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Commons 2.0
Paul Jacobson · Johannesburg Gauteng (South Africa) · Nov 20th, 2007 12:24 am · 42 votes · 3 comments
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When I think about the concept of the “Commons”, I think about a marketplace of ideas and content being exchanged by willing (and often passionate) participants. The emphasis is on collaboration and the use of shared resources. There are sometimes rainbows and tie-dye involved in my daydreams of the Commons. It is all very Woodstock and conducive to a culture of true sharing and meaningful exchanges of content and ideas.
The realisation of this dream, this ideal (in one form or another), is one of the purposes of Creative Commons and its partner in the sublime, iCommons. To a large extent achieving this goal is dependent on the form of media in question and the rights that attach to those media. No discussion about the Commons is really complete without a discussion about the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, which is described as follows on the Creative Commons site and licensed under a CC BY 3.0 licence:
“The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is the familiar notion that widespread public use of a commons leads to its inevitable depletion. But some resources, once created, cannot be depleted. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, ‘He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.’ An idea is not diminished when more people use it. Creative Commons aspires to cultivate a commons in which people can feel free to reuse not only ideas, but also words, images, and music without asking permission — because permission has already been granted to everyone.”
Some of the concepts associated with the Commons would seem to include open access, less restrictive (or no) licensing conditions on content made available and a collaborative spirit, if not a strong sense of community and the common good. As I mentioned above, lots of tie-dye. In this article I would like to toss some thoughts about social networks into the air and see what sticks to the ceiling.
Recent developments on the web slipped into my thought processes when I was considering how to approach this topic and I found myself thinking about social networks as facilitators of the Commons. Social networks like Facebook, MySpace and their younger cousin, Plaxo Pulse, are heavily populated by users who share their content and thoughts with each other daily. Used appropriately, they could become the newest and most effective platforms for the Commons on the web today. Going further, the digital nature of the content available on web-based social networks would likely circumvent the ‘tragedy of the Commons’. Digital content could be reproduced almost endlessly with no discernible loss of quality and the sheer numbers make social networks a real candidate for the next iteration of the Commons as a marketplace.
One of the features of the social web in the form of a social network (or social network infrastructure) that facilitates the Commons must be that the network be openly accessible so that the broadest possible cross section of the broader community of users can access and make meaningful use of the service concerned. This would obviously rule out paid services and while it would seem to fit well with free social networks on the web, the question is “what about the unwired members of the community?”
This issue has as much to do with universal access to broadband Internet access as it has to do with the accessibility of the service itself. The absence of Internet access renders these services inaccessible to the members of the community who can’t access the Internet and in South Africa this represents the vast majority of the population. The percentage of people who can access the Internet through a broadband service is even smaller.
Leaving aside the issue of access to the Internet and therefore the tool to access social networks, the next question is how those social networks handle content flowing into and out of them. This is where a movement known as the Open Social Web comes into play and advocates mobility and control of your personal information, your ideas and your content. A social network that subscribes to Open Social Web principles facilitates users’ ability to move their information, ideas and content into the social network concerned and out, if so desired, while ensuring that personal information entrusted to the service is protected from unauthorised disclosure.
In contrast, a “closed” social network either restricts who may become a member and what can be done with information, ideas and content introduced to the system. These sorts of services make it particularly difficult to export your data from the service in a format that facilitates easy import into another service. It may also be difficult, if not impossible, to export information such as your friends’ list, your personal preferences and habits and more.
Where a social network is like a walled garden with only specific entry/exits points available for users, it hardly supports truly open access to the content concerned and that means that the goal of a digital Commons on the social web is further away than we may like. Some believe Facebook is an example of such a service whereas Google’s new initiative, OpenSocial, seems to have been designed with the goal of facilitating open access and the creation of a digital Commons across some of the most popular sites on the web today. It seems that both of these services/initiatives are really matters of degree and contributions towards what may emerge as a truly open social network that is completely open and facilitates the free flow of ideas and content.
The issue of meaningful access to the Internet remains an important component of this particular discussion. The emphasis is not just on access to the Internet but also on access to the same sorts of connections that are commonly in use by other members of the community. If the more disadvantaged members of our community cannot share our experience of fast access to the web, they face an almost invisible bar to complete access to and participation in these social networks and to the content available on those platforms.
While meriting an entire discussion in itself, it is worth mentioning that content licensing plays a tremendously important role in this debate on the Commons. Content under copyright is simply not accessible in ways that would befit the Commons while content released into the public domain are perfect for the Commons. In between these two extremes stand the six Creative Commons licences, which facilitate this sort of sharing in varying degrees.
It would take a convergence of a number of considerations to create a truly open social network and a web-based expression of the dream of the Commons on the web. These considerations range from meaningful access to the Internet (and the social networks concerned) to unrestricted access to the networks concerned and, finally, the terms on which the content may be shared. If this convergence takes place, we could be looking at the Commons 2.0, a Commons for the web and a truly effective tool for the sharing of content and ideas for all to participate.
tags: johannesburg south africa culture opensocial socialnetworks commons commons20
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