Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration

Important concept

• coordination costs. 
• power law distribution, 80-20 curve, or long-tail distribution. 

The classic answer to getting a group to do something was the institution (centralized organization based on power relations). Today, the costs of communication, which is fundamental for coordination, has fallen. It is now possible to put the coordination into the infrastructure and to reduce the need for planning.  

The institution asks for:

• explicit goals 
• management, 
• enforcement of goals (carrots and sticks) 
• structure (economic, legal, physical, etc) 
• exclusion (cannot higher anyone) --> professional class 

Collaboration infrastructure: moving the problem to the people instead of moving the people to the problem, shedding institutional costs, adding flexibility. Decentralization, openness, inclusiveness. 

Tension between the institution as an enabler and institution as an obstacle. "Many of the relative advantages of hierarchy are now reduced."

It's all abut value! Open collaborative networks are mostly value-based organizations, and are increasingly replacing institutions (power-based organizations) on different arenas. 

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Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

This is why the multitude is taking over the economy...

Visit Multitude Innovation, read about the Discovery Network

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Symbionomics: Stories of a New Economy

Visit Economical Alternatives

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Seth Godin on the tribes we lead

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OpenKollab Pooled Fund Intro

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The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities. What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers charts this movement.

WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

Visit Economical Alternatives

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Better Means, a multitude initiative to production

BetterMeans proposes a very similar model to the Discovery Network.

"The Open Enterprise is a new organizational design. Unlike organizations using traditional management structures, Open Enterprises replace the command and control hierarchy with a meritocracy based on collaboration and open participation.

Organizations that adopt this new organizational structure can make decisions faster and respond quicker to their markets. They look more like living dynamic networks, and less like pyramids. People working in these organizations will have (and feel) more ownership. They’re more engaged in their work, and have the freedom to work on what they want, when they want to. Most importantly this model enables people to once again bring their full humanity – values, beliefs and passions – to the workplace, removing disconnect between organizational and personal values."

Visit Economical Alternatives

Visit Multitude Innovation and the Discovery Network 

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Crowdfunding Science

What a great example of multitude movement action! Scientific development IS controlled by large centralized institutions for different motives. As in communism with a planned economy, which led to disaster, we are living in a society with planned science, which is moving fast towards disaster. Scientific development and innovation must be open! Regulations must only apply to the use of new knowledge, not to its development.


ANDREA GAGGIOLI AND GIUSEPPE RIVA propose Crowdfunding Science:

We suggest crowd-funding as a possible strategy to cope with the lack of investments in research, as well as to increase democratization in the sciences. Projects seeking funding could be stored in an online repository. Each project would include a description of its objectives, duration, and requested contribution. Investors (either people or funding agencies) could decide which projects to fund. Read more in this letter to Science...  

Andrea further adds:

The closest example of crowdfunding science is Cancer Research UK's MyProjects scheme. Launched in October 2008, MyProjects allows Cancer Research UK donors to search projects by type of cancer and location to find a specific research project to donate money.

See also S.C.I.En.C.E.

SCIEnCE – Share Collaborative Ideas, Enact Cooperative Efforts – is part of the growing movement dedicated to encouraging public sharing of testable ideas. Not just ideas, but plans of action – ideas will be developed into specific, step-by-step proposals via Wiki-inspired community editing. A new system for attributing credit will be used to distribute funding for SCIEnCE projects. The projects outlined by these collaboratively written proposals will be tackled with a cooperative experimental approach. Society will benefit much more from the ensuing scientific and medical progress than any individual could benefit from the prestige of doing it first and doing it alone. 

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Social assets

The global economical and financial crisis is NOT generated by scarcity. It's not like the entire planet became unfertile, unable to sustain our civilization. There are enough resources to feed the entire world population, even by classical means. But our technology, if put to good use, can dramatically increase the capacity of our ecosystem, and make it even possible to start the colonization of the outer space. The current economical crisis is an anthropogenic "mechanical" problem. The needs are there, the resources are there, the knowledge is there, the means are there, but the classical mechanism of production and distribution is broken. We've lost our ability to work together constructively, for the benefit of all. Our institutions are corrupt, rotten.

Despite all the rhetoric coming out from the G8 and G20 meetings, we are not out of the woods yet. Some influential economists predict a double dip. What is the way out? Do we need to patch up our failed system, letting the same individuals who brought us on the verge of destruction in charge of it? Perhaps we need to think of creating new alternatives.

When you cannot bring your products to the people in need because the classical channels are broken what do you do? Do you stop production and close shop? What about the people on the other side, waiting for the necessities you can surely produce? You need to find alternative ways to feed the hungry market. I am not talking about abusive consumption here. We are in trouble, most of the people on this planet are struggling to stay alive. We need to create alternative institutions, new ones, more efficient ones that use effectively the new technology, adapted to the new reality.

Your social assets become the most important assets! Alone you cannot establish new ways of production and new channels of distribution. You need to team up with people who think like you, and who find themselves in the same situation, they have a product, a market, but no effective means to reach it. You capacity to organize large scale collaborations have became vital.

Communicate, collaborate, coordinate, you have the tools!

See more on the Discovery Network concept.

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Outsourcing and innovation

Somebody on LinkedIn asked if innovation will be outsourced.

In some sense, outsourcing is decentralization of production, but not quite so... because in some cases, General Motors for example, you get one large entity, GM, surrounded by a constellation of suppliers, which are entirely dependent on GM, who in turn calls the shots. Outsourcing was made possible by the increased level of coordination, and by the sophisticated logistical tools we have at our disposal. Technology made it possible. Its success demonstrates that production is more efficient, more flexible, more reliable, if it is organized on a broad base of well-coordinated small and specialized entities. Does the production network need to be centralized? If there is good coordination among these entities centralization is not necessary. In other words, in today's world enhanced with the new technology it is not necessary to have a strong center of command and control, like GM for example, to have a stable network capable of innovation, production and large scale distribution. Both structures can coexist, and many variants in between, and they will compete to impose their hegemony during this transition from the old economy to the new. In the end, I believe that big verticals will fall by shedding weight, outsourcing, and finally by morphing and dissolving into decentralized super-networks.  

Outsourcing means externalizing highly formal processes. Processes that can be specified and controlled very well. People now are asking the question, can innovation also be externalized? I just think this is the WRONG question to ask, because I think the "box" paradigm is obsolete. Future organizations that will drive innovation will not look like a box, but rather like a gravitational system, therefore there is no sense in talking about internal and external.

If you want to know weather India will play a role in innovation in the future, my answer is YES. Is innovation coming to India the way outsourcing came? My answer is NO. In the near future innovation will happen within (semi-) open collaborative networks - see the Discovery Network concept. Open networks are far more creative than boxes, if there are effective processes in place. Because of that, and because of the very effective tools of communication, collaboration, and coordination we have at our disposal,  (semi-) open collaborative networks will drive innovation, and they will drag within them highly specialized units of production and distribution, prototyping units, manufacturing units, marketing units, etc. The old classical boxes, the companies, will be surpassed in creativity, and starved on resources. So don't wait for a big company to pay you in India to innovate, rather take initiative and join these collaborative networks just emerging, capable of putting an idea on the market, being limited only by coordination, using the redundancy and under-capacity already existing in our economy.

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The Multitude Project is building the engine of the new economy

This is an experiment of historical proportions. A strong and diverse group was formed to build the infrastructure of a new kind of economical entity. We called this new institution, which is a global collaborative innovation network capable of putting an idea on the market, a "Discovery Network". 

The Discovery Network is a value-based structure as opposed to a power-based structure. It is a decentralized network as opposed to a hierarchical centralized organization. The core values are sharing, collaboration, openness. The Discovery Network is kept together by symbiotic relations, interdependency, synergy. This new form of organization will enable an individual in a poor country, possessing only brilliant ideas and sharp social skills, to generate tremendous wealth for his local community. 

We are testing the Discovering Network architecture for the first time on the Matchmaking Device System, an invention of Multitude Project's founder Tiberius Brastaviceanu. You can read more about the "Discovery Network" concept here.      

   

Anybody interested can join our group as an active participant or just as an observer. You can do so by filling the form on the Matchmaking Device System homepage. 

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Towards Science 2.0

This is an initiative to harvest the new technology for scientific projects. Good start! Still a lot to be developed...

 The Research Cooperative was established in 2001 as an international, not-for-profit organisation (NPO).

Our mission is to support academic, scientific, and popular research communication in all subjects, languages, and media.

Go to their homepage.

See also the Discovery Network concept proposed by the Multitude Project.

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Internet and social revolutions

What is different about the Internet compared to other communication mediums when one considers the dynamics of social mass movements? A social movement is the alignment of peoples’ actions according to a new system of values, beliefs, or a new ideology. Before the movement becomes obvious to an observer, before one can notice a new behavioral pattern, it is necessary for the new values system to spread throughout society, and to be adopted by a critical number of individuals. Notice that there are two important components in this process: the spread of information and its acceptance by different individuals.

Concerning the first, there is no much else to say about the efficacy of the Internet technology in spreading information or about its supremacy over all the other means of communication. Not only that, but the Internet is inherently democratic, giving a voice to everyone, rich and poor.

The second component, the adoption of the new ideas, must be examined a little closer in order to reveal the impact of the Internet on social movements. Take two modes of communication: one-to-many and one-to-one. An example of one-to-many communication is a person speaking to a crowd, say Martin Luther JR. King giving his I have a dream speech. The most obvious example of one-to-one communication would be two individuals directly speaking to each other, a form of two-ways synchronous communication, or an individual reading a book, a form of one-way asynchronous communication between the writer and the reader. In both cases we have on one side the teacher, or the person spreading the new ideas, and on the other side the uninitiated crowd or the individual(s) receiving the new teachings. If we consider the receiver, we can easily accept the fact that his/her receptivity is influenced by what others have to say about the message of the teacher. In general, you have a greater chance to convince someone of anything if you are talking to this person alone. In a crowd, if the message is somewhat controversial, if it threatens only a few vocal individuals, their reactions can influence the way others interpret the message, by seeding doubts in their minds. The dynamics of the crowd can help the speaker only when a majority already accepts the message, because the general approval puts pressure on the skeptics who fill themselves rejected. But here we are interested in social revolution and the social movements that make it happen. We are talking about disruptive social changes, which almost always stems from originally controversial ideas. Well, most of the information consumed on the Internet is asynchronous one-to-one or many-to-one. On the receiver side we have one individual alone, which makes this individual much more receptive to the new ideas.

Social movements are much more dynamic today because information is usually transmitted through the Internet to a single receiver at the time, and also because the Internet is the most efficient medium of communication ever implemented. Moreover, the number of those spreading the information is also increased, as new adepts possess all the means (affordable communication tools) to become effective teachers. Furthermore, the Internet is not only a communication platform; it also acts as a coordination and collaboration platform. The growth rate and the coherence acquired by social movements today surpass the capacity of any means to suppress them in the arsenal of those in power.

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Activism and the new technology

Tiberius Brastaviceanu proposes the Scientific Oeuvre to replace the current system of science communication.

"Sharing and collaboration, as well as free access to all scientific knowledge are values that make the ethical framework of this article. I strongly believe that these values have positive consequences in terms of economics (in the general sense of the word) within a strongly interconnected society, but I leave the argumentation for another day. My point is that in the context of our modern society, the solution to the information crisis seems to be aligned with these values, which, in turn, engender positive outcomes in terms of production of new knowledge, and its embodiment into new technologies. "

Read article here http://sites.google.com/site/tibisphilosophy/home/the-scientific-oeuvre

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