Multitude Movement, from a theoretical perspective - beautiful!

It is organic... In fact, we are moving away from the industrial era paradigm of command and control, the machine paradigm, to the living systems paradigm. We are moving away from power relations, towards synergistic value-based relations. We are moving from coercion to voluntary involvement, from duty to passion. The pyramid is collapsing! A well-informed, well-coordinated and self-organizing crowd is taking over...

By AllOfUs

About crowdsourcing

First published on June 14, 2011 last updated June 11, 2021. 

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See history of the term and concept on Wikipedia.

The practice first appeared as a participatory action that is mediated by the Internet: people got together online to collaborate on some project - ex. open source development.

The term crowdsourcing was first coined in 2005 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, editors at Wired, in a business context, referring to an organization "outsourcing work to the crowd". Outsourcing is externalizing some processes that previously were part of an organization to another organization, which implies a clear boundary between in and out, us and them. Although the outsourcing relation is mutually beneficial, it is not symmetrical. The outsourcee has an information disadvantage and is economically dependent on the outsourcer, cut-off from the market or the customer. Outsourcing can be seen as inter-firm collaboration or synergy. This leads to the notion of supply chains. This form of collaboration has become a key success factor in the global capitalist economy; it has been said that the best companies are the ones that can manage the best supply chains. 

Towards 2008 this phenomena of Internet-mediated sourcing got the attention of academia and Daren C. Brabham wrote the first review paper on the subject. He identified three patterns of crowdsourcing:

• open collaboration crowdsourcing
• competition crowdsourcing
• virtual labor market crowdsourcing

Open and collaboration crowdsourcing is the pattern that stands on the high moral ground. This is what we see in open source software and hardware development, knowledge repositories like Wikipedia, or transaction networks like Bitcoin. Open, in this context, means access to participation as well as transparency. This pattern establishes symmetric relations between participants and a plain field for opportunities and potential development. This is also the pattern used in open value networks.

The other two patterns are at odds with the multitude philosophy, or with the edicts of the p2p economy. 

Competition crowdsourcing is mostly used by companies in need of new ideas. They create a contest between individuals (sometimes organized in groups) and the best idea(s) is rewarded. These contests are usually high adrenaline events that generate a few happy winders and lots of sore losers, while trying to provide a fun experience and enriching experience. I call this type of crowdsourcing "flock milking". Examples: Xprize and the Mio project.

This practice comes from the realization that companies (i.e. closed and hierarchical organizations) can use some of the tools and techniques developed by the open source culture to coordinate a very large number of individuals and extract value from the crowd. The relation remains asymmetrical between the company, a closed, intrinsically individualistic organization and the crowd. In the eyes of the company, the role of the crowd is similar to the role of an outsourcee, although the different nature of the crowd forces the company to modify its practices.

Virtual labor market crowdsourcing is about externalizing low-skills and repetitive tasks, often through an intermediary platform with a market functionality. There, tasks (demand) are matched with skills (offer) and the platform facilitates the transaction and mediates potential disputes. Example: TaskRabit.

In both last cases, the crowdsourcing concept supposes a powerful entity (the outsourcer or the labor market provider), which has some advantage (informational, transactional, logistical, financial, access to market, etc.) over the crowd. The crowd is considered disorganized but resourceful. It is implicitly assumed that this powerful entity is necessary to channel potential out of the crowd, which is seen as incapable of producing a coherent output. For that matter, and for others too, it seams justified for this powerful entity, acting as a center of analysis, coordination and production, to keep the biggest part of the reward/revenues and to reward the crowd just enough. Let's call that the candy economy.

When it comes to motivation, there is a fundamental difference between outsourcing and crowdsourcing. The outsourcer has more influence over the outsourcee than over each individual in the crowd. Moreover, negative incentive doesn't work on the crowd. The outsourcer must become seductive, attractive and must give something in return, something that the crowd likes, which can be a bundle of intangibles (fun, learning experience, networking, exposure, badges, etc.). In some cases the crowd can insist on opening the new information or knowledge that is created during this process, to make it public, which is a form of open innovation that companies have started to appreciate, but not for altruistic reasons. Open innovation unleashed by crowdsourcing, if well conducted, is hyper-innovation, which can better tactic in a very dynamic, innovation-dependent market, as opposed to a defensive tactic based on intellectual property protection.

Structurally speaking, a these two crowdsourcing patterns exhibit a high degree of centralization. 

 

We cannot ignore the innovation potential of the crowd. Moreover, the crowd is building its production, transactional and distribution capacity. I believe that the last two patterns of crowdsourcing will fade away with the sunset of capitalism.

Sensorica is an example of an open network centered around the individual and its capacity to work in collaboration. Sensorica is not an entity exploiting the crowd, it is the crowd creating solutions for its own problems. It's mode of production is commons-based peer production (Yochai Benkler).

Open source communities don't "source" the crowd, they are the crowd working in collaboration to produce something, one entity, one system. They are not lead by any other entity. They are self-oriented and self-governed entities.

By t!b!   AllOfUs

Chris Cook - Capital Partnerships: A Debt Free Solution to the Property Crash

Chris Cook - Capital Partnerships: A Debt Free Solution to the Property Crash from Feasta on Vimeo.

By AllOfUs

New Economy, New Wealth

This presentation by Arthur Brock is really nicely done. It pretty much summarizes everything. Send it to your friends who think you're crazy...   : )

New Economy, New Wealth on Prezi

By AllOfUs

Comparing business development paradigms

Steve Bosserman introduced the idea of "Production Centered Local Economies", and "People Centered Local Economies". This article synthesizes Steve's coining of those terms, and uses concepts developed by Sam Rose, Paul Hartzog and Richard C Adler of Forward Foundation to further explain the differences between these economies, from a business development perspective.

In fact, "People Centered Local Economies" is what we would call "Multitude Economics".

  Read more...

By AllOfUs

Build your own civilization

Marcin Jakubowski - part 1 from East Bay Pictures on Vimeo.

By AllOfUs

Marcin Jacubowski on the Global Village Construction Set & Open Source Ecology

Marcin, you really understood the essence of the Multitude constructive revolution. You are a hero! 

The Multitude movement builds new alternatives for production and distribution of value. It proposes new forms of property. It builds new decentralized institutions based on free and open collaboration, and sharing, alongside classical hierarchical and monopolistic institutions that are based on competition, secrecy and control. It greatly reduces our dependence on the system. It decentralizes innovation, production and distribution. It decentralizes power. The Multitude social movement dose NOT directly attack to destroy classic institutions, it builds new ones to compete with them. In that sense, the Multitude movement is a constructive revolution.  

In Marcin's case we can even take the term "constructive" literally.

By AllOfUs

Evgeny Morozov on the Spinternet

Evgeny doesn't consider the innovation, production and distribution side of the new technology. It is not guaranteed that the young generation will use Internet to influence politics, BUT something even more powerful is happening. The younger generation understands how to use the new tools of communication, coordination, and collaboration to create and to distribute value! The open enterprise is emerging and all kinds of open currencies are being created. This will shift the economical power from centralized power clusters to the multitude, and the politics will follow naturally. This is what we call a constructive revolution. Change the substance of society, the way value is created and distributed, and you will change the power structure.

We don't need to clash with the elite. They will see their institutions emptied! Their levers of power are melting in their hands...        

By AllOfUs

A Multitude choir

Who said we can't sing our way into the future?

By AllOfUs

What's next from Coalition of the Willing (and how you can help)

ProM, a sub-project of the Coalition of the Willing is designing the infrastructure to support the next level of social organization with the help of the new technology. The ambition of ProM is to match different organizations according to their affinity to collaboratively tackle complex projects, and to provide the tools to enable these organizations to interface with one another, to share resources, to formulate new visions, to plan and to execute.

Multitude Project is active at the very core of this world changing project. The problems we are trying to solve are far from being simple. The web2.0 revolution has provided the infrastructure allowing individuals to organize into large collaborative networks, undermining the monopoly of creation and distribution of value, until now hold by hierarchical institutions, and transferring power to the multitude. We want to make possible for these networks to coalesce into super-networks, being able to take on the most ambitious projects humanity has ever dreamed of. We believe that this new infrastructure designed by ProM will unleash the power of the crowd like never before, surpassing in capacity any existing hierarchical organization, including governments. ProM is envisioning a web2.0 on steroids. A successful ProM-driven web2.0 RErevolution would complete the metamorphosis of our modern society, would complete this structural transformation from a state in which the multitude is merely equivalent to means of production, to a new state in which the multitude takes the leading role in innovation and creation. An infrastructure allowing complex layers of organization in which the individual still holds the key position would represent the backbone of a new society in which the power truly resides within the multitude.    

ProM is building itself on the already existing social structure around environmental issues. It's first alpha applications will be customized to be tested within this same space. But this "infraSUPERstructure" will be made generic. It will also be directly applicable within the innovation space. Multiple Discovery Network-type open enterprises (decentralized and open organizations for innovation, production and distribution) will be able to coalesce into super Discovery Networks with tremendous capacity, empowering the individual creator, giving him his proper place within our economy, wile respecting each other and our environment. In other words, ProM applied in the space of innovation and production will render obsolete closed, secretive, competitive and profit-driven power-based structures like corporations, which constitute environments breathing social and environmental injustice. Our modes of production and consumption will be radically changed by restructuring the set of incentives and constraints which traps the worker as well as the consumer.  

We have created an online space for you to contribute your ideas and experiences. You'll find it here. It would be wonderful if you could take ten minutes to share some insights. No need for anything fancy. Anything that you can offer us will be greatly appreciated.

Coalition of the Willing is a volunteer-based network organization, If you have questions you’d like to ask about Coalition of the Willing or ProM, or if you'd prefer to share your experiences by email, drop us a line on helloprom@gmail.com.

If this project excites you, you can get involved in a deeper way by joining the ProM team.


By AllOfUs