II-08-01-Tovey-MassCollab 455-466

Mass collaboration and open source

Mark Tovey¹

Generating substantive content collectively is nothing new—witness the thousands of contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary project. Begun in the late nineteenth century, it produced, over many years, one of the intellectual edifices of the twentieth century, unparalleled in any other language. The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential², begun in 1972, was originally print-based (3 vols, ca. 3000 pages), and derived its content not from individuals, but from the documents of organizations worldwide. Even before the World Wide Web came on the scene, thousands of people were typing in the public domain texts which formed the corpus of Project Gutenberg.

Many of our most cherished institutions can be seen as a product of understudied mass collaborative processes: city planning, map making, setting regulatory frameworks, negotiating peace treaties, drafting legislation, peer reviewed publication, and reconstructing ancient languages or cities.

The Web has accelerated the process of peer production³, heralded by the success of large open source software projects. Linus Torvalds showed the way with Linux⁴, which was followed by applications such as OpenOffice and FireFox, and fueled by industry participation. IBM has notably been paying developers to work in-house on open source software initiatives⁵. There are thousands of open source projects⁶ hosted at content repositories like sourceforge.net, and there are people who run their computers entirely on open source software.

Individual distributed computing projects (SETI@Home, Folding@Home, XGrid@Stanford) are giving way to open standards which allow anyone, regardless of computing platform, to donate computer time to large computing tasks of a humanitarian nature (World Community Grid).

The success of free software, and Richard Stallman's GNU Public License (GPL) gave open source software the legal framework it needed. This prompted a move by Lawrence Lessig and others to found a similar license for human-readable content, giving birth to free culture and the Creative Commons.⁷

Grounded by this license, and spurred by the new technologies that the Web (and now, Web 2.0) make available,⁸ we are beginning to see large-scale collaboration on freely available content. Instead of being distributed over many computers, the work is distributed over many minds. Instead of writing computer programs, people are now generating knowledge. The Wikipedia project is the best known, but by no means the only, example of successful distributed knowledge production.

We are already seeing the emergence of peer production in the physical realm. In China, small shops are cooperating in assembling motorcycles with interchangeable subsystems in a distributed fashion.⁹ Such practices could scale to build the first open source cars. Open source cad (Computer Aided Design) is being used to make blueprints for future vehicles.¹⁰ Peer production and Open Source cad offers the potential to introduce sustainable transportation technologies into the marketplace at low cost.

Other initiatives, such as ThinkCycle (www.thinkcycle.org), or Open Architecture Network (www.openarchitecturenetwork.org), aim at collectively solving “design challenges facing underserved communities and the environment,”¹¹ and open sourcing these designs. Instructibles (www.instructibles.com) allows people to show-and-tell the things they’ve built, and share how to build them.

Once clever solutions to long-standing problems¹² exist as open source blueprints (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_design), they can be built as needed in underdeveloped areas through the use of 3D printing¹³. The RepRap project hopes to build an inexpensive, open-source, 3D printer which can print itself (www.reprap.org). On the higher end, Fab Labs are small scale workshops that can be used to build one of virtually anything (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fab_lab).

Modularity of code, object-oriented programming paradigms, and open APIs have enabled successful code re-use. Online content management systems and the set of social practices that surround them, have enabled large-scale collaboration on programming projects.

Inexpensive (or free) availability of software for producing media content, and more widespread literacy in that software, are allowing for peer-production of sophisticated media content that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Reusability, mash-ups, and remixability are a logical consequence of open source, open APIs, and the Creative Commons. The ability to take content from one place and successfully and easily combine it with content from another, immediately allows for a form of collaboration between people who will likely never meet or even interact.

You can leverage mass collaborative techniques for social ends not directly related to computer applications, hardware, or artistic endeavors.¹⁴ Distributed translation teams are translating dictionaries. The blogosphere is becoming a powerful force for analysing the news, and throwing up concerns that would otherwise be under-reported. Systems are being built to allow scientists to make public and replicable their computational models, which might otherwise remain inaccessible¹⁵.

It is becoming increasingly clear that we can use the virtues of open source, mass collaboration, and collective intelligence for tackling the tough problems the world is facing. These technologies and practices present humanity with a powerful lever. They make it possible for the world community to think collectively, transparently, and effectively.

To understand future democracies, we need to understand past democracies. To understand future legal and administrative systems, we need to understand past administrative systems. To understand future forms of collaborative working and co-working, we need to understand past modes of peer production. In each case we need mechanisms to extract what worked, and what didn’t, what was missing, and what was available in over-abundance. We need to understand what the best practices were, and what the areas of blindness were. And we need to identify the vicious cycles that led to breakdown.

This will be a multi-disciplinary effort. We need historians, ethnographers, and foresight specialists. We need mediators, lawyers, and experts on democracy and deliberative processes. We need programmers and database experts. We need political theorists, cultural theorists, and cross-cultural psychologists. We need people who study free culture and peer production. We need philosophers of science. We need cognitive epistemologists and experts on cognitive bias. We need investigators who study distributed cognition and macro-cognition. We need more research on Wise Crowds¹⁶. There are many other specialties that can contribute to this effort.

Thomas Homer-Dixon talks about the gap between the seriousness of the many problems¹⁷ we face, and our ability to generate solutions to them: the ingenuity gap¹⁸. There are collaborative tools and social modes that currently exist which, if combined, could scale into mass collaborative problem-solving mechanisms¹⁹. If these systems are built, and built effectively, they can help us get traction on some of the world's most pressing issues.

Workaday practices for the social entrepreneur

In the meantime, we are not without tools for the social entrepreneur. Familiarity with these tools can multiply the effectiveness of individuals interested in facilitating change in a variety of domains. Below are some practices that can be helpful for people interested in leveraging this space.

• Become proficient in the tools for social networking (facebook.com, LinkedIn.com, del.icio.us/, myspace.com, citeulike.org).

• Attend meetups in your city related to what you do (meetups.com).

• Learn how to produce content for the emerging social media (blogs, podcasts, Flickr, YouTube). Contribute your voice to librivox.org.

• Mine the data sources (UN statistics, State of the Future, www.gapminder.org).

• Participate in the blogosphere, learn how to monetize what you do (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/). Join (or start!) a group blog around your topic.

• Learn how to write like the pros (read Clear and Simple as the Truth, On Writing Well, and A Writer’s Time).

• Become involved in citizen journalism (indymediaorg, globalvoicesonline.org), or create a distributed journalism project (see tinyurl.com/2s9bya for ideas). Create courseware for cnx.org.

• Find existing communities of interest and bring them together

• Empower communities by bundling relevant open source software.

• Seed ideas on whynot.net, halfbakery.com, globalideasbank.org, listible.com. Ask deep questions on metafilter.com. Read deep answers at the World Question Center (edge.org/questioncenter.html)

• Get comfortable editing the Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com).

• Make a wiki (http://pbwiki.com). Start your own Wikia (wikia.com).

• Explore systems of deliberation (openpolitics.ca, issuepedia.com) or start your own. Familiarize yourself with decision-making processes (http://www.dotmocracy.com/, http://www.iit.edu/~it/delphi.html), and decision-support (Steen Rasmussen, Diana Mangalagiu, Hans Ziock, Johan Bollen, and Gordon Keating, Collective intelligence for decision support in very large stakeholder networks: The future US energy system — tinyurl.com/223eau)

• Create sharable visualizations with public data: tinyurl.com/3btkjm, learn how to display data really effectively: edwardtufte.com, learn how to display really complex data: visualcomplexity.com/vc/.

• Hold global, multiple-time-zone meetings and conference calls using Skype or Gizmo, freeconferencecall.com, the worldclock.org meeting planner (tinyurl.com/ytgcp), and Meeting Wizard (meetingwizard.org/).

• Become hip to the world of Make magazine (www.makezine.com/).

• See what the TEDsters have to say about collaboration: http://www.ted.com/themes/view/id/19

• Find (or found!) a free media lab (www.mongrelx.org/?q=gyoml)

• Help bring laptops to the world's children (laptop.media.mit.edu/)

• Sponsor a FabLab (fab.cba.mit.edu/) in an under-served location.

Workaday practices: specific domains of interest

• Music: Lay down some grooves on cc:mixter (ccmixter.org/), start a free culture record label, organize a global synchronized listening party (everyone downloads a playlist and starts their mp3 player simultaneously, and then all wander through beautiful places in their part of the world).

• Programming: get an XO laptop (One Laptop Per Child) and write apps for it. Write FaceBook or Web 2.0 apps²⁰ that make it easier for people or companies to coordinate sustainable practices.

• Art: Share meaningful work on deviantart.com/ or flickr.com/. Curate an art show of artists from around the world. Bonus: do it in Second Life. Derive inspiration on how to display the large-scale from Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers (chrisjordan.com/), or Ed Burtynsky’s photographic works (edwardburtynsky.com/)

• Finance: Explore the world of peer-to-peer micro credit (kiva.org) and currency democracy (ripplepay.com, tinyurl.com/yp5jdu) as a way to understand paradigm-shifting technologies. Check out the Interra Project chapter in this book.

• Community: Start a free wireless hotspot that informs people about their neighborhood:

http://www.ilesansfil.org/tiki-index.php?page=Projets.

• Science and technology: Replicate innocentive.com in your area.

• Government or politics: See http://www.mysociety.org/projects, http://www.howdtheyvote.ca/, and openpolicy.ca.

• Transparency: Read Why Congress Needs a Version Control System: radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/why_congress_ne.html, by Tim O’Reilly, and investigate the transparency mashups at www.sunlightlabs.org. See Ethan Zuckerman’s blog entries on Tools for Open Government (http://tinyurl.com/ypz234), and Towards the principles of open government data (http://tinyurl.com/3daaaf).

• Bias: Familiarize yourself with the various kinds of cognitive bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) and how to counter them (Surowieki’s The Wisdom of Crowds). Develop tools which contribute to media democracy.

• Open Data: Investigate http://datalibre.ca/ (“urging governments to make data about Canada and Canadians free and accessible to citizens”) and http://civicaccess.ca/

• Envisioning the Future: For a compelling example of collaborative foresight, see worldwithoutoil.org/ (and the feature on Jane McGonigal at: salon.com/tech/feature/2007/07/10/alternative_reality_games). See also the chapter in this volume, State of the Future 2007.

• Taking action: Look at savetheinternet.com, avaaz.org and changemakers.net for very successful and credible models of how it can be done. pledgebank.com has a system for taking actions together, as does razoo.com.

Building a prosperous world at peace: strategies for change

How can we build the world we want, quickly, and in a way which is as inclusive as possible? Changing the world is difficult work²¹, even with many minds engaged in the problem. Technology and global culture have created unprecedented problems, but they also offer unprecedented remedies.

Advanced strategies for the global practitioner

The world has a new tool-kit. How to use it?

• Identify the disruptive applications of the future. Build them, or have them built. Open source them. Watch the world alter.

• Determine where the costs are too high. Lower them.

• Inspire the opening up of closed information silos, at national and international levels²². Get the facts, and allow everyone else to get them too. Make them easily visualizable. Encourage evidence-based policy.

• Identify the as yet undiscovered win-win-win practices in your sector and the infrastructure necessary to make them possible.

• Study the methods in The Change Handbook and The Tao of Democracy. Figure out how to scale them up.

• Design systems of effective deliberation, coordination, and cooperation for everyone in your domain of interest.

• Work out the principles of having Difficult Conversations²³ about what you care about at a societal level. Have them.

• Discover a generative class of human knowledge that has never been aggregated. Aggregate it. Generate it.

• Design communities of practice that don't yet exist. Figure out the tools necessary to empower those practices. Make them.

• Seed a field by writing a paper laying out the issues for a brand new area of inquiry, ala Robert Trivers²⁴. Watch the world flesh it out.

• Given a paradigm that isn't possible with the current infrastructure, figure out what infrastructure would make it possible, and cause it to come into existence.

• Familiarize yourself with Donella Meadows’ Twelve Leverage Points to Intervene in a System.²⁵ Apply leverage. Transcend a paradigm. Extra credit: find an additional point of leverage.

Figure 1. Historical, current, and potential movements in

mass collaboration, open source, and collective intelligence