What makes people work for free? – Follow up.
There have been some interesting thoughts about ‘What makes people work for free?’ since it was published on openbusiness.cc. The idea of ‘micro-innovation’, the act of making very small contributions to a much larger, much broader innovation sprung up at principledinnovation.com. A reply to this idea was the idea of ‘micro-volunteerism’ i.e. you can put a touch on something and never spend time on it again. It would be interesting to see more organisations working on models of stimulating people to contribute with as much ease as possible, especially in times with low incentive to volunteer as identified by principledinnovation.
German website best-practice-business.de have also taken an interest and shown another example of encouraging people to work for ‘free’. A german company, nachtausgabe.de, which reviews and comments upon German nightlife had set up a scheme where young gents got free VIP tickets to certain clubs, and in return they wrote a review. I’m not sure this is entirely free, but it does show people willing to do work in exchange for something fun and exciting.
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The security that those improvements are safe from re-enclosure, and therefore can never be “used against us” is enough to motivate labor.
The defining quality of the GPL is the enforcement of this disallowance. By erecting a barrier to re-privatization, the GPL secures the Means of Production from those who would impose excessive rents on its use.
Copyleft licenses allow both individual and corporate volunteerism to improve the commons without the worry of creating a competitive advantage for others because the resource, and any improvements to the resource are effectively “locked open” to the community.
This Mode of Production can be brought into the physical world by creating an analogous contract which could be applied to the Means of Production for material objects, so that (for example) the tools used to construct an automobile would be available to any qualified worker to bid upon, with the ‘floor’ of that auction held to the true costs {invest, insure, maintain, etc.} of those machines, and with any improvements made (that must be approved by voting stakeholders) would also be “locked open” to future users of those machines. Any amount bid past the ‘floor’ could be used to purchase more Means of that variety, since high bids indicate high demand.
[...] Analyse pseudo-marxiste: le web 2.0, c’est l’exploitation des masses Cette captation de la richesse produite collectivement et gratuitement par les foules est une forme d’esclavage 2.0, comme le laissent penser les écrits mortifères des théoriciens du “Comment faire travailler les gens gratuitement?” et autres apôtres du crowdsourcing (”externalisation vers la foule”)? Autrement dit, le capitalisme a trouvé une nouvelle martingale: plus besoin de réunir (si possible par la coercition) les travailleurs dans un endroit identifié -l’entreprise- pour capter le surtravail. Un peu d’habillage idéologique (partage, liberté, coopération) et, miracle, les gentils travailleurs bossent pour rien, les amateurs font concurrence aux professionnels (lestés de leurs salaires et charges sociales), et le capital peut s’accumuler jusqu’à Bételgeuse. [...]