Marla Parker's Weblog

On Monday I spoke to a group of a dozen or so Human Resources execs from large companies attending a meeting called Great Employers: The Future Perspective, hosted by the Institute for the Future. They asked about new cooperation models and ways of organizing work that might be learned from the open source movement.

I gave them some quick basics about open source: Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) means Libre (free speech) not Gratis (free beer); FSF and GPL; OSI, Open Source Definition; Linux is F/OSS but not the other way around; community matters most; the type of community and the types of possible business models depend on the type of license.

The community aspect is the part that relates directly to the future of work. I told them about Coase's Penguin, and the third mode of production described by Yochai Benkler as "commons-based peer production". (The other two modes of production being markets, with transaction costs, and firms, with managerial hierarchies, described in 1937 by Ronald Coase.)

In The Success of Open Source, Steven Weber talks about distributed innovation: there is no weakest link because there really is no chain. Innovation happens on the edges, then gets incorporated into some core if it has value, and sometimes new cores or centers are created.

Weber also coins the term "antirival" goods. If you Google that, it says "Did you mean antiviral?" Rival goods (e.g. a pizza) and nonrival goods (e.g. a park) are defined in economics. Weber calls open source software an antirival good because, paradoxically, the more "free-riders" (users) the better. Unlike with pizza or parks. This assumes there is a core of actual developers, and also that some non-zero fraction of the free-riders will complain or otherwise give useful feedback.

So at the future of work meeting, we talked about ways to make cross-organizational communities happen within a corporation, or across the firewall between the employees and customers, too. We talked about blogging, and how all their companies are way too full of strict secrets for that, even just internal blogging.

I talked a little about iWork at Sun, and the fact that one reason I'm reluctant to leave is that I doubt the infrastructure could be this good anywhere else. They asked how my work is measured, since I work from home full-time now. I gave my stock answer: I'm not paid to do the things I can do, I'm paid to choose the right things to do. I have way, way, way too many opportunities for one person. I could keep a staff of 10 people busy, no problem. But I don't get a staff of 10, so I have to carefully pick what I'm going to do, what will have the biggest impact for Sun, and then do it really well. They seemed to buy that, repeating it back to me as getting paid to make the right bets.