What happens downstream?: Scott Mattoon's blog

No sooner had we put the wrap on an April 9 Commonwealth Club panel interview on Collaborating for Change, than PBS announced a really cool collaborative project on Nova to design the "Car of the Future".   Both of these recent productions focus on the application of open source design to social and economic needs beyond software.  The promise of open source economics is popping up everywhere.  It must be something in the water, (or the atmosphere).   Network based open source design efforts have been written about before, and there's more than a few established non-software open source design projects, but they were hardly regarded as mainstream.  And open source as a business model has been a fringe enterprise.  But all that is changing.

The upcoming Nova special, and the Commonwealth Club interview (with Amy Novogratz, Kate Stohr, Maria Giudice, and myself (video courtesy fora.tv)) serve as proof points that this phenomena has exceeded meme status and is spilling over into the broader socioeconomic graph.   But we knew this was inevitable, right?  We just needed the right conditions for humanity's collaborative tendency to come out of the proprietary deep freeze.

The substrate upon which this new culture is rising pairs flexible licensing models a'la Creative Commons with accessible technology for building collaborative online communities a'la Drupal and Wordpress,  Yahoo!groups and PBWiki.  Among the catalysts for this reaction are frustration over obscene economic inequities around the world, abuses of people and planet for profit, and utter neglect by federal governments.  As was discussed here in the video interview about the Open Architecture Network, these frustrations can be overcome by collaborating for change on the net.

Need more proof of the trend toward an open source economy?  Just check with the folks at Open Everything.  They're tracking numerous open collaboratives, which are exogenous to  the software world, but infused with many of the same principles, practices and tools as open source software projects. 

One of the most prominent tools applied to these new collaboratives is Drupal, and we discuss it's role in the Open Architecture Network in the video (at :37:30, :46:30, and :51:00).

Ten years ago who would have imagined that:

• IBM would begin opening their patent portfolio?
• Major news bureaus would sponsor citizen journalism?
• Educational curriculum would be opened and shared for free?
• The Pirate party could get on a national election ballot?
• Sun Microsystems would convert its software portfolio to open source, and it would be profitable?  (Well, that one you might have imagined.)
  

Yet these, and plenty of other examples show that collaborative culture is on the rise.  Does this signal the next generation economy in which businesses profit less from market lockout and legal protection and more from direct value delivered in open markets?  Or does it lead to a more fundamental shift wherein socioeconomic prosperity derives less through commerce than through collaborations for which the primary incentive to contribute is sociocentric good?