[p2p-research] Open source is a company; social media is a country

[magius]

by Chis Anderson (Wired)

image At the Sourceforge breakfast this morning we got some questions
on what the organizational differences are between open source and
social media. Here’s my answer:

One of the paradoxes of early 20th Century management was the
observation that companies are best run as dictatorships, while
countries are best run as democracies. Why was this? Management
theorist Charles Barnard, in his theory of the firm, proposed that it
was because organizations existed for a common “shared purpose”.
Countries, on the other hand, existed only to serve their people.

Shared purpose required singular vision, leadership and top-down
control. Serving the people, on the other hand, benefits from
bottoms-up recognition of needs and collective decision-making
(voting).

Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent,
self-organized and democratic. The truth is just the opposite: most
are run by a benevolent dictator or two. What makes successful open
source projects is leadership, plain and simple. One or two people
articulate a vision, start building towards it and bring others on
board with specific tasks and permissions. The best projects are the
ones with the best leaders.

Social media, on the other hands, doesn’t exist for a shared purpose.
It exists to serve the individual. We don’t tweet to built Twitter, we
tweet to suit ourselves. We blog because we can, not because we have
signed on to a blogging project.

Seen this way, open source projects are like companies. Social media
is like a country. Benevolent dictatorships rule the first; democracy
the second.

The point: the nature of participation is very different between open
source and social media, even though people tend to lump them together
into "peer production". Open source is hierarchical by design, while
social media structure is simply ruled by popularity.