[p2p-research] Building Alliances (basic income and entrepreneurship)

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 7:07 AM, Paul D. Fernhout
<pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> For most companies in the past (maybe this is changing at some) talking to
> others in detail about the current problem you are working on would be seen
> as giving away key competitive information in a commercial context, and thus
> violating either signed employee documents about confidentiality or
> violating a fiduciary obligation to the company. Discussing your work may
> also effect the patent status of it. Even at universities now, academics are
> often not allowed to discuss their work until patents are filed (which may
> delay communications by years). That's why I said it was probably illegal
> for you to talk in detail about your work. Some very successful companies
> have moved beyond that, but for many, secrecy is a big part of the game.


Secrecy is usually used to protect resource investment that will
always be scarce, even in a P2P scenario.  We don't have any official
secrecy bits ourselves but we are covered by overlapping NDAs required
by most other people we interact with.

Let me point out a failure mode of your model which you obviously
haven't considered:

We don't publish anything because no one cares to or wants to spend
the time. Interesting, reputation-enhancing work that has no profit
value even in the current world never gets written down in a form that
would allow that knowledge to be shared because the only people that
know it have zero interest in spending weeks writing dozens of tedious
pages of no conceivable value to them.

Where is the incentive to share, when people could spend those same
weeks doing something fun instead? You seem to be operating under the
assumption that sharing information has zero cost, but that is far
from true in many cases even in a P2P world.

-- 
J. Andrew Rogers
realityminer.blogspot.com