Sip from the what?

In When it comes to Wikipedia, love trumps selfishness, a blog entry written today by Paul C. Campos, there’s a claim that Wikipedia doesn’t suffer the tragedy of the commons because building it is an “act of love”. This is in reference to what Clay Shirky had to say in his recently published new book Here comes everybody (if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you get a copy). In it, Shirky likened Wikipedia to the Ise Shrine in Japan which each generation of Shinto priests has torn down and rebuilt for a total of 61 times in the past 1,300 years. Now, I love Shirky’s writings and I think he’s dead-on in many aspects in his book but I think he’s missing some subtleties of how Wikipedia works that are essential to understanding why it works. The flaw in Campos’ statement, built on top of Shirky’s analysis, is that he pre-supposes that Wikipedia is a public resource, that is, everyone has the right to use it and no one has the right to exclude anyone else from doing so. That’s not really a good way to characterize Wikipedia though. (more…)

Frank Schulenburg, vice chair of Wikimedia Deutschland, has made a video of the new Wikimedia Deutschland office. I gave a short interview in it trying to answer the question “What was the most significant event for Wikimedia this year?” Watch me look at everything but the camera and shaking my head for no apparant reason…

This is the first part in a series of posts about volunteers and the constraints underlying volunteer management.

Economists think differently. Let’s say you buy a bottle of water at a local store for $1. Let’s also say that for the sake of argument tax is already included so the financial cost of this bottle to you is exactly one dollar. To most people, that’s all there’s too it. You have a bottle of water more in your hand and one dollar less in your wallet. The shop keeper has one bottle less on his shelves and one dollar more in his cash drawer. End of story. But like I said, Economists think differently. Because what this view ignores is the opportunity cost involved in this transaction. (more…)

This morning, there was a presentation by Joi Ito who, among a lot of other things, is the chairman of the board of the Creative Commons. His talk was entitled “The Sharing Economy”, which is a term he uses to describe an approach that adds “sharing” as an essential aspect of economic activity (in addition to “production” and “consumption”). His claim was that openness and reusability of other people’s ideas is a fundamental requirement of innovation and that the free culture movement, in which organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation or the Creative Commons are involved, is driven by the love individuals have for what they create. He introduced this idea as a contrast to the non-free world where primary motivation is the benefits and compensation one gets for his work, specifically money.

And it’s this contrast that I find problematic because he clearly assigned value judgments to each side. He described an on-going war between these two worlds and his express intent to proliferate the concept of free content even to at the moment entirely proprietary organizations (he specifically mentioned Microsoft). Disturbing to me was the prominence of black-and-white-thinking inherent in his approach, even more so considering that he was also talking about the need for diversity and variety as a precursor to success. I just have a hard time reconciling the martial and aggressive (“war&gdquo;, “battleground&gdquo;) way he used to describe his mission with the openness and pluralism he identifies as the foundation of the internet. Does the latter not imply that there proprietary and free organizations can co-exist striving individually or working together according to what each situation warrants? Or does pluralism end where ideologies come into play? To me, there’s no question that both free and proprietary approaches have their strengths and their weaknesses, that there is no silver bullet and that the most valuable arrangement is a system where organizations can employ the approaches that are most effective within the respective parameters without getting caught up in ideology and rhetoric.

I’m in Taipei this weekend attending Wikimania 2007, the annual wiki conference hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation¹. The following is my utterly biased personal log which strives to be anything but neutral, will include original research but mostly stays away from personal attacks, except for, of course, when it doesn’t.
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Last Sunday, I was elected into the executive board for Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. If you don’t know what the Wikimedia Foundation is, it’s the organization behind Wikipedia and a range of other similar projects. The Wikimedia Foundation and its chapters are all non-profit organizations relying primarily on volunteer efforts to accomplish their goals.
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