzz words to help everyone understand them better. This first installment covers a tech buzzword that is very big today in online marketing: Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 (that’s Two-Point-Oh)
Tim O’Reilly is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, so why not start off with a quote from him explaining it:

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

So what does that mean? In its early days, the web was mainly used to deliver information to a user. A user would go to a website and get the information they requested (or not). Once they got the information they needed, or bought their stuff, their experience with that website was effectively over.

After the dotcom bubble burst, there were a handful of websites that weathered the storm, and some even thrived. The websites that thrived – Wikipedia, eBay, craigslist, Amazon (user generated content and recommendations), to name few – all had a couple things in common. First, they were applications not normally run on the web or in a web browser. Second, they relied on content generated by users, and last they had rich user interfaces that allow users to easily interact with the website.

Other people started noticing this trend and created websites and business models around the following ideas:

• The web as an application platform
• User generated, dynamic data that was freely available
• user interfaces that engage the user

With these ideas, users were driven back to the websites because the experience was fun and rewarding. They had ownership of the site from the content they contributed, and the website was a destination to “get things done.” This led to the proliferation of these new ideas in online marketing: blogging, social-networking, peer-production, online memes, and much, much more.

So what does this mean for online marketing? Well, it doesn’t mean that being “more Web 2.0” is a simple polish to the design and layout of your website (although that could be part of it). It’s enabling a user to do things on the web they could not do before – and the websites that get the most eye balls are the ones with content generated by users.

Here Comes Everybody

I am convinced that the web will change our society in many ways that we cannot currently grasp. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a book which everybody who is interested in these changes should read. Many books on technology take a very shallow approach. Often they focus on the technology itself or only look at one particular aspect of how technology can be used (e.g. books on “How Wikis can change the way you collaborate”). Shirky’s book is the first one I have read which takes a very deep sociological and often philosophical perspective on the ubiquitousness of the net and its wider implications.

He is not the first author to draw an analogy with the invention of movable type. The social effects of this invention lagged decades behind the technological effects:

Real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable.

We are just now entering the chaotic period. We cannot accurately predict the changes that will happen to society now that we have the Internet. It will be many years before we can oversee and look back at the consequences. I can instantly see how the above is true for education. Currently the old institutions are still in full reign, but they are more and more broken (e.g. look at the percentage of students who prematurely quit their vocational tertiary education in the Netherlands). These institutions have not harnessed the new possibilities of technology.

So what are these new possibilities? The book is full of wonderful examples, but Shirky’s main point is that the Internet allows groups of people to self organize without the need for organizations, firms or (governmental) institutions. Traditional communications were always one-to-one (like the phone) or one-to-many (broadcasting, like television). The net enables many-to-many communication which we never had before. E-mail was the first example of this, but IM, (micro-)blogs and social networking sites enable this too. These new tools are “eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination”.

Shirky has a great observation on media:

The twentieth century, with the spread of radio and television was the broadcast century. The normal pattern for media was that they were created by a small group of professionals and then delivered to a large group of consumers. But media, in the word’s literal sense as the middle layer between people, have always been a three-part affair. People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it [..] and they like to share it [..]. Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption.

Social tools are coming into existence that support new patterns of group forming and group production. My personal favourite example is open source software. Clay Shirky attributes the success of this method of producing software to the way that it gets failure for free. For this reason, he considers open source software to be a threat to commercial software vendors:

Open source is a profound threat, not because the open source ecosystem is outsucceeding commercial efforts, but because it is outfailing them. Because the open source ecosystem, and by extension open social systems generally, rely on peer production, the work on those systems can be considerably more experimental, at considerably less cost, than any firm can afford. Why? The most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.
The overall effect of failure is its likelihood times its cost. Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing its likelihood. [..] The obvious problem is that no one knows for certain what will succeed and what will fail. [..] You will inevitably green-light failures and pass on potential successes. Worse still, more people will remember you saying yes to a failure than saying no to a radical but promising idea. Given this asymmetry, you will be pushed to make safe choices, thus systematically undermining the rationale for trying to be more innovative in the first place.
The open source movement makes neither kind of mistake, because it doesn’t have employees, it doesn’t make investments, it doesn’t even make decisions. It is not an organization, it is an ecosystem, and one that is remarkably tolerant of failure. Open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost of failure; it essentially gets failure for free.

Do yourself a favour: If you haven’t read this profound book, please read it as soon as you can.

Dalam bukunya Wikinomic, Don Tapscott menulis dengan berbagai perkembangan teknologi dan munculnya fenomena global brain, wisdom of crowd maka untuk dapat bertahan perusahaan harus dapat mengadopsi fenomena tersebut melalui kolaborasi secara global yang menurutnya dapat di bagi menjadi beberapa cara.

1. Peer production, peer production berarti berkolaborasi dengan sesama (peer) untuk membuat sesuatu. Bentuk kerjasama ini bisa berupa proyek outsourcing yang sudah teruji separti yang di lakukan Linus Torvald dalam mengembangkan Linux atau yang dilakukan oleh Mozilla dengan browser fire Foxnya. Pada level korporat IBM melakukannya dengan menggandeng komunitas opensource, untuk menciptakan operating system deserver-servernya.
2. Ideagora, Don menggunakan istilah Ideagora untuk merujuk bahwa saat ini perusahaan dapat memanfaatkan otak-otak genius diluar perusahaan untuk kepentingan perusahaan. Cara-cara yang dilakukan kurang lebih bisa seperti P&G yang memanfaatkan jasa Innocentive untuk mencari ide yang bagus untuk memanfaatkan paten-paten perusahaan yang belum di manfaatkan. Atau bisa seperti Starbuck, dalam mencari ide minuman Starbuck baru melalui websitenya. Begitu juga yang dilakukan Dell melalui webnya Ideastorm.
3. Prosumers, produsen konsumen, dimana konsumen dapat menjadi produsen yang dapat memberikan nilai tambah bagi perusahaan. Prosumers ini merupakan efek langsung dari berkembangnya trend consumer generated content, dimana sebagian besar content (dalam hal web content inilah yang di jual) dibuat oleh consumer. Ini terjadi terutama dalam situs social network seperti flickr dimana foto-foto yang “dijual” untuk di lihat pengunjung site di upload oleh komunitas atau konsumennya flickr, juga Second Life dimana user/consumer dapat meng create benda dalam linkungan virtual second life.
4. New Alexandria, Internet merupakan satu perpustakaan besar dimana didalamnya banyak informasi dan pengetahuan manusia sepanjang sejarah. Perusahaan seperti Google dan Microsoft saat ini berlomba untuk mendigitalisasikan berbagai buku-buku dari berbagai perpustakaan besar didunia. Google bahkan memiliki visi untuk mengorganisasikan informasi dunia. Sumber daya yang besar ini merupakan peluang bagi siapapun yang dapat memanfaatkannya. Aspek lain dari tren ini ialahperkembangan pengetahuan secara collaborative seperti yang dilakukan konsorsium perusahaan farmasi besar untum memetakan genom manusia.
5. Open Platform, untuk meningkatkan proses pengembangan yang cepat dan murah beberapa perusahaan membuka platform produk atau aplikasinya sehingga pihak luar dapat mengembangkan sendiri aplikasi yang pada akhirnya akan menguntungan sang pemilik platform. Seperti yang dilakukan facebook, ditahun 2003 facebook memutuskan untuk membuka platformnya bagi developer luar dan facebook juga mengijinkan para developer itu mendapatkan revenue baik dari penjualan CPC atau CPM, hasilnya ribuan platform dikembangan dan akhibatnya user experience facebook meningkat dan para user berdatangan mendaftar.
6. Global Manufacture, jaman dimana perusahaan melakukan segalanya sendiri telah berakhir. Diawali oleh trend outsourcing, offsourcing saat ini perusahaan besar seperti Boeing dan BMW tidak lagi melakukan segalanya sendiri. Dalam era outsourcing, perusahaan yang memberi pekerjaan memberikan gambar desain yang detail yang harus di ikuti oleh perusahaan outsourcenya. Namun dalam era global manufacture  ini, sang perusahaan outsource berubah menjadi partner, dalam pengertian, mereka turut dilibatkan mulai dari awal perencanaan produk, desain produk, dan turut menentukan proses serta kualitas produk. Dengan demikian perusahan induk dapat lebih mengoptimalkan ekosistem perusahaan dan partner-partnernya.
7. Wiki Workspace,  Kolaborasi tidak hanya antara internal perusahaan dengan external perusahaan. Bahkan didalam internal perusahaan juga dapat terjadi kolaborasi yang konstruktif. Misalkan saja bagaimana membangun knowledge database pemecahan masalah customer dapat dibangun dengan menggunakan Wiki, sebuah medium yang dapat di edit bersama-sama secara demokratis. Pengertian lain Wiki workspace ini ialah implikasi pada proses collaboration dalam berbagai proses internal perusahaan seperti komunikasi, evaluasi proyek. Trend ini diperkuat juga dengan semakin banyaknya orang yang bekerja dari rumah.

Demikian beberapa hal yang dibahas Don dalam bukunya.

I just saw this great video from Jon Brouchoud (Keystone) from the Arch blog. He calls Second Life a “single largest collective expression of creativity at a single location, that the world has ever seen”. This is not particularly my field (at least right now), but I remain very optimistic about the possibilities which Second Life opens to notions like peer production.

Last week we ended the class discussing the difference (or similarity) between crowd sourcing and networked production. In my mind networked production is a larger description of a type of economic production ecosystem and crowd sourcing is a description of a tool that is employed within such an economic framework. The primary difference being that crowdsourcing requires an agent that is seeking an answer or product that is “sourced” and networked production does not require such a central agency. Rather, networked production can work by the power of individuals with individual motivations, and does not require someone to pose a problem or question.

I think that crowd sourcing is different than aggregating information about a large group of people and inferring and answer. For instance taking data from a grocery store and seeing that more people buy cornflakes than buy cheerios doesn’t tell you anything about the qualitative differences that drove this choice. To me it seems that crowd sourcing necessitates or implies a certain framing in order to give qualitative context to the data that is returned. Considering that this is my understanding of crowd sourcing I found it fascinating that some in the class had an exact opposite opinion. Some believed that crowd sourcing was more chaotic and less organized than networked production, perhaps this is because one describes an organizational structure and so seems that it would require more organization. I am not sure yet where I stand on this issue, but will definitely be investing more thought on the topic.