Cooperation Commons on The Open Business Creative Commons

Here’s a recent blog posting from the Cooperation Commons blog:

The Open Business Creative Commons describes itself as:

a platform to share and develop innovative Open Business ideas- entrepreneurial ideas which are built around openness, free services and free access. The two main aims of the project are to build an online resource of innovative business models, ideas and tools, and to publish an OpenBusiness Guidebook.

Increasingly, we are seeing the concepts behind “Open Source Software” make their way to into other aspects of human existence, such as Open Design and Open Business models. A recent Economist article talked about how:

In order to succeed, open-source projects have adopted management practices similar to those of the companies they vie to outdo. The contributors are typically motivated less by altruism than by self-interest. And far from being a wide-open community, projects often contain at their heart a small close-knit group.

I think The Economist Article is referring to the “close-knit heart” as those who would be motivated more by self interest than altruism.

However, Howard Rheingold recently pointed out to me in an email that Steve Weber’s book: The Success of Open Source looks at the most common motivators for open source project participation. Howard wrote that those motivators are (in order of popularity):

1. Learning to code
2. Gaining a reputation
3. Scratching an itch
4. Contributing to the commons
5. Sticking it to Microsoft

I can translate these motivators to roughly mean:

1. “Learning to code”= Access to, and sharing of knowledge/education/removing information asymmetries.
2. “Gaining a reputation”= Trust. Pretty self explanatory. But very important in a system that is open to everyone’s particiaption. “Reputation” not only equals status, but also can equal trust.
3. “Scratching an itch”= Inventing something that meets your own needs
4. “Contributing to the commons”= actively being altruistic.
5. “Sticking it to Microsoft”= Not just “revenge”, but trying to work towards obsoleting closed systems and replacing them with open systems.

Howard also pointed out that “scratching an itch” in open source software devolpment can be self interest that also contributes to the public good. Indeed, all of the motivations listed above serve this dual role. So, as pointed out to me by Howard, successful Open Source Software projects are “hybrids” of altruism and self-interest.

These same motivations seem to be driving participation in the emerging “Open Business”, and “Open Design” paradigms. Sucessful Open Businesses will incorporate Access to, and sharing of knowledge/education. Through this, they will remove information asymmetries. They will incorporate reputation systems and ways to gauge wether you can trust others. They will innovate by way of giving people access to “scratch and itch”, and invent tools and systems to meet their needs, that also feed back contributions to the public good. They’ll give an outlet for altruism. And, they will give people a systematic way to obsolete closed, centralized, and proprietary business systems with open and decentralized systems.

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More about the Cooperation Commons Project from Howard Rheingold (author of the book “Smartmobs”):

“Even a small increase in our understanding of the dynamics of cooperation and collective action could have enormous payoffs in regard to international relations and conflict-resolution, the evolution of economic institutions, and the future of democratic governance and civil society. The Cooperation Project, a collaboration between the Institute for the Future and Howard Rheingold, proposes to catalyze an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action. We do this by compiling and synthesizing current knowledge, mapping the outlines of the emerging field, convening meetings of the best minds in relevant disciplines, and encouraging ongoing discourse, research, and practice.

Problems of health care, economic development, political and interpersonal conflict, environmental sustainability, resource allocation, disaster relief, urban planning, civil society, democratic governance, technological innovation, intellectual property, public education—the most critical problems of our time—
involve social dilemmas and institutions for collective action that are not yet well-understood.

Evidence from biology, sociology, economics, political science, computer science, and psychology suggest the feasibility of building an interdisciplinary framework for understanding cooperation. Because of institutional specialization, a program of cooperation studies will not happen without purposeful action. In order to catalyze the growth of this enterprise, the Cooperation Project has created:

* An open, shared, knowledge base of insights and resources relevant to cooperation and collective action: the Knowledge Commons
* Several visual maps for customized navigation of the cooperation studies landscape
* A university course with publicly available lecture videos and readings
* A workshop and guidebook for re-perceiving the role of cooperation in business and the technologies that enable it
* The beginnings of a social network of cooperation researchers

The Cooperation Project has convened expert workshops, published a syllabus, launched online discussion communities, compiled reports, created and published video lectures, and built software prototypes— the beginnings of a Cooperation Toolset. Now we seek to:

* Test and refine these instruments through workshops and further research.
* Attract the best minds in cooperation-related disciplines to help.
* Learn how practitioners can use the knowledge and tools in their domains.
* Make these resources public and invite broad participation.”