The Architecture of Participation

The architecture of participation is discussed in Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0, as one of a number of satellite ideas, including ‘The Right to Remix’ and Chris Anderson’ s ‘The Long Tail’. In terms of business models, the insights paraphrased below suggest the design of web-applications should automatically distill value resulting from user-participation and translate it into benefits for other users.

O’Reilly, citing Dan Bricklin’s The Cornucopia of the Commons, identifies the models available for building a large database. The traditional approach of paying people to do it ( e.g. Yahoo) is contrasted to the ‘voluntary labour’, where contributors fulfill comparable duties but may or may not require payment. A third, novel approach contrasts both the paid-labour and the OS models, of which the paradigm example is Napster. Its key function is to enable ‘every user to automatically help build the value of a shared database’. Users add value, this much is well understood, but most users lack either the time or the inclination to do so explicitly. The third approach involves circumventing this difficulty by creating an architecture of participation – ‘inclusive defaults for aggregating user data and building value as a side-effect of ordinary use of the application’. Users do not have to positively act to contribute, their ordinary use of the application is structured so as to benefit others.

The architecture of participation might be central to the future successes of open-source, rather than the voluntary approach. Allowing users to pursue ‘selfish’ interests whilst also building collective value has worked for not only for Linux, Apache and Perl, but also for the architecture of the internet and the web.