[p2p-research] a new funding mechanism for useful online services

Sat Jan 2 20:40:02 CET 2010

Hi Michel,

Two things are true about me.  First is that I think socialism is inherently
a failed system.  Second, I think the Nordic countries have dealt with the
inherent failures in such a way (mostly through cultural norming) as to make
the very real failings of socialism work better than almost any other
conceivable system.  So yes, there is a paradox in my arguments.  Whether
the paradox is a contradiction is a matter for others to judge.

I do feel the Nordic countries (a term that includes Sweden, Finland,
Iceland, Norway and Denmark for me...) have invented a superior way of life.
But they have invested intensively in education, cultural norming, etc. in a
way that I suspect is unrealistic for most places/nations.  Also, their
history of poverty before WW2 (and almost all these countries were very
poor) made them much more open to collective action.

I find most socialist revolutions (e.g. Cuba, 1917, Venezuela, etc.) to be
among the most heinous crimes committed against humans...even if the
intended social outcomes are very similar to what has come about in, say,
Sweden.

So I suppose I place very high value on collaboration and consensus and very
high negative judgments on coercion.

Both of these are American traits I'd say.  I feel, at my core, that I am an
American.  I sympathize with our history (though I recognize the many huge
past and present failings).  I feel the US has been a morally superior great
nation to others and that part of our moral superiority rests on a
commitment to greater liberties than socialism tends to allow.  I feel that
moral superiority has been in serious doubt...especially since Ronald
Reagan, when several US ideals were simply taken too far. It has happened
before and the nation has recovered.  Right now, the principle moral
failings relate to too little collective action and too much greed.  There
are other issues such as racial prejudice that matter, but the real issues
now relate to radical acceptance of excessive earning and consumption.  Few
Americans (maybe 30%) share this view.

Almost all Americans hate socialism and especially coercive Communism which
was our opponent in war for much of my early life...and which is probably
equivalent in the American ethos to fascism in the modern European ethos.
Americans felt abandoned and burdened by Europe during the Cold War...there
was, whether fairly or not, a sense the Europeans were enjoying a vibrant
and subsidized life by playing the US and the Soviets off one another.
European socialism is sometimes seen as a form of surrender to the Soviet
ideals of the past.  This is a burden of history...one that is mostly
inaccurate in Sweden, but maybe truer in Romania or Italy.   So, I think I
carry the burden of an America that raised me in the Cold War...a war that
was far less real for Europeans even though they lived in the prospective
theater of operations.  In a sense, America bore the intellectual and social
cost of competing with the Soviets.  Consequently, we view socialism as an
evil...implicitly.  That conservative view pervades America--even our left.
It will for some time.  However, we relish innovation--much more I'd say
than Europeans, in general, and therefore like to try new approaches, new
modes, new ideals...so long as they aren't old rejected ideals.  Maybe
something here begins to explain my contradictions.

Ryan

On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Ryan,
>
> you often refer favourable to the nordic countries, who rely quite a bit on
> public services,
>
> yet, when it is proposed, you critique it ...
>
> as far as I understand the proposal, it doesn't involve any management by
> government at all ...
>
> but in fact, I'm suspecting a too quick reaction here, as in my reading, it
> doesn't even involve government funding!!
>
> see:
>
>  « Greenwashing or conscious capitalism?<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/greenwashing-or-conscious-capitalism/2010/01/02>
>
> Towards Public Open Source Services, An ingenious P2P Funding proposal by
> Jeff Lindsay<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/towards-public-open-source-services-an-ingenious-p2p-funding-proposal-by-jeff-lindsay/2010/01/04>
> [image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
> Michel Bauwens
> 4th January 2010
>
>  An ingenious proposal <http://poss.gliderlab.com/> by *Jeff Lindsay*:
>
> *“The point is this: Twitter is an important piece of infrastructure. Even
> if it didn’t change for a long time, people would still use it because it is
> useful. If there was no business behind it (which there practically isn’t —
> got revenue?) … would the community pay for it? It depends on how much,
> right? Well, say expenses are low and users are high … and you don’t require
> everybody to pay the same amount, so some pay a lot, some pay nothing, and
> some somewhere in between. And say you have enough people paying different
> amounts that collectively make enough to keep it running (which we assume we
> can get it way down there), well… then it will run. If they don’t … it
> simply goes away. Why? It can’t run. Nobody is paying for it.*
>
> *Now think about something else. How many useful bits of cool plumbing are
> made and abandoned on the web because people realize there’s no true
> business case for it? And by business case, I mean make sense to be able to
> turn a profit or at least enough to pay the people involved. Even as a
> lifestyle business, it still has to pay for at least one person … which is a
> lot! But forget abandoned … how much cool tech isn’t even attempted because
> there is an assumption that in order for it to survive and be worth the
> effort, there has to be a business? Somebody has to pay for hosting!
> Alternatively, what if people built cool stuff because it’s just cool? Or
> useful (but not useful enough to get people to pay — see Twitter)?*
>
> *Well this is common in open source. A community driven by passion and
> wanting to build cool/useful stuff. A lot of great things have come from
> open source. But open source is just that … source. It’s not run. You have
> to run it. How do you get the equivalent of open source for services? This
> is a question I’ve been trying to figure out for years. But it’s all coming
> together now …*
>
> *Enter POSS:*
>
> *POSS is an extension of open source. You start with some software that
> provides a service (we’ll just say web service … so it can be a web app or a
> web API, whatever — it runs “in the cloud”). The code is open source.
> Anybody can fix bugs or extend it. But there is also a single canonical
> instance of this source, running as a service in the cloud. Hence the final
> S … but it’s a public service. Made for public benefit. That’s it. Not
> profit. Just “to be useful.” Like most open source.*
>
> *So how do you take care of something like this financially? If it’s
> running, it’s using resources. Well, again, if you expect this thing to be
> financially self-sufficient, it needs to leverage the cost saving benefits
> of cloud based infrastructure, but also take humans (which tend to be the
> biggest expense) completely out of the loop. So you automate as much as
> possible.*
>
> *If you can, you ceratinly don’t want to have to fuss with all the details
> of running and administering a system. This means even EC2 is not ideal.
> Google App Engine however … there is not a single bit of system
> administration beyond designing database indexing (arguably DBA, not
> sysadmin). You don’t touch a Unix prompt. It’s all taken care of for you …
> even scaling! What’s more, is it’s cheap and on-demand. These are perfect
> foundations for a self-sustaining system… now you just need to get people to
> pay for it!*
>
> *So what, you set up a PayPal account and tell people to donate? Well,
> you’re still in the loop if you have to take those donations and pay a bill
> to Google. Not to mention convincing people they need to pay. Instead let’s
> do this … this is the heart of the magic of POSS:*
>
> *You use the same Google Merchant account that App Engine debits as the
> one that accepts donations. This way no bank account is involved. Then you
> track the money that goes into the account (using the Google Merchant IPN
> equivalent). Then you look at your usage stats from the App Engine panel and
> predicate future usage trends. Then calculate the cost per month. Then
> divide the cash in the account by that and you have how long the service
> will run. You make this visible on all pages (at the bottom, say) that this
> service will run for X months, “Pay now to keep it running.” You accept any
> amount, but you are completely clear about what the costs are. And this is
> all automated.*
>
> *That’s right. Once in place, you can completely remove yourself. If the
> service is useful, people will use it. If they want to keep using it, they
> pay for it. If they don’t, it goes away. But costs are completely
> transparent, as cheap as possible, and on-demand. So perhaps it does go away
> because it ended up not being useful. Somebody else stumbles upon it
> (through a static page placeholder) that allows them to “put more quarters
> in” if they want to use it. It’s also open source, so if people want to make
> changes or fix something, they can. Various people in the community would
> have the ability to deploy to the cloud … just like some in open source are
> considered a canonical source for the source code (in the context of DSCM).
> It’s not just “Software as a Service” … it’s “Open Source Software as a
> Public Service”.*
>
> *In effect, you get something kind of like Wikipedia — only leaner, and
> more automated. They do fundraising drives to cover their annual operating
> expenses. This is a batching approach that lean thinking shows us is
> inefficient. POSS makes this a continual, ongoing process … making it much
> more efficient. Not to mention completely automated.*
>
> *Now the story above assumes App Engine, but you can tweak it to work in
> other circumstances. The point is the story above is ideal and best to prove
> the point.*
>
> *The community pays for, maintains, and consequently uses this software as
> a service, leveraging all the latest cloud infrastructure. And it all starts
> by you making something cool. The cooler it is, the more people will use it,
> the more it will cost, but the more people to split the bill with. And
> different people will value it differently. This is a plus. Sure, some
> people won’t pay for it. But some people will pay way more than many because
> they have the money and may get more value out of it. This system can be
> further be optimized to fully extract consumer surplus using tricks like
> suggesting donations that get larger until there is resistance.*
>
> *So much stupid crap is made on the web in attempts to make money. Most of
> them fail. Yet you have completely valuable and useful things on the web
> (Twitter), that aren’t making a dime. Perhaps capitalism isn’t the only
> answer. And I know I referenced nationalizing at the beginning, but this
> isn’t about socialism either. It’s simply about technology and
> self-sufficiency. Certainly, not everything should be POSS. The best
> candidates are reusable infrastructure bits of plumping and difficult
> computation made easy. Infrastructure that will make it easier for you and
> others to build a service that is worthy of a startup, not to mention
> letting tinkerers do more with less.*
>
> *Would this work for Wikipedia or Twitter? Considering their scale and the
> complexity behind that, probably not. It’s hard to automate very complex
> things. But as we continue to standardize industry practice, virtualize,
> automate and raise abstractions … someday it may be possible.” *
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 9:32 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>  On 12/29/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> here's the text Ryan, which I'm reproducing on the blog
>>>
>>> see
>>> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/towards-public-open-source-services-an-ingenious-p2p-funding-proposal-by-jeff-lindsay/2010/01/04
>>>
>>> since I've covered it, perhaps Sam and Sepp could have a look at the
>>> services mentioned at the last paragraph?
>>>
>>> Michel
>>
>>
>>
>> It sounds mysteriously like "government."  Do people really think this
>> will work?  I can think of 1000 problems almost instantly.  First, who
>> controls the working release?  Governance will be a continual headache and
>> there will be no clear way to identify who has the expertise and the
>> commitment to be good at governance.  Second, no one will fund start-up
>> risks--this only works where markets fail.  Third, you have to "nationalize"
>> success by taking away risk venture incentives away from entrepreneurs.
>> Fourth, government programs are always rife with excessive start up costs
>> and intensive free riding issues.  Nothing here addresses those. (And I work
>> for government!)
>>
>> In the case of Twitter, lots of people are thinking through monetizing the
>> engine now.  If it doesn't work, then it is entirely possible the owners
>> will make it a co-op...a very standard and widely used market model.
>>
>> Sorry, but I see nothing new here at all.
>>
>> Ryan
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think
> thank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
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>
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>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
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