Mon, Aug 07, 2006
Yochai Benkler and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh at WikiMania 2006
#
On Saturday morning, I had the pleasure of attending talks given
by two very important contributors to my field. About a year and a half
ago, shortly after I first met KatrinVerclas, Katrin started telling
me, "You've got to read YochaiBenkler." I'm pretty sure that she
ended 90 percent of our subsequent conversations with, "You really
should read Benkler." When Benkler came out with his book,
Wealth of Networks earlier this year,
everybody
else in the world seemed to echoed Katrin's advice. (KYH)
I knew that Benkler was
speaking
this weekend, so I finally downloaded his book and started reading it
on the plane. Unfortunately, I only got through the first chapter.
You can imagine how lame I felt when I found myself having dinner with
him on Friday night. Fortunately, Benkler himself gave a thirty minute
synopsis of his book on Saturday morning. (KYI)
(As an aside, Benkler unintentionally scored some major geek points,
when his laptop revealed
that he runs Linux with KDE. There are a lot of outsiders
commentating on OpenSource these days, but most of them do not
actually run Linux themselves.) (KYJ)
Benkler's thesis is that technology has enabled unprecedented forms of
large-scale cooperative production, what he calls "commons-based peer
production." Think Wikipedia, think
OpenSource, think MashUps?, etc. According to Benkler, these
non-market activities are no longer on the periphery, but form the
very core of economic life for the most advanced societies. (KYK)
Technology is largely responsible for our ability to behave this way,
but only partially responsible for the authority to behave this way.
The latter is a cultural phenomenon that has been catalyzed by the
technology, but is not entirely causal. (KYL)
The question is, is this behavior an outlier, or is it economically
sustainable? Benkler didn't talk a lot about this -- this is why I
need to read the book -- but he did cite numbers such as IBM's
revenues from Linux-related services, which far outpaces its revenues
from IP licensing. (This alone is not evidence; smaller OpenSource
companies like MySQL are making significant
revenue from
dual licensing, a lesser known fact of life for many OpenSource
companies.) (KYM)
Benkler touched a bit on the importance of humanization in
commons-based peer production, which he said is the focus of his
current research. He also cited the reemergence of a new folk culture
in society today, something that LawrenceLessig also talks about. (KYN)
There was a minor hullabaloo between JasonCalacanis and Benkler during
Q&A. (See AndyCarvin's
description, plus some
background
and
commentary. It was entertaining, but low on any real controversy.
Benkler acknowledged that the interface between market and nonmarket
interaction is not well understood right now. There are
good
examples of how paying people kills the community dynamics, but the
patterns are not necessarily discernible yet. However,
RishabAiyerGhosh, who
spoke after
Benkler -- made it crystal clear that those citing numbers about how a
small number of people are responsible for a large percentage of work
are missing the point. If you pay for 75 percent of the work, you end
up with a three legged chair, which is worthless. (KYO)
Ghosh has done some of the best quantitative analysis on OpenSource
communities, and he's been doing it for a while. The BlueOxen report
on open source communities
was heavily based on work that Rishab had done. (KYP)
Ghosh kicked off his talk by talking about JamesWatt's exploitation of
the patent system, and argued that Watt's significantly slowed
innovation with the steam engine and thus was partially responsible
for delaying the IndustrialRevolution. (KYQ)
(I didn't find Ghosh's argument particularly compelling or relevant,
but it was a good story. Patents give folks monopolies, and
monopolies are bad for markets. We know that already. But patents
are also supposed to incentivize innovation. Ghosh was insinuating
through his story that patents were not a strong motivator for
innovation in this particular case, but I have trouble believing that.
ChristophFriedrichVonBraun wrote an excellent, but dense book, The
Innovation War (1997), where he explained how difficult it was to
correlate patents to innovation, either for or against. And von Braun
barely touched on software, which adds even more complexity to the
question.) (KYR)
Ghosh then went on to talk about FLOSS developer motivation and
described his value-flow and cooking pot analogy for how markets can sustain this
type of behavior. He also pointed out that the collaboration is not
new, but the scale is. (KYS)
Ghosh continues to do good research, much of which is hosted at
FLOSS World. (KYT)
/talks |
Posted at 2:53pm
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