[p2p-research] [OK] Re: [VBbuilders] Why and how work together?

[Ryan Lanham]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 7:19 PM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> We've done some preliminary work on this with
> http://code.google.com/p/knowledge-commons/  there is much more work
> to be done. If people in the community would fund even a modest amount
> of work, we could really do some spectacular stuff with Knowledge
> Commons (beyond just distributing data)
>
>

There are two things commonly missing from free and open source work: 1.)
Overall design. 2) Integration.  Really they are one in the same.  What
profit does very well is to create incentives for big plans/solutions and to
motivate people to attempt to solve big plans and solutions.  The
individualism of P2P tends to rely on stigmergy as a solution.  Trouble is,
stigmergy is not very efficient in time use or resource use.

Sam's solution seems to bridge the two...which is to say, it is the same
solution as many other nonprofit foundations--using management technology
along side free/open source strategies.  In a sense, this makes the commons
more important, and P2P less important.  I'm not sure that's not the way to
go in general.

I'm really starting to think that the bloom is off individualism; that
management as a technology has won, and that free is inevitable.  The last
piece of the equation I cannot solve is why co-ops are not spontaneously
developing all over.  The thing in the high Andes that Michel forwarded
makes utter sense to me.  Why don't the red shirts in Thailand do a thousand
of those?  There must be a technology or know-how that is involved in making
something like that work that is more complex than it seems from the
outside.  My guess is that most organizations tend to be too utopian and too
democratic and thus fail like the 60s US commune movement to be an
attractive place to exist even for those so inclined.
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