|
|
Towards a Global Mind
Based on Software Supporting
Collaboration, Compensation and Competition
April
13, 2009
Bruce A. McHenry
“The
medium is the message”, said Marshall McLuhan. The medium and this
article are far from done. Please email the “staff” if you wish to
participate in writing this. There is an
editable version here: http://docs.google.com/Edit?id=dgq8gmpn_62d24fjbf7
MIT's OpenCourseWare Illustrates Why Most Things that are Hard to Create are Not Free
The experience with OpenCourseWare (OCW) illustrates the promise and the pitfalls of open online education, the foundation of a global mind. Heralded as making all MIT courses “open” to the world, much remains to be achieved if that promise is to be fully realized. The founders of OCW were unpleasantly surprised by the cost of identifying and then duplicating or removing the many proprietary parts of course packets. At odds with the front page announcement, this causes most OCW versions to be older and less complete than the one used by MIT students.
OCW does little to serve the needs of professors or students enrolled at MIT. How could it do better? Teaching a subject develops mastery. That is as important as sampling from a virtually limitless intellectual buffet. Every MIT student ought to be required to tutor a student not enrolled at MIT and to make improvements to OCW. Advancement at all levels including even of students towards graduation could be linked to the success of their OCW materials.
Scratch that suggestion if improving the quality of free education threatens the academy. The advancement and compensation of MIT faculty is based on publication in fee based journals. Making expertise less expensive undermines economic animals who have long labored in their domains. (OCW inhibits the freedom to modify by publishing to .pdf files. Fortunately, there is now at least one free converter.)
There is little reason to hope that deep change will start within existing institutions but they will respond to competitive pressures that develop externally. Experts need to be motivated in new ways to make content that is free to be evolved in ways big and small. Just as wiki software supports the interactions of Wikpedians, new code will structure the processes of a global learning and research.
Organize Communities of Thought around Key Contributors
Created circa 1995 by Ward Cunningham, wikis remain the state-of-the-art in open global collaboration. Wikipedia is an example of great value and complexity arising from millions of small acts, of the power of simplicity. It is also a testament to selfless desire to improve the commons.
However, Wikipedia has only rudimentary tools to identify and resolve conflicting data; gross vandalism is easily detected but smaller deleterious changes are not; there are no mechanisms to protect work and rights of knowledge workers. A new kind of wiki inspired software is needed. It should be much better at correcting misinformation in the public sphere and it should also support economically productive work by having:
- Much better processes to identify and isolate disputes, structure and weigh evidence. These will require some ownership rights.
- An ability to satisfy the financial needs of contributors. Professionals usually demand compensation and everyone would like to be treated fairly.
Information ought to quickly flow where it is most needed and, in so doing, identify the thought leaders. People will not get the information they need if:
- it is too expensive
- it is not being produced because the would be producers cannot get compensated
- it is too difficult to separate what is valuable from that which is worthless or, worse, misleading
We do not want to eliminate information and income hierarchies but have them change so that those at the top always demonstrate the greatest expertise. Such collaborative systems will outperform less open and flexible management systems based on relatively rigid personnel hierarchies and salary grades. One can rise to the top of a hierarchy by having comprehensive, coherent and accessible statements of a problem, solution or plan of action. Advancement may be accelerated by:
- Publicly funded prizes[i]
- Client specified projects that operate similarly to public prizes but where the capital and the internal work remains private. They could use our self-organizing properties to improve internal work efficiency and to interface with customers, suppliers and consultants.
- "Crowd sourced" customers who use the consensus building nature of our system to simultaneously create specifications and demonstrate the existence of a market. In business school lingo, this is "customer pull" rather than "supplier push".
- Revenue from (micro-)tolls to access a property and have the right to build upon it. Successful derivative work will often be integrated into the original property in exchange for an equity stake (i.e. share of future revenue).
- Combinations of the above
The contributions will recursively break down into components. The equity rights ought to be richly distributed so that both collaboration and competition occur at an appropriate level of granularity.
Investments Spur Growth in Intellectual Works
Author-creators could pay for editing. People with queries could pay for answers, and then earn income from distributing and refining them. Publishers will acquire properties and help them to develop by keeping them well maintained and setting reasonable tolls and referral fees. Properties that have fallen into disuse because of unresolved disputes, unanswered questions and irrelevant details may be acquired and renovated, or they may be supplanted by new structures with better architectures.
Having low or no entry tolls, or even paying people to enter, will increase participation and can generate more activity and higher earnings for the community. It will be in the interest of everyone in the community to ensure that there is at least one well maintained portal. There will often be many to suit the backgrounds, needs, languages and media preferences of a diverse audience.
Fairness is Essential
The fundamental reason for slowing down the dissemination of knowledge is to help ensure that creators are compensated. Offering byte-for-byte copies at lower prices clearly constitutes piracy. Re-writing such works to avoid copyright infringement can still violate the rights of the creator. These hard problems have led to extremely expensive mechanisms to enforce copyrights and patents which impose burdens on the innovator that are often much greater than the work of the innovation itself. As a result, many innovators fail to profit from their good ideas. A more effective way of recognizing valuable contributions is greatly needed.
Recognition and prize money can help this process along. Competitions could include collaborative workspaces that shield work in progress from public view. Copyright and patent protection could then be used to protect the winning work. However, sufficient rewards could motivate innovators to forego the existing protections for intellectual property.
Similar innovations often arise concurrently once the need has been recognized and the pre-requisite components become available. Thus the first to file, winner-take-all system is rarely the fairest way to allocate rights and rewards. The specification creators and the innovation peers are best able to allocate shares in the innovation. The ultimate customers can best reward them.
While rapid cost lowering is a highly desirable characteristic for the global mind, there should not be a "race to the bottom". Outright piracy usually ought to be prosecuted except when it creates strong demand in poor markets. Their leaders will eventually create good links to the core community. The folks who traverse these links routinely will best be able to decide on matters of economic justice and originality.
Charge Backs Help to Identify and Promote Good Properties
The ability to charge back will be crucial for determining whether a property delivers value commensurate with its price. Charge back statistics will be used to create consumer satisfaction indices that control prominence. Thus, promotion will principally be viral and similar to “word of mouth”. Traditional promotion and advertising, a mix in approximately equal measure of truth and lies, may prove to have no worth except for various kinds of economic games.
Links between properties may be labeled according to the relationship between them. One of the link types will point from substantially copied works back to the original. Users who follow this notice of piracy and then reject the pirated version could automatically cause a charge back and penalty to be levied against the pirated version. The fee structure could then be adjusted to control the degree of copying and resale.
People who routinely use charge backs as a way of avoiding tolls will lower their credit scores. Their tolls would then be adjusted, perhaps retroactively.
..... being edited (Nov. 12, 2008 onwards) .....
NOTES AND REFERENCES
From
http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2006/05/normsbased_ip_a.html:
The concept of social norms to
influence behavior have been floating around for a
while years. “Social norms are pervasive and powerful structural
characteristics of groups that summarize and simplify group influence
process. They generally are developed only for behaviors which are viewed
as important by most group members (Hackman 1976).”
From the research, von Hippel and Fauchart
determined that French Chefs have three rules of “correct behavior” that
follow:
- Right to not be copied exactly: Chef’s expect that
“honorable” chefs will not copy their recipes exactly even if the
information needed to do so is public.
- Right to selectively reveal: Chefs expect that those to
whom they reveal a recipe in confidence will not “abuse their trust” by
passing that information on to others.
- Authorship right: Chefs expect to be credited
as the authors of the recipes they develop.
These social normal work extremely well – in
French Chef society, if you violate one of them, you are outcast. For
example:
- Functionaly similar to patent: “If another chef copies a recipe exactly we are
very furious; we will not talk to this chef anymore, and we won’t
communicate information to him in the future.”
- Functionaly similar to
contracting regarding trade secrets: “If I give information to another chef I trust
him to not pass it on. I do not have to say this.”
- Functionaly similar to
contracting regarding trade secrets: Said to a chef who didn’t credit another chef as
the source of a recipe: “Sir: Your [TV] presentation has revealed a rare
ingratitude … You should admit that presenting recipes that are mine and
that I taught you without referring to my name constitutes an unacceptable
indelicacy.”
In addition to anecdotal evidence, von Hippel
and Fauchart’s paper has a series of statistical studies that substantiate
their hypotheses and the conclusion that – while there is still a lot to learn
about norms-based IP with regard to information sharing among French chefs –
it’s clear that this is a powerful and effective approach to enforcing IP
ownership in this domain.
Now – try substituting “software developer”
for French Chef. While there are definitely some things to work out, if
we add a few simple lessons from open source software development communities,
you can almost imagine a norms-based IP approach for software.
From
http://evergreenip.typepad.com/view_from_bridge/2006/07/rss_web_20_pate.html:
What if we
(the
From http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/08/11/080811ta_talk_surowiecki?printable=true
Good short article inspired by Heller's book, The Gridlock Economy
From
http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2008/03/another_softwar.html:
"What's all the more
infuriating about the current patent situation is that many of today's patents
go against the original social contract surrounding patents. The original goal
of the patent system was to get inventors to share their innovations for the
common good. In return for a limited monopoly, you, Mr. Inventor, share your
invention so that We, the public, can understand how you did it and can then
innovate on top of it. Rather than stifling innovation, patents were supposed
to drive it forward.
Unfortunately, many patents, even the ones
that are legit, would have been created independently anyway. It's obviously a
balance, but at least in the world I live in, I see patents getting in the way
rather than helping me. I have never gone and looked at old patents to get new
ideas for products. The only time an independent patent, one that I'm not
working on filing myself, comes to my attention, it's because somebody is
getting sued for infringing it. This tells me that we have lost the original
goal that patents were supposed to foster."
THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL NEEDS TO BE EDITED OR IS REDUNDANT
There will be a Need to Balance Growth against Fair Compensation of Original Creators
Although conventional intellectual property protections will need to be obtained to discourage infractions not covered by the internal regulations, having to resort to traditional legal mechanisms will greatly increase costs. Therefore, the system must automatically balance creators' rights against economic fairness in order to maximize growth.
Links to similar material will be created automatically for byte-for-byte copies while users will create such links for more elaborate duplication. These links to similar material will be crucial to maintaining this balance between openness and exclusivity. Copies will span a range from cheap fakes to updated versions with improved architecture. Members of the infringed community will be the first to notice such links to similar material. In cases of outright piracy, the existing community members will issue punitive charge backs and assert their claims to original work by inserting piracy identifying links. People who discover that they were taken in by a fake will thus pay slightly more to reach the bona fide community. Some will gladly charge back the imitator. Some will decide that the cheaper imitation is good enough. If the original is overpriced, it will lose market share and eventually the imitator may be upgraded to the extent that the community changes allegiance.
In many cases, these new but similar works will legitimately serve unmet needs and create a new facet for the community. In that case, the similar link followers will embrace and develop the new property.
The amount of restitution will depend upon the charge back rates for the infringed property: if its consumers are frequently dissatisfied, restitution will be reduced accordingly. Charge backs will also include an overhead assessment to the vendor that will serve to penalize and remove bad actors, and discourage repeat offenders. These inducements will be on a continuous scale so that promotion and penalization occurs in a graduated manner.
Inexact copies of original contributions will be identified by the links to similar material. People who traverse these links will identify opportunities to populate the replicas with links back to the original. Their users will incur two charges unless they reverse one. which may be upheld even when equivalent standards of copyright and patent protection have not been violated. There needs be a continuous balance between the rights of those who created a body of knowledge, those who seek to use it and those who wish to develop it further. The acid test of whether a publisher is being robbed will be the defection rate of the membership in that body of knowledge.
Challenges will always be allowed because dissenters will be able to create markup tags which become prominent according to the merit recognized by the community. This ensures that there will be freedom to modify. The original author will often negotiate to incorporate the changes that the tags suggest. Frequently, the original author will lose interest and be bought out by the owners of derivative content. They may make the original work costless in order to draw traffic into more economically vigorous properties. Thus older contributions would become trailheads that feed traffic to the budding branches where most growth and economic exchange occurs.
Of course, an original contributor whose property has been developed mostly by others into an attractive destination could charge unfair rents. The more they are overpriced, the more quickly such portals would be replaced by rewriting to circumvent copyright. In general, contributors would only be able to earn income by continuously forging ahead and keeping the knowledge base consistent.
Thus significant investments will be required to reach the developing parts of the open mind. However, the cost will surely be less than universities charge today because there will be vastly less overhead. The cost will usually be quite modest compared with the value of one's time and the entry points will be accessible from anywhere to anyone.
One might think of the tolls as "pay to play". Since ownership leads to expectations of future revenues, there would naturally arise equity and options markets. One could wager that a dissident view will rise and that a dominant one will be discredited. There would necessarily be people who spread falsehoods, knowingly and not. The untruths will be highly vulnerable if others can bet on exposing them. This will not prevent mass delusions from persisting sometimes for long periods. It may be unappealing that those with greatest access will remain those with the greatest wealth, but it has ever been thus. Fools will be quickly parted from their money and wiser for it. The man of economic needs cannot be divorced from the man of intellectual aspirations. The closer the marriage, the better it will be for both.
Information that is already free in both senses of the word - costless and able to be modified - can be improved by dissents, questions, details and links to similar material. The system must guarantee that creators will be appropriately credited. The augmentations will be recursive and constitute communities of thought.
Tying career advancement to the creation of useful content has been successful in private wikis. But the same managements that reward internally visible work will also prevent it from being seen by external parties who would value it most. The need to keep revenues flowing but to lower barriers will cause the open source movement to recognize some ownership rights. It should be acceptable to refer to a piece of code, writing or art as someone's property. It may be worth a cent to a hundred million people, or it may be worth a million dollars to one person. The value of most contributions will of course be much less, and could also be negative.
© 2005 - 2008 DiscussIT.org
Versions: 2008.10.31
Software engineers interested in helping to specify or implement a major revision of wikis are encouraged to contact the author.
State of Collaboration
|
|
|
Thank you Richard Stallman (pictured) and the MIT AI Lab for the Open Source movement.
|
|
