Currently, spectrum in wireless networks is allocated using a property based scheme. This solves the problem of interference by providing coordinated access to capacity for users of multiple technologies at the cost of fixing the available capacity for each technology area. Recently, architectures have been proposed that use a cooperative strategy for capacity allocation. These have the advantage of increasing available capacity with the number of users. The author believes that cooperative wireless networks could be created that provide capacity that scales proportional to the number of users. In addition, a cooperative wireless network would have increased options with respect to Metcalfe's Law, the number of pairwise transactions that could occur would grow as N**2, and Reed's Law, the number of groups that could be formed would grow as 2**N.

The author argues that the scaling of capacity available in wireless networks indicates that spectrum does not behave like ordinary property and requires a different commons based allocation and coordination regime one that encourages cooperation among users in order to increase available capacity. No obvious regime exists today. However, the current Internet regime for wired communication was formed from 25 years of innovation in an open and experimental environment. The resulting regime differs significantly from the previous regime that grew under the control of the telecommunications provider. The author calls for the development of a cooperative wireless network regime by starting with an open and experimental regime that encourages cooperation much the same as the starting point for the current Internet regime for wired digital communications.

This paper is a summary of an Aspen Institute sponsored in-depth roundtable session, written from the perspective of one informed conference observer (Bollier). The participants are leading thinkers in the many complex areas this paper covers (economics, systems theory, human behavior, human futures, information technology evolution, etc) and are listed on page 57. A selection of their key insights shared in the paper are listed below:

A "push" economy is geared towards mass production, anticipating consumer demand, and routing resources to the right place at the right time, to create standardized and mass produced products. By contrast, a "pull" economy is based on open, flexible production platforms that are used to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products, "pull" model companies are demand-driven, and assemble products in customized ways that serve specialized or local needs, usually using "rapid" or "on the fly" processes.

Several global corporations are moving towards "pull" methods, and away from "push" models; ie., Toyota, Dell, Cisco, Li & Fung. These companies employ different variations of Value Network models, that share information about overall network performance and best practices for serving specialized needs, among hundreds or even thousands of partner companies that make up the network. This creates an intra-network knowledge commons. Some companies also work closely with Open Source Software projects, thereby expanding their "pull" network, and expanding their knowledge commons into a broader Open Commons via Open Source Software project contributions. Thus, "pull" business models also tend to be Network Value-Increasing, and Commons-based business models as well.

"Pull" models can also be platforms for creating "increasing returns dynamics." This is due to "pull" models being based around loose and flexible networks that are already configured to scale as growth occurs. So, growth does not incur the huge overhead costs in administration that "push" models must contend with. Pull platform key characteristics include modular and loosely-coupled networks, open channels that better harness the passion and commitment of innovation communities. "Pull" platforms also will tend to influence public policy with regards to education and innovation, as more companies tend to gravitate towards the "pull" models.

The areas where "push" models tend to succeed in business are in areas where people do not know what they want, and prefer to shop from pre-made selections (Ikea, Home Depot). However, there are even "pull" models to found here, in the form of user-driven innovation, such as mountain biking, extreme skiing, hot rodding, etc. In these pro-amateur niches, customers don't necessarily know what they want, but do want to be a participant in the "pull" network that creates the product.

How do you tax a product that is made in 23 different countries? "Pull" models are going to change the way that governments create policy as more companies gravitate toward them. This will influence laws about intellectual property, education, taxation and more.

"Pull" economies are not just centered around finding creative ways to "outsource/offshore jobs" away from one place and to the places where "labor" is "cheaper". Successful "pull" models have encouraged and aided "insourcing", where more jobs are created, for instance in the United States by "foreign sources (a total of 7 million cited by this paper), than are out sourced (a total of 600,000+ cited by this paper). This is because pull models seek out, not just the "cheapest" labor, but the best ways to add value to the production networks. So, they can scale to many participants around the world, regardless of local labor costs, to find the best participants needed for specific specialized productions.

The social dynamics of "pull" models are highly centered around creating relationships of trust, sharing knowledge, and close cooperation among network participants. In "pull" models, non-market value creation (tacit knowledge, intangible value) is generally steered towards a commons-based model. A commons is used as a "collective governance regime for managing shared resources sustainably and equitably." Many of these commons are made possible by networked information technologies (the internet).

Bollier suggests that "if online commons are going to be useful to business, companies will need to do more work to develop protocols for identity and reputation management". This is because the use of the commons is based around trust. It also due to the need for ways to measure qualitative value in intangible assets beyond money, like knowledge, individual performance and value multiplication, and network wide performance/value multiplication.

Roundtable participants also noted that "pull" models will pose challenges to current education regimes that are centered around training people to participate in "push" economies. One of the participants mentions that " Computers, software tools, and Internet resources make possible some radically new styles of learning. By using pull-based systems, students can function much like businesses in the pull environment: They can access resources they don't control and put themselves into flows of activity, rather than just building inventories of static, objectified "knowledge."

“Along every conceivable dimension — from the intimate to the institutional — digital media force both individuals and organizations to redefine what kind of relationships create value.” The result of this paradigm shift isn’t about data and information, it’s about the value and priority that people place on the quantity and quality of their relationships.

Significant advances in technology have always altered how we perceive ourselves and our relationships. The automobile had an impact beyond simply moving from point to point B, and TV had an impact beyond delivering images and sound. Both of those wrought real and profound cultural change. Whenever a new medium emerges we have to look beyond the simple mechanics of the medium to the impact the medium has on the community. What’s important to recognize is that these new digital technologies aren’t simply evolutions of preceding technologies, but that these new technologies are now networked with each other. These new networks between networks have resulted in new relationships between networks that, in turn, have created new kinds of relationships between people.

This new phase of networked technologies allows individuals and institutions alike to create new ways of interaction. Intimacy, anonymity, trust, openness, access, passion, negotiation, hierarchy, coordination and collaboration can all be mediated, monitored and managed via networks ostensibly designed to carry bits. The value challenge has shifted from gathering and disseminating information to packaging and bundling it in unexpected ways.

What people crave is the chance to communicate and relate to each other in new ways – not simply to have access to a vast feast of information. The new technologies are directly related to the essence of being human. They challenge and stretch the traditional meaning of concepts like relationship, community and interpersonal expression. People expect more from these new technologies than simple job improvement, they want it to improve their working relationships with their boss, their colleagues, their subordinates and their clients.

Ultimately what is critical to people is value, and it is people, not information, that create value. According to “Netizens” their increased sense of belonging, of being part of a larger community, greatly outweighs the benefits of having a mass of information available. Failing to understand the transformational affects of the digital technology on culture itself will result in missed opportunities.

Technology, history, and social impacts of technology are most often framed in terms of hardware, software, and finance, but communication technologies have the potential to change the way people think, communicate, and organize social groups. These impacts are sometimes framed by Moore's law (microprocessors and chips grow more powerful and less expensive over time), Metcalfe's law (the value of a technical network grows as the square of the number of nodes grows) and Reed's Law (when technical networks enable people to form social groups, the value of the network grows as two raised to the power of the number of nodes - much faster than just the rate of growth of technical networks). The group-formation enabled by the Internet makes it possible for people who don't know each other and who are located in different parts of the world to connect with each other in regard to shared interests - economic, social, cultural, and political. When communication technology enables people to organize collective action in these spheres, civilizations change. Now that the power of computing and communication has untethered from the desktop and leaped into billions of pockets, the forms of collective action are erupting in places and spheres of life where computation and communication had never reached before.

At the point where billions of people have access to personal communications and the instant information that the Internet provides, the aspects of cooperation and collective action discussed by Axelrod, Ostrom, and others comes into play - the capabilities of the emerging mobile mediasphere enable forms of collective action that were not possible before.

Moore's law means that the quantitative capabilities of chip-based devices grow so quickly that they translate into qualitative changes over periods of decades; today, billions of people carry devices that are thousands of times more powerful than the first personal computers, and cost a fraction of the price. At the same time, the users of these devices discover and exploit communication capabilities, social potential, political leverage, economic opportunities that were not dreamed of by those who designed, manufactured and sold the technologies. The technologies that make smart mobs possible are in the earliest stages of development, similar to the state of the personal computer in 1980 and the Internet in 1990. Yet the political demonstrations and electoral leverage that manifested in the Philippines, Korea, Spain, the USA and elsewhere - deposing governments and electing others - show the potentially disruptive power of smart mobs, even in their earliest stages.

At the same time, primitive ad-hoc computation collectives such as SETI@home and folding@home indicate new forms of computing emerging from the collective, voluntary efforts of millions of computer users. And GPS chips add the power of location-based services to the mix: people are mobilizing social networks and information in the immediate time and space.

Economically, the ability to gain profit by sharing with others, rather than only by competing - as manifested by Amazon, Google, eBay, open source software and other enterprises - is making a new kind of economic enterprise possible. Commerce is ancient, markets are as old as the crossroads, but capitalism is only about 500 years old, enabled by technologies such as joint stock ownership companies, shared liability insurance organizations, double entry bookkeeping. Now, the peer production methods exhibited by open source communities and other enterprises hint that humans have not stopped inventing new forms of economic collective action.

Six Degrees begins in the beginning. Stanley Milgram's initial small world studies are analyzed. His findings in seeing if a group of people in Nebraska can get a letter to someone in Massachusetts are scrutinized. Milgram left a puzzle. Mathematically, six degrees of separation can be shown and intuitively it is appealing. But do social networks actually work that way?

Initially, Watts steps into the world of pure mathematic theory. Graph theory and random graphs are employed to build potential worlds in which connections can be made. These tools are detailed and their histories explained.

Watts and his colleagues then take the science to new levels, by introducing sociology, epidemiology, economics, and business models into this new multi-disciplinary science. Immediately, each new field of study brings with it new insights into network dynamics.

This convergence of disciplines reveals the social, transportation and technological networks that make up our world. These networks are, ultimately, made up of individuals. Individuals in turn relate back to the networks and define how they operate.

Socially, people relate to their network by clustering. Clusters are logical organizations of network elements. In a social context, we might cluster in terms of a religion, a favorite author, a school we are attending or an affinity for a type of food. Some of these have very close physical distance, while others have a social distance with members spread out over a large area.

Networks of this type are, to various extents, “scale-free” networks. If graphed these networks roughly follow a classic power law trend where the level of connectivity between two nodes in a network increases dramatically as more nodes are connected. Real-world scale-free networks tend to have highly connected hubs which rapidly, purposely, and efficiently transmit pertinent or pervasive content from one location to another. In social circles, these are networkers. In the airline network these are hub airports. In traffic they would be freeway interchanges.

Due to this architecture, the Internet and modern air transport have combined to greatly decrease the role of proximity in our social networks. This has had great impacts on commerce, tourism, cultural sensitivity and other social factors. However, it has also led to great risks in the transmission of diseases, sensitivity to distant economic fluctuations, and rapid spread of misinformation.

These dynamics create a type of network that Duncan calls simultaneously robust and vulnerable. Their strength and weakness is that, with rapid transmission from cluster to cluster, anything can move quickly from one location or group to another. He uses the example of Toyota, whose network of suppliers was organized in such a way as to quickly compensate for and recover from a potential economic catastrophe.

Stable scale-free networks do not rely on a rigid hierarchy to provide direction in times of crisis. Rather, the structure of the network itself can rapidly respond to an unforeseen situation.

Their network was arranged in such a way as to foster and reward communication. This communication helped cope with ambiguous or unplanned situations. Rather than paralyzing Toyota while people waited for a decision from a rigid hierarchy, the contractors in the network were able to analyze the calamity and provide a rapid response to it.

As mentioned above, this robustness also rapidly transmits malicious content as well. The Melissa Virus, SARS and Ebola are analyzed to show why the network did or did not transmit them and, when it did, how they eventually died out.

Watts ends this book by summarizing that the multidimensional nature of social distance is sometimes counterintuitive and subjective. People can feel close in a network sense to people they are physically distant from and, conversely, socially distant from people physically nearby.

He continues by warning that social and physical distances have shrunk. People can quickly travel from place to place and economies are highly interdependent. The sheer number of dependencies in the modern world may yield surprising results from seemingly insignificant actions.

He finishes by showing the stability of our networks with the example of how New York adapted to the 9-11 attacks. The City bounced back to semi-normal operations within a week. During the disaster, the best laid plans of emergency operations staff were scuttled by the utter unavailability of facilities and services designed to copy with disasters. The network will provide.

Humans have taken the cooperative arrangements that benefited organisms and species at the biological level to the cognitive and social levels: the capacity to play cooperative social games that benefit all was a driver of the evolution of human intellectual capacity; increased intellectual capacity manifested in both the concrete sphere of tool-making and the abstract sphere of social relationships. Once enhanced cognitive capabilities made complex social arrangements like status, reputation, gossip, persuasion, punishment, alliance possible, human social capacities became a tool for ratcheting up cooperative game-playing capacity.

Certain technologies push human societies to reorganize at a higher level of cooperation. As an example, Wright offered the Shoshone, a Native American tribe that lived in a territory with no big game to hunt but an abundance of jackrabbits at certain times of year. Because of their stark environment, the Shoshone normally existed at a simple level of social organization, with every extended family foraging for itself. When the rabbits were running, however, the families banded together into a larger, closely coordinated group, to wield a tool too large for any one family to handle or maintain — a huge net. Working together with the net, the entire Shoshone hunting group can capture more protein per person than they could working apart. Wright declared that "The invention of such technologies — technologies that facilitate or encourage non-zero-sum interaction — is a reliable feature of cultural evolution everywhere. New technologies create new chances for positive sums, And people maneuver to seize those sums, and social structure changes as a result."

Wright noted that people who interact with each other in mutually profitable ways are not always aware that they are cooperating; he cited evolutionary psychologists to assert that unconscious underpinnings of cooperation — like affection and indignation — are rooted in genetic traits:

"… natural selection, via the evolution of 'reciprocal altruism' has built into us various impulses which, however warm and mushy they may feel, are designed for the cool, practical purpose of bringing beneficial exchange."

"Among these impulses: generosity (if selective and sometimes wary); gratitude, and an attendant sense of obligation; a growing empathy for, and trust of, those who prove reliable reciprocators (also known as "friends"). These feelings, and the behaviors they fruitfully sponsor, are found in all cultures. And the reason, it appears, is that natural selection "recognized" non-zero-sum logic before people recognized it…Some degree of social structure is thus built into our genes."

"In the intimate context of hunter-gatherer life, moral indignation works well as an anti-cheating technology. It leads you to withhold generosity from past nonreciprocators, thus insulating yourself from future exploitation; and all the grumbling you and others do about these cheaters leads people in general to give them the cold shoulder, so chronic cheating becomes a tough way to make a living. But as societies grow more complex, so that people exchange goods and services with people they don't see on a regular basis (if at all), this sort of mano-a-mano indignation won't suffice; new anti-cheating technologies are needed. And, as we'll see, they have materialized again and again — via cultural, not genetic, evolution."

The cultural innovations that reorganize social interaction in light of new technologies are "social algorithms governing the uses of technology." Wright called these social methodologies "metatechnologies.". In the Middle Ages, the metatechnologies of capitalism — currency, banking, finance, insurance — pushed the hierarchical machinery of feudal society to transform into a new way of organizing social activity, the market. "The metatechnology of capitalism then combined currency and writing to unleash unprecedented social power." Wright claimed that the emerging merchant class pushed for democratic means of governance, not out of pure altruism, but in order to be free to buy and sell and make contracts. Throughout this process, powerful people always seek to protect and extend their power, but new technologies always create opportunities for power shifts, and at each stage from writing to Internet, more and more power decentralizes: "I mean that new information technologies in general — not just money and writing — very often decentralize power, and this fact is not graciously conceded by the powers that be. Hence a certain amount of history's turbulence, including some in the current era."

Currently, regulatory policy in the digitally networked environment is being used to replicate the current mass media structure in which individuals are passive consumers obtaining information and content from a few commercial producers. In this paper, Benkler provides legal, regulatory, and technological examples of how the mass media producer-consumer model is being reproduced at the content, logical, and physical layers of the digitally networked environment. At the content layer, intellectual property rights are used to legally deny uses that purely provide for public discourse. At the logical layer, owners of the logical layer are allowed to design that layer to protect the use of their content even for uses that are privileged by law. At the physical layer, the FCC has gone in two opposing directions by both created a commons of digital spectrum and perpetuated the current broadcast system with the allocation of digital spectrum. And in cable broadband, providers cite "technical reasons" for creating a system that provides significantly larger downstream capacity than upstream capacity and that technically prohibits customers from becoming users by hosting servers that serve up content in both cases perpetuating the mass media producer-consumer model.

But people want to be users as is evidenced by the Internet and the fact that people using telephones have spent more than on "newspapers, magazines, broadcast cable, and movies combined" in order to participate in communication. Users consume information but also rework information and send it to others (or produce new information). The Supreme Court's view of the First Amendment has repeatedly upheld the notion of users in that it provides for "robust debate, diversity of viewpoints, and individual expressive freedom" as opposed to the view that it provides a technical rule against regulation as regulation. At the same time, mass media has become technically, economically, and legally entrenched and government regulation seeks to counteract the potentially ill-effects on the intent of the First Amendment. The reality is that mass media provides very few individuals or organizations with access to communication pathways, and hence without regulation and maybe in spite of it, it is possible for this reality to inhibit the intent of the First Amendment.

Benkler calls for regulatory policy to move away from providing better service to consumers and towards enabling use and that consumption, production, and exchange of content is the purview of users - a move from the mass media producer-consumer model to an information commons. Today, technologically through the digitally networked environment and through appropriate regulatory policy, it is possible to develop a system in which individuals are free to participate in the consumption, production, and exchange of information - an information commons. Such a system would provide the intent of the First Amendment as regulatory policy today seeks to provide in spite of the realities of the mass media producer consumer model. However, such a system is not guaranteed and is not without regulation and therefore appropriate regulatory choices must be made at all levels (physical layer, logical layer, and content layer) to ensure a commons.