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."

The “second enclosure movement” attempts to put fences around the intellectual commons of ideas and facts in a manner analogous to the enclosure and transfer of property rights from the public to the private sphere during the first enclosure movement in England that fenced off common areas between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. A new way of thinking about the public domain, the intellectual commons, is needed to combat the negative impact of this trend.

Limits on intellectual property rights are being eroded by specious arguments about the need to protect against piracy and to encourage innovation. Historically there was a sense that any grant of intellectual property rights, effectively a state granted monopoly, was to be strictly limited in term. In fact, the erosion of those historical limits through legislation and extensions of intellectual property protections like business method patents, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and patents on the human genome can be argued to decrease the possibilities for collaborative creation traditional in domains as varied as science, law, education, and music.

The first enclosure movement can be viewed as a “revolution of the rich against the poor”, it was justified by the incentives it offered for large-scale investment, for the control it offered over exploitation, and for the efficiency of exploitation of resources. It was said to “avoid the tragedies of overuse and underinvestment,” a conclusion that is subject to some debate.

The second enclosure movement is the similar much more recent application of intellectual property law to “the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind”: things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights.

Advocates of the second enclosure argue that the extension of property rights is essential to create incentives to invention. Opponents point to the restrictions and bottlenecks on innovation and, in the case of the human genome, the claim that it is the “common heritage of humankind belonging to everyone.”

Dangers:

• Propertization is a vicious circle. Once something is made private it’s hard to take it back.
• To enclose the intellectual commons requires throwing away or restricting the characteristics of the Internet that made it so effective a force for innovation.
• The arguments for enclosure are analytically unsound and often based on the vested interests with financial abilities to sway lawmakers.

The notion of intellectual property has had critics through its history: Jefferson was concerned with the state creation of unbounded monopoly. He felt that intellectual property rights might be necessary, but should not be treated as natural rights and should be strictly limited in term.

The concept of public domain as applied to intellectual property is a relatively recent construct. Copyright is a system designed to feed the public domain providing temporary and narrowly limited rights. The public domain is “a commons that includes those aspects of copyrighted works which copyright does not protect.”

The Internet expanded rapidly because its core protocols, TCP/IP and HTML, are open.

A global network transforms the nature of creativity by introducing new ways of collaborating: examples include the free software and open-source software movement.

The free software and open-source software movements may serve as models for thinking about alternative ways of dealing with intellectual property which encourage collaborative innovation while offering creators the ability to distribute their inventions for financial gain. These movements stand squarely on intellectual property: they build on a living ecology of open code where the price for participation is a commitment to make incremental innovation part of the ecology.

Lessig defines a commons as “a resource that is free. Not necessarily zero cost, but if there is a cost, it is a neutrally imposed, or equally imposed cost.”

The General Public License (GPL) of the open-source software movement encourages continuing improvement by making source code for software and its modifications available for members of the community. Continuous, peer-monitored improvement is encouraged without violating individuals’ rights to distribute products for financial gain. Presumably the best solutions are adopted by the community.

Boyle proposes using the concept of “public domain” for intellectual property, a relatively recent term in legal discourse, as a rallying point for combating the erosion of the intellectual commons in much the manner that the concept of the “environment” was used to create a coalition of disparate self-interests.

Dan Bricklin examines ways to induce a pool of users to contribute to a commons without extra effort, using the architecture of the commons (as in Napster's default to sharing in the way download directories are available) and leveraging user's self-interest. The key to understanding the success of Napster and other file-sharing technologies resides not in their 'peer-to-peer' nature but in the fact that they provide users with access to a database of desirable things and enable people to create a public good in the process of seeking their own interests.

Bricklin identifies three ways to fill a database: organized manual, organized mechanical, and volunteer manual.

CDDB succeeded at motivating volunteer manual data entry because it leveraged the desire for users to have their data in the database so that CDDB-aware programs could access it, for example when a user would insert a CD into their computer.

Bricklin calls this "harnessing the power of individual selfishness."

Napster cleverly avoided manual data entry by automatically indexing anything in the user's 'Shared Music' directory. Thus "storing the copy in the shared music directory [was] a natural by-product of the user's work with the songs."

Sharing is the default. This results in users "adding to the value of the database without doing any extra work."

Eric Raymond compares two styles of software development using his own experience as illustration. The Cathedral refers to a top-down command-and-control approach, whereas the Bazaar refers to a decentralized cooperative approach. The success of the bazaar-made operating system Linux led Raymond to investigate why that approach succeeded when the accepted norm was that only a Cathedral approach could successfully create good software.

Raymond reaches a number of conclusions about the Bazaar approach to writing software.

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch. “Scratching an itch” is a way of harnessing self-interest to get high-quality volunteer labor. Developers will work hardest at solving their own problems first, and since those problems are often also other people’s problems, the community has shared incentives to cooperate.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse). This refers to the value of “constructive laziness,” i.e. that good programmers seek to do as little work as possible and therefore are drawn towards the most efficient methods they can find.

"Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11) Raymond clarifies, “you often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once.”

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you. Your reputation directs things to you as people learn what you are good at.

When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor. If you don’t make arrangements for the capable continuation of a software project, then the entire community loses.

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. Your users are your testers.

Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. Or, less formally, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: "Linus' Law". I am indebted to Jeff Dutky for pointing out that Linus' Law can be rephrased as "Debugging is parallelizable."

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. Brooks, Chapter 9: "Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won't usually need your [code]; it'll be obvious."

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong. The moral? Don't hesitate to throw away superannuated features when you can do it without loss of effectiveness. Antoine de Saint-Exupery (who was an aviator and aircraft designer when he wasn't being the author of classic children's books) said: "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." When your code is getting both better and simpler, that is when you know it's right.

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you. In The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks writes: “while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people.“

Provided the development coordinator has a medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

There is a class of “shareable goods” that systematically have excess capacity relative to the needs of their owners. The use of these goods is more efficiently harnessed and allocated through sharing relationships rather than secondary markets. These rival material resources are beginning to be shared in the production of both rival and non-rival goods. Examples include car-pooling and the pooling of excess processing capacity of personal computers connected to the Internet for decomposed computations in a variety of domains.

Social sharing and exchange among individuals who are strangers or weakly related is an underappreciated modality of economic production that should exist alongside price-based and firm-based market production and state-based production. The sharing of physical goods is analogous to the sharing of labor in peer production (e.g., open source software).

The goods that are amenable to sharing are “lumpy.” They deliver utility in discrete packages rather than continuously. Thus an automobile used in carpooling is purchased with a fixed number of seats; a PC has certain processing power, memory and storage. They have enough capacity to satisfy their owners, but more than is often needed. Shareable goods are also of “medium granularity”: granularity is a measure of the cost relative to the demand for them in and the wealth of a society. A locomotive or passenger plane is large grained virtually everywhere. An automobile or PC is mid-grained in the United States, but large grained in Bangladesh. Thirty years ago, computers were large grained all over the world. These goods are thus are large enough to satisfy the needs of their owners and inexpensive enough that one person can justify putting a unit into service given his ability and willingness to pay for it. They have an overcapacity on a aggregate basis.

The motivations to share are often altruistic, but may also be financial or offer some other non-financial reward (e.g., access to high occupancy vehicle car pool lanes in the case of ad hoc ride sharing systems.)

The provision of services through sharing is more efficient than traditional markets because of negligible transaction costs and the benefits of more direct information exchange: the needs of the end consumers are communicated more directly than in traditional markets.

The analysis of the economic efficiency and value of shareable (physical) goods has implications for legal and legislative policy in other areas such as intellectual property and wireless communication.

Current policy analysis, legal decisions, and legislation often disregarding and/or ignorant of the economic and social value of shareable goods, has tended to defend existing market-based production and distribution in support of increasingly outmoded centralized, capital intensive, industrial models of distribution (as opposed to production) of cultural media. These limiting decisions incorrectly assume that the role of market production is fixed rather than technologically contingent.

How shareable goods are treated through legal, regulatory, and legislative policy has potentially crippling or conversely encouraging impact on the architecture of multi-media devices, communication networks, power distribution systems and on the production of cultural goods.

Recent years have seen a series of questions asking the applicability and usefulness of traditional collective action theory to certain contemporary phenomena. To name an example, Olson's (1965) proposition that small groups are more successful than larger ones in his account of collective action theory can now be widely contested with evidence from contemporary networks such as the highly successful Indymedia (a large network of journalists, writers, and everyday people organised around participatory media principles).

The paper first examines traditional collective action theory in relation to two central elements: the problem of free-riding and the importance of formal organisation as one important way to overcome it. The challenges presented by new uses of information and communication technologies address specifically to these fundamental elements.

A number of examples are presented, to drive the point that collective action theory has evolved or departed from its traditional concept especially with respect to free-riding (do I contribute or free-ride) and the role of, and dependence on organisation. Some examples are:

1. “Battle in Seattle”, in which a far-flung network of groups «used e-mail, the Web, and chat rooms to engage in a largely self-organising protest against the policies of the World Trade Organisation» (pp 370).
2. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBLM): «a core strength of the campaign, which still seems to be ill understood by many, has always been its loose structure» (pp. 370).
3. «participating in various groups and public forums in which people's useful contributions emerge from an interactive process rather than the explicit pursuit of a goal» (pp 371).
4. «posting information on a web page or weblog, contributing to discussion on an electronic bulletin board» (pp 372).
5. Open source projects (pp 375).
6. Spontaneously organised smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002) aimed at public goods (pp 376).

These examples effectively illustrate how the nature of free-riding, organisations, and organising have changed in the contemporary media environment. In the case of the problem of free-riding, the binary decision of whether one contributes or free-ride is no longer apparent. Instead, the individual frequently go back and forth through a process of interaction and negotiation for collective action. In many of these scenarios, decisions to free-ride or contribute can also no longer be easily discerned.

The rise of new technological and participatory media have also made communication methods that used to be exclusive to formal organisations, now available for individuals. Changing structures of organisation that are made possible by communication technologies have also resulted in the ability of social movements and groups to take on certain functions of formal organisations — even surpassing the possibilities of formal organisations. Again, the boundaries are blurred, «between traditional hierarchical forms and flexible network structures».

By studying these phenomena, collective action theory is now reframed using the principle of boundary-crossing between private and public. In this context, when an individual cross a boundary between private and public realms, and when this boundary is crossed by two or more people in conjunction with a public good, collective action is said to have occurred. This is a rich frame by which several scenarios in the current contemporary media environment can be accommodated:

• the ease of transforming private discourse to public discourse, without any specific dependence on central organisation (e.g. private responses to an e-mail discussion which eventually becomes public)
• The absence of a central organisation prompting people to share their email lists (transforming private domains into a public domain of collective action)
• The Web as a vehicle for crossing boundaries (information that are privately created may one day become useful publicly)

The facilitation of private-public boundaries results in exchanges that could arguably advance collective action. Technologies that help to identify, for example, private interests, experiences, and acquaintance once identified as shared between people can prompt collective action. Other than permitting the constitution of pubic spheres around commons interests, this focus would also accommodate the continuum by which individuals and groups can easily move back and forth between private and public realms.

Further thoughts:

The notion of using the private-public boundary crossing as the principle to explain contemporary types of collective action is a very interesting one, especially in relation to the commons paradigm in the media environment. Such reconceptualization of collective action is also necessary, in light of the various types of convergence that the world is witnessing today. The convergence of technologies and growing interdependence between people and their uses of technologies, converging communities and organisations, and convergence in media as they continuously evolve over time.

Having said this, there is also a number of theories and constructs which I think would be very useful to study along with the work raised by this paper. For example, borrowing the lens of structuration theory (Giddens, 1986) to look at how the nature of technologies in use reflect the structural and agency properties of the private and public realms would enhance understandings around the social processes of these technologies (how technologies influence and are influenced by people). The theoretical constructs of the commons, such as the Prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy as conceived by Hardin (1968) would also be relevant to study with respect to the free-riding problem and the role of organisations raised by traditional collective action theory. And along with this paper, it may also be worthwhile to reframe the commons concept in light of the contemporary scenarios of the commons.

References

Bimber, B., Flanagin, A. J. and Stohl, C. (2005) Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment. Communication Theory, 15 (4), 365-388.

Giddens, A. (1986) The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 62, 1243-1248

Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart mobs: the next social revolution, Perseus Books Group, Cambridge.

"This chapter examines the problem of financing public goods in three settings. Two efforts combine a degree of state coercion in mandating funding, with a decentralized and competitive private sector model for allocating funds. The first is the problem of compensating artists in a world where the most efficient distribution systems are peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. The second concerns the problems of funding the development of new drugs and other medical inventions. Finally, a proposal for new intermediators to facilitate voluntary collective action to finance public goods is considered."

Making DNA sequences centrally and freely available resulted in valuable innovations, such as the software tool BLAST that performs 500 trillion sequence comparisons annually.

"In a series of workshops at New York and Banff, Canada, a group of artists, lawyers, and economists looked at practical issues of how a compulsory license might work, and like most such inquires, discussed how one might set or collect fees, with alternatives such as levies on purchases of computer equipment or bandwidth, or various systems for subscription services, based either upon a flat rate or the amount of downloaded music. Some thought the fees should be paid directly from general tax revenue. There was no group consensus about these issues, but there was an appreciation that it would be good to structure the fee so that it was in some sense free on the margin (similar to how one now pays for cable television or subscriber-based radio services), and that it would be a positive feature if listeners could freely experiment with unknown artists or music types, thus contributing to discovery, growth, and opportunities for new artists."

How to allocate funds was not settled. Would some money be available to finance public goods that are not supported by the marketplace, such as experimental music or recording/archiving folk music? Should artists and studio musicians have a say? The workshops proposed that for part of artist compensation, intermediators would compete against each other and listeners could decide where to put their money. It was suggested that several experiments should be conducted and evaluated: "The Blur/Banff discussions were seeking to find a way that the listeners and artists could build a new social contract that would compete with and possibly replace t he current system of distributing and marketing music. It would seek to liberate the art from the consequences of marketing the art as a commodity. If the P2P model was successful, the expenditures on marketing would fall, and the greater share of resources would be available to artists themselves."

Health care R&D, especially research into new drugs, poses another problem. Although government grants to scientific research through academic institutions supports fundamental research, drug development is carried out by pharmaceutical companies, whose patents enable them to repay the considerable development costs — but the prices bear no relation to the cost of manufacture. The social dilemma balances the self-interest of the pharmaceutical companies who seek rents to justify lengthy and expensive development, and the needs of nations faced by epidemics such as AIDS whose citizens cannot afford access to commercially available drugs. WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires all but least-developed economies to issue patens on medicines. "This suggests a potential modification to the TRIPS agreement to allow countries an alternative way to contribute to global health-care R&D by ensuring that a fixed fraction of their GDP is being spent on supporting health care R&D," releasing such countries from their obligation to allow patents that block generic drug manufacture. Systems for efficiently collecting funds, and how to use them to fund innovation without marketing monopolies are outstanding problems to be solved.

Authors suggest competitive intermediators to "control the allocation of resources to companies and academics carrying out R&D, but not carry it out temselves (as this would be a conflict of interest). Instead each intermediator would concentrate on embracing the business model for resource allocation that it believed was the most efficient for drug development.." Prizes for R&D outputs, small grants, peer-reviewed open research projects are suggested. "Intermediates could also adopt "open" research agendas, since the ability to raise money would not be linked directly to product sales. If employers or individuals believed open research was more productive than proprietary R&D, more money would flow to open R&D projects." Consumers could possibly enjoy savings from reduction in marketing spending, which is a far larger component than R&D in pharmaceutical sales.

Another model, developed in a 2002 Rockefeller dialogue on collective management of intellectual property goods, focuses on lowering transaction costs for voluntary financing for a wide range of public goods by creating a kind of eBay marketplace, matching seekers with philanthropies, individuals, and corporate entitites. "The Matching Funds proposal is to create a new institutional framework that would make it easier to match willing funders and willing suppliers of public goods. The institutional framework would be an intermediator called Matching Funds (MF). The role of MF would be to provide due diligence on proposals for new public goods, and if the review was positive, to list the projects for subscribers." The public could critique the proposal and suggest modifications. "Subscriptions would be binding commitments to fund the project if sufficient support for the project was forthcoming from the community of persons who wanted the project done."