Presented
at the public launch of the Intercommons Initiative, May
16, 2002
We stand
at an interesting intersection in history. From one direction
we can see the new digital commons that is the Internet
bringing great potential for open communication and global
collaboration to each of us. Coming in from the other direction,
the forces of strong commercial monopoly and governmental
action or inaction threaten to collide head on with the
vision of that open digital commons. From the long term
extension of copyright to the mishandling and misapplication
of software patents, the very right to be creative and inventive
is at risk. Efforts such as the Creative
Commons seek to redress the copyright issues, while
the Open Source Movement fights monopoly control
through patents using its shared stakeholder licensing of
open code.
We
believe there is an important missing piece in these efforts
to protect the digital commons: the safeguarding and strengthening
of open marketplaces. In human communities throughout
history there has always been a marketplace. In ancient
Greece this was known as the "agora" and it served
not only as a place to transact business but as an important
social and cultural institution. In virtually every human
community the market was located at the very heart of a
town or village, next to governmental and spiritual institutions.
So what is the agora for the software community?
The
software business has always prided itself in its openness
and in operating like a bazaar, always giving space for
new entrepreneurs with a good idea. Following the recent
disastrous experience of 90s style venture capital speculation
many entrepreneurs are going "back into the garage"
to continue their craft without the encumbrance of "professional"
money and management. However, they will emerge from those
garages into a very different world: one dominated by
a few huge monopoly players and a world where a tangled
web of software patents means that any opponent with a large
enough war chest for legal action can shut down or force
an acquisition of any business. With this tectonic shift
in how business is done in software, the openness and pace
of innovation will be drastically affected.
There
is one clear alternative to this trend, the Open Source
movement. This movement is gaining momentum and has garnered
key corporate and government supporters and enough market
share to come under attack by monopoly powers. However,
if you wanted to obtain open source products or services,
where would you find them? Word of mouth has always been
the key purveyor of information in the software community
and this is especially true in the Open Source marketplace.
The very distributed nature of Open Source means that
there are even more channels of information and flows of
support, tools and innovative ideas which can lead to great
confusion for potential users and developers. As this
community comes into increasing challenge from closed source
monopolies, it might be wise to consider ways to present
the open source community and what it offers in a more coordinated
way.
We
propose to create a well-designed many-to-many marketplace
for the software industry, with a special emphasis on supporting
open source tools and people, thereby supporting the public
interest in an open digital commons. So how could such
a marketplace function and how would it be organized? There
are two inspiring precedents that inform our efforts. The
first is familiar to most of us, the online auction service
eBay, which has shown
that a large, smoothly functioning commercial commons can
be bootstrapped from a few simple rules and grown entirely
through the Web. The second is an older and less well known
example which we will describe next.
Dee
Hock, in his design of VISA
International over thirty years ago mapped out a novel
organizational structure which he later dubbed "chaordic"
from a combination of "chaos" and "order".
Starting from a clear statement of purpose and a few simple
rules, VISA grew to be the largest commercial enterprise
on Earth (with over 2.5 trillion dollars in business
transacted annually). VISA made ubiquitous a new form of
virtual currency (credit card charges) which today powers
a big proportion of the world's economy from tiny businesses
to huge banks. The key novel properties of VISA are found
in its stakeholdership and governance. VISA exists to serve
the interests of its members and is organized as a for-profit
corporation that issues no stock, employing a membership
structure instead. Each member has equal rights to organize
at any level of VISA. The ultimate goal that Dee had was
that anyone materially or otherwise affected by VISA should
be able to have a stake in it and a say in its governance.
So
here we have two successful predecessors as models,
eBay for an online marketplace implementation and VISA
for stakeholdership and governance. Dee challenges us
today to visualize new forms of organization for the benefit
of humankind, warning us that it is the malfunction in our
organizations that most threatens our survival and endangers
the biosphere. We seek to answer that challenge and build
a new organization that will protect the innovative and
open spirit of the software business by helping open source
and other independent developers and other free agents build
their individual economic power. At the same time, this
organization will be owned and governed by all who are materially
affected and wish to have a role. Lastly, the many to
many exchange of financial, intellectual and social power
through the new organizations' digital commons will create
substantial collective resources which can be put into service
of the entire membership.
Protecting
the ability of the software business to innovate and grow
promotes the greater mission of an open digital commons,
and on that foundation rests the ability for individuals
to be guaranteed free speech, privacy, and control of their
identity. The health of our civilization and its institutions
may be better served by the civic, not commercial control
of Cyberspace.
The
organization we propose here today is the Intercommons,
the Internet Commons. More detailed information can
be found below on the development of the Intercommons concept,
its inspiration, and current collaborations. In addition,
our team has created a mock-up web
site illustrating how the Intercommons marketplace might
function. We invite you to join this effort in any way you
might see you could contribute. Please feel free to contact
us to become part of our team, or join our mailing list
for occasonal news of the Intercommons as it develops.
