Ok. I get it. Open source is good for business because it’s “smart mob” collaboration provides an opportunity for companies to receive global input from experts around the world. Such “wikinomics” is good for industry because among other benefits, it provides companies with the R&D opportunities, product enhancement and procurement at a lesser cost than if this was all done in house. Through the ability to reach out to global experts through the web, companies can more cheaply and more effectively expand their business capabilities. As Eric Raymond proclaimed in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams wrote about in Wikinomics, open sourcing is becoming a rapid technological wave.
Last weekend I was at a meeting for Hopkins’ Parents and the conversation turned to wikis and how students at Homewood were placing their notes on line in an open source document. Students from the class would go into the document and add or edit other students’ notes. (Very interesting! Life as I know it, illustrates what I have been learning about in class.) One of the parents commenting on the wiki phenomenon was David Fellows, the former CTO for Comcast. At the reception following the meeting, I asked David whether he thought more companies were going to utilize open source development, and or get on the bandwagon to blog thus sharing proprietary information. David’s comment to me was that not only did he think that these business models were going to be adopted by more companies, he felt that those which did not get on the band wagon, would be left in the dust.
That said, there were some themes which Shel Israel and Rober Scoble in Naked Conversations, Dan Gillmor in We the Media, as Tapscott and Williams in Wikinomics discussed which I don’t agree with. All authors came down hard on big companies who shut down the free exchange of content on Napster. While I can understand their commitment to the democratization of media, I do have a problem with their argument. One of our Hopkins alumni, Eric Schwartz is an intellectual property attorney. Eric represented the music industry against Napster in the law suit to prevent the on-line free exchange of music. He helped me understand that the folks who were suffering from the sharing of content were the musicians themselves. Their CD’s were not selling as a result of people being able to listen to their music for free.
In reading about “ideagoras” this week, I found it fascinating to think that companies would pay a prize to scientists and engineers for helping to solve a technology problem or help develop a product. While the vehicle to do this is new, I am not sure the idea is that innovative. A couple of weeks ago I watched the movie, The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio. The movie was about a woman who supported her family by winning competitions by large corporations, which provided prizes for award-winning jingles or advertising slogans which would later be used in advertising campaigns. Although the competitions were promoted through magazines, placement on product labels, as well as radio, television and newspapers, are these not “ideagoras?”
Finally, in Tapscott and Williams’ discussion about “prosumers” and the game Second Life as an example of this topic, I thought about a conversation I had in one of my other classes. We saw examples of the Seond Life game and discussed how individuals were using it to create characters and roles for themselves which allowed them to live in a fantasy setting. In some of the cases, and as illustrated in a “Law and Order” episode, players, who in real life were attractively-challenged, could create a character which would be beautiful and socially more accepted in the game than in they were in everyday life. While I initially thought this was sad, I have come to value the way that these individuals-by being prosumers- could create a happier existence, even if it was in a virtual reality setting.
