SuitWatch -- June 8

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Mashing Up a Commons

Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't have one yet? Or at least not a complete one?

That's what occurred to me last Sunday night, as I sat talking with Claus Dahl in a smoky Copenhagen bistro.  We were talking about public spaces.  Europeans have a deep appreciation of them.  Even in relatively chilly Denmark, there are plenty of outdoor cafés.  Narrow streets in the older quarters terminate in public plazas as big as football fields.  We also talked about how Americans seem to have a correspondingly elevated sense of private matters.  Private enterprise, for example.  Perhaps, Claus suggested, that's why the Net was commercialized first in the U.S.

Email and blogging, to name at least one more mostly-American invention, also serve to equip the private side of things.  The emails we send are personal: one-to-one, or one-to-many.  Blogging is personal too, even when companies do it.  Since blogs are published on the World Wide Web, they're public on the exposed side.  But they are authored privately, mostly by individuals.

Blogs can be powerful.  Just ask Trent Lott, Howell Raines or Dan Rather. In aggregate, blogs may comprise a smart mob (or maybe just a mob, in some cases), but each still expresses the thoughts and expressions of a sovereign individual.  This is not a small thing.  As a blogger of long standing, I appreciate the sense of exclusivity in my blog.  It is mine alone, and I am my own boss there.

But many blogs together do not comprise a commons.  Blogs are private and commons are public.  Many blogs are like many silos.  Not a farm.  Not a public plaza or a public park.

This was made clear to me as I followed (as little as I could, given my bad luck with broadband connections in Denmark) the O'Reilly/CMP Web 2.0 service mark controversy.  An enormous amount of pixels have been spilled on this subject, but here's one interesting bottom line to the whole thing: Tim O'Reilly apologized to Tom Raftery for "the organizational failure that led to them getting a legal letter rather than a simple email query or phone call.".  And Tom Raftery apologized as well, saying "I should have dropped him an email first rather than posting on the blog", adding "Frankly, it didn't occur to me.  Sorry Tim."

Why didn't it occur to Tom to contact Tim before posting something on his blog? Tom writes, "I did the same thing to Tracy Sheridan after I had problems participating in her initial Waxxi interactive podcast with Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.  I had her email address as well but I blogged.  Should I have emailed her? Possibly but blogging has become my natural response to events like this." Then he adds, "Maybe I need to re-think how I respond, in the future."

Both Tom's and Tim's first posts on the matter were written neither to each other, but to the crowd.  While their posts were public, the sources of those posts were private.  They seemed somehow removed from the public space, even as the whole controversy played out in a public way.  By "public space" I mean one where once senses the immediacy of other people: not just the person to whom one is talking, but everybody else as well.  There is combination of intimacy and exposure one can only get in a commons.  Back-and-forth blogging has some of that, but not all of it.

So, how do we get that?

I've said before that blogging is a way of sending emails that go "cc:world".  My point has always been about blogging's ease of use.  When people tell me they don't have time to blog, I ask them if they have time to email.  When they say yes, I point out that there's little difference between the two, at least in terms of time commitments.

But now I think there is also another deep similarity: both are more personal than public.

Think for a moment about how we sense personal space.  To illustrate, consider the differences in our behaviors as drivers and as pedestrians.  We'll yell invective at other drivers that we'd never yell at other individuals in a theater queue.  One big reason is that, when we drive a car, we become the car.  Our senses extend out to the peripheries of the car itself.  Its hardware becomes "my fender" and "my tires" and "my bumpers".  Pilots feel the same way about the wings and engines of the planes they fly.

As personal spaces go, blogs are car-like.  They are an enlarged structure around our virtual bodily selves.  To some degree (less than in a car, but more than in a fully public space), blogs can combine the sense of separateness and power.  (Syndication especially can do this. Thanks to syndicated subject searches, one can participate in buzz just by blogging quotably about that buzz's subject, regardless of the "size" of one's blog.)

Against corporate, political and media gigantism, blogs are a great equalizer.  I would be surprised if Tom didn't feel a bit like David when he got a note from a lawyer representing two media Goliaths.  Same with most of the rest of us who remarked on the topic.  Tim, naturally, was outraged.  He wrote, "The flap about the Web 2.0 Conference trademark has shaken my faith in the collective intelligence of the blogosphere.  Of all the hundreds of people who commented on this issue, only a few touched base to do a bit of fact checking."

Claus suggested that Tom didn't call or write to Tim first because there's still something missing from the Net's commons.  What he said brought to mind what Craig Burton wrote five years ago, in early 2001:

We are in a deep state of Web Noir --a technological Dark Age obscured by the apparent brilliance of the Internet, as we know it. The dark -- that noir -- is what we don't see, what we don't know because it doesn't yet exist.

What's missing is technology infrastructure.  I'm not talking about physical infrastructure here.  I'm talking about the logical infrastructure where both humans and devices live and do their work. It's the way we're all connected, and what we can do with --and through -- those connections.  The real world of people and devices changes constantly.  Natures, functions, identities, relationships all change.  Yet we have few if any truly useful ways to support that dynamism beyond the store & forward facilities of Web and email servers running over a worldwide TCP/IP network.  While what we have is a miracle-grade advance over what we knew a decade ago, it's still profoundly limited.  In fact, it's so limited that in some cases the best we can do is leverage the worst from bygone ages.

In fact Claus has something in mind -- a nice piece of hitherto missing infrastructure.  I don't want to say any more about it, because he's not ready to talk about it yet.  But as soon as he gave me hints I realized the Net's commons is missing something that might have prevented a lot of unhappiness around this Web 2.0 flap.  Plus countless other misunderstandings.

Claus and I had both just come from the latest Reboot conference, titled Reboot8.  As a tech conference its more about ideas and insights than about what's new and cool.  Right before Reboot I spoke at Samtalerne, a one-day conference about conversation ("samtalerne" means something similar in Danish).  Two weeks from now I'll be at another conference where conversation and ideas are central: Identity Mashup, put on by the Berkman Center, at Harvard Law School.

So I have some infrastructure-building ideas for the commons that I want to explore there and beyond: with the folks at Berkman, with my colleagues in the Identity Gang, and with friends new and old in the Linux, free software and open source communities.  As briefly as I can put them, here they are --

First, a handy way to sort out and understand what's happening in the virtual public places we call markets is to divide activities there into three categories: a) transaction; b) conversation; and c) relationship.  For perhaps a century and a half or more, we've been filtering our understanding of markets through the first of those three.  But now the Net supports the other two as well.  We just need to build out the required infrastructure.

Second, the matter of intention needs full respect as we build out an understanding of markets in the fully networked world.  I've written about this before in The Intention Economy, at Linux Journal.  There I said "The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or 'capturing') buyers." We lack an infrastructure for this.  If we build one, I believe we'll see an explosion of new business.  Building this infrastructure, I believe, will utterly disrupt marketing as we know it, and finally give customers powers they've lacked through the entire Industrial Age -- powers that are required to end Web Noir and create a renaissance for business and culture.

Third, I believe this infrastructure can (not "must", but can) grow out of the efforts being made now among "user-centric", "independent" and "identity 2.0" development communities, many of which will be well-represented at the Identity Mashup.

Fourth, I believe relationships in an Intention economy will require a legal framework similar in some ways to the one Creative Commons has provided for Net-native creative artists and the industries now starting to grow around them, and adapt to them.  Creative Commons licenses are expressions, after all, of intentions by artists in a world where users of that art have a great deal of choice and power. Moderating and utilizing that power requires agreements, even relationships.  Creative Commons licenses provide frameworks for these as well.

Since Creative Commons grew out of work by Larry Lessig and colleagues at Berkman and Harvard Law, I'm especially interested in seeing what of the above makes sense to them, and how it can be, well, mashed up.

And I wanted to get this set of ideas out there in advance of the conference so we could get a head start in talking about them.

Links:

Blogs vs. Lott and Raines: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/kathleenparker/2003/07/13/160876.html
Samtalerne: http://www.samtalerne.dk
Reboot: http://reboot.dk
Berkman Center: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/
Making a New World, from Open Sources II: http://www.searls.com/doc/os2/docchapter.html
Identity Mash-Up: http://www.identitymash-up.org/
Identity Gang: http://identitygang.org/
The Intention Economy: http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000035

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