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This thought experiment starts in the metaphors of business. How do we structure organizations and construct authority? Businesses are structured for top down control as are most of our modern institutions, but the commons is different and we need to be aware when we reach the limits of our metaphors and need to create something new. We need to imagine our way to the structure or a [[global wisdom driven organization]]. When you don't have ways to force or push people into imposed structures, you need to pull them together by some other means. That means is vision. The best corporations are led by vision. Emerging leadership thinking realizes that it is ineffective to use force to get people to cooperate with collective goals. The blatant unfairness of sharply stratified incomes and wealth as wealth collectively created with large inputs from the commons make the whole process into a collective psychological game. Why should anyone cooperate with a class that contemptuously treats them as raw materials, just another factor of production.
I propose that the Commons needs a CIO. Being multiple in itself, there is no reason to think this should be a singular position where competing visionaries have to engage until one emerges victorious. It is the vision that needs to be singular in the way it constitutes a shared space of engagement, an [[Open Stewardship|open field]]. I become an acting CIO by participating in the construction of a vision of what can be done now and in the near future. This field is inclusive of all open source software and the peer produced resouces like Wikipedia, Open Street Maps and many many more. The scope is so vast and constantly growing that it will always be difficult to know the boundaries. In this chapter, the author puts on the hat of acting CIO and begins to articulate a vision. If you're like me, you'll have strong opinions about what is important and what needs to be done next, and if you do, then put on a hat and join the fun. There's plenty of work to go around. We will need to keep up with each other and to work to construct collective understandings.
Multiple centers can and do emerge, and sometimes they later merge and sometimes not. In the open source world, we also have a word for when a singular project becomes two. We call that a fork, and it doesn't happen very often. In the commons, it is very resource intensive to fork projects. It splits the attentions of one community of users and developers into two smaller groups and makes confusion and headaches for those spanning groups, and other projects that depend on them or provide support to them. There is a kind of marketplace functioning, but it isn't much like markets that operate primarily in terms of scarcity and rivalry.
If we want to understand why, we have to look directly at how information and knowledge is fundamentally different than material goods, and how their respective marketplaces might differ. The raw material here is data, information in it's raw form, and this kind of information is always too abundant. But this raw form is completely contextual. In semiotic terms, it is signs without objects or interpretants. When we load the data into information processing networks, and some of the data is interpreted as programs, then those programs can construct interpretations of the actual signs and objects. Ultimately, information systems are supporting sign systems for human intelligence so the signs that are important and in the commons of human language and interpretations. When we talk about rival and non-rival goods, we are refering to this distinction. Physical objects like a car, a house or food to eat are consumed in their use, but information is not. You body copies billions of bits of DNA every time a cell divides, and computers can make exact copies of any binary data with almost no cost. Just like with our cells, making copies is fundamental to how they work.
I propose that the Commons needs a CIO. Being multiple in itself, there is no reason to think this should be a singular position where competing visionaries have to engage until one emerges victorious. It is the vision that needs to be singular in the way it constitutes a shared space of engagement, an [[Open Stewardship|open field]]. I become an acting CIO by participating in the construction of a vision of what can be done now and in the near future. This field is inclusive of all open source software and the peer produced resouces like Wikipedia, Open Street Maps and many many more. The scope is so vast and constantly growing that it will always be difficult to know the boundaries. In this chapter, the author puts on the hat of acting CIO and begins to articulate a vision. If you're like me, you'll have strong opinions about what is important and what needs to be done next, and if you do, then put on a hat and join the fun. There's plenty of work to go around. We will need to keep up with each other and to work to construct collective understandings.
Multiple centers can and do emerge, and sometimes they later merge and sometimes not. In the open source world, we also have a word for when a singular project becomes two. We call that a fork, and it doesn't happen very often. In the commons, it is very resource intensive to fork projects. It splits the attentions of one community of users and developers into two smaller groups and makes confusion and headaches for those spanning groups, and other projects that depend on them or provide support to them. There is a kind of marketplace functioning, but it isn't much like markets that operate primarily in terms of scarcity and rivalry.
If we want to understand why, we have to look directly at how information and knowledge is fundamentally different than material goods, and how their respective marketplaces might differ. The raw material here is data, information in it's raw form, and this kind of information is always too abundant. But this raw form is completely contextual. In semiotic terms, it is signs without objects or interpretants. When we load the data into information processing networks, and some of the data is interpreted as programs, then those programs can construct interpretations of the actual signs and objects. Ultimately, information systems are supporting sign systems for human intelligence so the signs that are important and in the commons of human language and interpretations. When we talk about rival and non-rival goods, we are refering to this distinction. Physical objects like a car, a house or food to eat are consumed in their use, but information is not. You body copies billions of bits of DNA every time a cell divides, and computers can make exact copies of any binary data with almost no cost. Just like with our cells, making copies is fundamental to how they work.