NMCSymposium for the Future2010-10-20

Collaboration for Good Futures

Mike LinksvayerCreative Commons / Collaborative Futures

Photo by asadal Licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 http://flickr.com/photos/68242677@N00/2117153416/

Thesis & Outline

Collaborative Futures=(increased probability of)Good Futures?(your participation matters)

How this talk came about...

Aside:very brief re licenses and Creative Commons

Creative Commons .ORG

Nonprofit organization

HQ in San Francisco

Global network of 100+ affiliate organizations

Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

Licenses & Public Domain

Space between ignoring copyright and ignoring fair use & public good

Legal and technical tools enabling a Some Rights Reserved model

Like free software or open source for content/mediaBut with more restrictive options

Media is more diverse and at least a decade(?) behind software

Six Mainstream Licenses

Public Domain Tools

Lawyer Readable

Human Readable

Machine Readable (License)

Machine Readable (Work)

My Book by
My Name
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at example.com.

DRMfree

NOT!

Computermusthelpnothandcuff!

DRM Voodoby psd licensed under CC BY 2.0http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1806247462/

Public licenses (e.g., CC) enable mass collaboration in communities (e.g. Wikipedia) and across legal entity boundaries (e.g., Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Free Software)(end not so brief aside)

Back to how this talk came about...

About Collaborative Futures...

Could the book sprint methodology be extended to non-manuals, i.e., less structure implied by subject?

How about a book sprint starting with only two words:CollaborativeFutures?

A recipe for the perfect meta-collaboration?Or a recipe for certain collaboration fail?

Arbitrary lessons and curiosities...

Whenever a communication medium lowers the costs of solving collective action dilemmas, it becomes possible for more people to pool resources. And more people pooling resources in new ways is the history of civilization inseven words.

Marc Smith, Research sociologist at Microsoft

Sharing is the first step

Web 2.0 is bullshit

This book might be useless

On the invitation

Open relationships

Sharing is the first step

Problematizing attribution

Can design by committee work?

Can design by committee work?

And lots about the future...

A recipe for the perfect meta-collaboration?Or a recipe for certain collaboration fail?

A: Selection of book sprint participants a confounding factor, or rather a factor in success (twice).

Good Futures

Note: This may seem like cheerleading. There is an opportunity for a good critique of free collaboration and the net in general. Please take it up!Also note: This section is just me, not Collaborative Futures

In Innovation, Meta is Max

The max net-impact innovations, by far, have been meta-innovations, i.e., innovations that changed how fast other innovations accumulated.

Robin Hanson (Economist)http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/meta-is-max---i.html

Collective Intelligence

Meta innovation?

Commons

Meta innovation for Collective Intelligence?

$2.2 trillion

Value of fair use in the U.S. Economy

http://www.ccianet.org/artmanager/publish/news/First-Ever_Economic_Study_Calculates_Dollar_Value_of.shtml also see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7643

In Innovation, Meta is Max

We dont have any idea how to solve cancer, so all we can do is increase the rate of discovery so as to increase the probability we'll make a breakthrough.

John Wilbanks, VP for Science, Creative Commons

Good Futures

Also requires avoiding bad futures. Under-appreciated role of free collaboration?

Cyber terrorism(Cyber terror war on)

Privacy breaches

Loss ofGenerativity

Lock-in

Surveillance

DRM

Censorship

Suppressionof innovation

Electoral fraud

Threat categories

Legitimate security issues

Protectionism

Politics and power

Security theater and fear-based responses (driven by all of above, not just legitimate security issues)

What digital freedoms needed for beneficial collective intelligence?

Keep same rights online/digitally that we (should anyway) have offline/IRL

Permit innovation and participation enabled by digital world even if not possible before (probably follows from above)

How building the commons (free software, free culture, and friends) helps

Security

Data shows FLOSS is more secure

Security through obscurity doesnt work

FLOSS encourages a heterogeneous computing environment

Free software and free culture both allergic to DRM and other mechanisms that sacrifice security to other goals

Protectionism

Peer production undermines policy arguments for protecting knowledge industries

Free software and free culture both allergic to DRM

Politics and power

Free software and culture improve transparency

... and the ability of all to participate

Peer production works against concentrated power doesnt require concentrated production structures and lowers barriers to entry

Security theater and fear

Access to facts mitigates fear and allows rational evaluation of responses

Commons work against three previous threats that drive security theater and fear

Can the success of the (digital) commons alter how we view freedom and power generally?

The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.

Eben Moglen

If we dont want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate, not one who is successful at taking from others.

Richard Stallman

i.e., we can form collective intelligences instead of forced collectives ... and still change the world

What is the future of digital freedom?

I dont know

Have a good idea of what we need to do to make it a good future

It is truly wonderful that creating free software and free culture has a side effect of facilitating [digital] freedom

Building the commons is key to assuring a good future

Politicians and corporations are unimaginative ... they need to see solutions, or they react in fear

A dominant commons makes many collective stupidity scenarios much less likely

Beneficial collective intelligence needs universal access to culture, educational resources, research ... in machine-readable form

So Collaborate!

(and learn/experience so you can teach/recommend free software and free culture when appropriate)

Polyphonic voices / heteroglossia / CF contributors

Thank you friends, and apologies for misrepresentations:Adam Hyde, kanarinka, Michael Mandiberg, Marta Peirano, Sissu Tarka, Astra Taylor, Alan Toner, Mushon Zer-Aviv

Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

AttributionAuthor: Mike Linksvayer

Link: http://creativecommons.org

Questions?ml@creativecommons.org

Detail of image by psd Licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1805374441