By 2011 the number of mobile VoIP users around the world may rise to 100 million from 7 million in 2007, according to ON World, a consulting firm based in San Diego. ON World estimates that in 2011, mobile VoIP voice services may generate $33.7 billion, up from $516 million in 2006, the most recent year for which the figure is available. If that sounds like a breakneck pace, consider the growth trajectory for Jajah, a provider of wireless VoIP, which had 10 million users in April—a fivefold increase in just a year.

Wireless carriers are expected to generate $700.7 billion in sales of voice services this year, according to consulting firm Ovum. Still, carriers in the fiercely competitive mobile-phone industry will be none too pleased with newcomers snapping up a portion of the almost one-quarter of all wireless minutes now devoted to long-distance and international calls. Insight Research estimates that together, international and long distance will make up 24% of the 1.2 billion wireless minutes used this year.

Now, imagine if you could do something like this for a very large variety of artifacts and technologies. This is what I was planning for the Open Source Everything Project. The idea here isn’t just to invent and disseminate a collection of open source artifact designs. The idea is to create an organized mass exchange of these designs bootstrapped by starting it out with the dissemination of designs for tools and the techniques for them. It’s not just about products. It’s an open source industrial infrastructure. Designs for everyday objects that improve standard of living are good but to begin with you have to disseminate the tools and techniques to make those with too. Ultimately people have to learn how to make things wherever they are with whatever resources are at hand. It’s not always going to be in the same ways. You can run a program that donates masses of power tools or puts Fab Labs in the Congo but that’s only helpful until they break. So what you have to do is develop and communicate this whole open source ecology of progressive industrial capability -as if NASA had to communicate to a bunch of colonists on Mars how to bootstrap a civilization from scratch starting with a small kit of hand tools.

Now, the key thing here is that the end result is physical goods and any physical artifact you can make you can potentially sell. As you’ve already learned, software’s economic value is keyed to the exclusivity of its distribution. It has no value in and of itself. If I open a business based on putting Linux in a box on store shelves I can only make money from the most hapless computer novices -people so ignorant they probably couldn’t use something as complex as Linux anyway. So monetization of Linux has been based on two things; appropriating code for reuse in propriety software one can control distribution of or turning the Linux community into a trades guild for specialist technicians versed in its unique language -which is probably why Linux development has made such slow effort towards being easier to use. There’s monetary value in the community-specific exclusivity of its based of knowledge. (which is why early scientists, physicians, and trades guilds had a habit of documenting all their knowledge in secret codes…)

But it’s a different story when the end result of open source development is physical products. Even if the knowledge of how to make a thing is completely free and universally available, the tools, skill, talent, materials, and time to make it aren’t. So there’s value encoded in the production of an artifact. Not everyone can or will make something themselves. So this presents an opportunity for entrepreneurship within a local market. There’s a common phenomenon in the world of crafts and hobbies. Someone can publicly share the complete knowledge for how to make something on-line or in magazine articles and they will STILL get letters from people asking them to make the thing for them for a price or sell them materials they can’t find locally. Maker skills and the tools and free time to use them are not universal -especially in the western world. We don’t have a culture like Indonesia’s. So from this often come the start of new small businesses. People start making things on ‘commission’ for others, or start selling in small volumes hard-to-find parts and materials that they have found a source for in bulk, or they develop and sell kits where the rare materials are pre-packaged and the hardest parts of making an item have been pre-done. If you have some business savvy -which is also in short supply in the west- you can cultivate this into a self-perpetuating industry and a life-long career. Countless businesses have been created in this way.

Now, open source artifacts will generally not compete with corporate industrial products in the western world for some time. They will tend to be clunky, will cost more that what you can get at Wal-Mart, and their appeal will most likely be based on their counter-cultural aspect, their novelty, and their potential for customization. People in the west don’t use Linux because it’s ‘better’ than Windows or Mac OS. (frankly, all computer operating systems suck rocks with equal vigor and should have been obsolesced 20 years ago…) They use it because its an alternative to those. But in other countries where hard cash is hard to come by Linux is the only legitimate game in town. So it becomes a means of empowerment -albeit a bit weak because the hardware still can be produced locally. The same will be true of open source artifacts. Look at how big a deal the Baygen/Freeplay Energy company’s radios are -radios that are totally non-competitive on the western electronics market, yet they’re doing wonders for people in developing countries or disaster situations and which western people are perfectly happy to pay a premium for here knowing it helps support local industry and aid projects in the developing world. That’s a powerful thing to tap into. Can you imagine the impact of a Freeplay refrigerator?

So I see this Post-Industrial Revolution evolving like this; initiated in the west, the Maker movement will remain focused on hobby and altruistic activity for the near-term future, periodically producing altruistic projects based on models like OLPC and Freeplay to disseminate the more practical and appropriate of Post-Industrial technology in the developing world. (and the ‘new’ developing world in the inner cities) It will pursue functional parity with Industrial Age technology but not cost-parity -which it really can’t do until long-term trends push the costs of labor and resources beyond a certain threshold- and will favor pushing the leading edge in the technology. So the counter-cultural symbolism, novelty, and customization potential of these open source fabrication technologies and their products will be what sustains the movement for some time. There will be some entrepreneurship generated after the models of hobby/craft community entrepreneurship and some attempts by corporations to exploit the novelty or unique technologies that might emerge in the manner of the Linux monetization strategy. But in general this may remain marginal for a long time. It will be a while before Makers can match the iPod or a BMW.

In the developing world the Maker movement – already nascent but amplified by western ‘Outquisition’ activity like OLPC – will bring new empowerment manifesting as new entrepreneurship which will interface with the microloan movement to create new Post-Industrial infrastructures that are very practical and functional in a spare resource situation. Both functional and cost parity with western products will be pursued, because labor is so much cheaper in this environment and hard currency so much more dear. Some of this entrepreneurship will branch off into parallels of existing Globalization industrial models – job shops for export goods. But much will remain local. Dissemination of Post-Industrial technology brings with it ad hoc technological education leading to the potential for innovation in the context of adapting open source designs for greater local appropriateness. This will feed-back through the communications networks for Maker knowledge distribution to the west, expanding the base of novelty but also providing very practical answers that would tend to elude western Makers because of their different environment and less practical thinking. Technology tends to both disseminate and assimilate culture where its development has an opportunity to ‘flow’ in more than one direction. Americans introduced personal computers to Japan and now Americans play Japanese designed computer games with Asian cultural themes on them -and the Chinese ‘farm gold’ for those players… This feedback would have the potential of pushing Post-Industrial technology to critical mass because for people in the developing world this isn’t fun and games or a counter-cultural movement. This IS their first real-world practical industrial infrastructure and they’re going to use it to catch up with the western standard of living despite their lack of Industrial Age style resource infrastructures. As those old infrastructures break down in the west, the Outquisition might reverse direction in predominate knowledge flow. The real Eco-Tech safe haven may be in the Third World.

Since its publication in Science in December 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. It is also one of the most-quoted: a recent Google search found “about 302,000″ results for the phrase “tragedy of the commons.”

For 40 years it has been, in the words of a World Bank Discussion Paper, “the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues.” (Bromley and Cernea 1989: 6) It has been used time and again to justify stealing indigenous peoples’ lands, privatizing health care and other social services, giving corporations ‘tradable permits’ to pollute the air and water, and much more.

Noted anthropologist Dr. G.N. Appell (1995) writes that the article “has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge.”

Like most sacred texts, “The Tragedy of the Commons” is more often cited than read. As we will see, although its title sounds authoritative and scientific, it fell far short of science.

Garrett Hardin hatches a myth

The author of “The Tragedy of the Commons” was Garrett Hardin, a University of California professor who until then was best-known as the author of a biology textbook that argued for “control of breeding” of “genetically defective” people. (Hardin 1966: 707) In his 1968 essay he argued that communities that share resources inevitably pave the way for their own destruction; instead of wealth for all, there is wealth for none.

He based his argument on a story about the commons in rural England.

(The term “commons” was used in England to refer to the shared pastures, fields, forests, irrigation systems and other resources that were found in many rural areas until well into the 1800s. Similar communal farming arrangements existed in most of Europe, and they still exist today in various forms around the world, particularly in indigenous communities.)

“Picture a pasture open to all,” Hardin wrote. A herdsmen who wants to expand his personal herd will calculate that the cost of additional grazing (reduced food for all animals, rapid soil depletion) will be divided among all, but he alone will get the benefit of having more cattle to sell.

Inevitably, “the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd.” But every “rational herdsman” will do the same thing, so the commons is soon overstocked and overgrazed to the point where it supports no animals at all.

Hardin used the word “tragedy” as Aristotle did, to refer to a dramatic outcome that is the inevitable but unplanned result of a character’s actions. He called the destruction of the commons through overuse a tragedy not because it is sad, but because it is the inevitable result of shared use of the pasture. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

Where’s the evidence?

Given the subsequent influence of Hardin’s essay, it’s shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable — but he didn’t show that it had happened even once.

Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved. One such process was described years earlier in Friedrich Engels’ account of the “mark,” the form taken by commons-based communities in parts of pre-capitalist Germany:

“The use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and direction of the community …

“Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of the ‘common mark.’ The nature of this use was determined by the members of the community as a whole. …

“At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark.” (Engels 1892)

Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed Engels’ description of communal management of shared resources. A summary of recent research concludes:

“What existed in fact was not a ‘tragedy of the commons’ but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years — and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era — land was managed successfully by communities.” (Cox 1985: 60)

Part of that self-regulation process was known in England as “stinting” — establishing limits for the number of cows, pigs, sheep and other livestock that each commoner could graze on the common pasture. Such “stints” protected the land from overuse (a concept that experienced farmers understood long before Hardin arrived) and allowed the community to allocate resources according to its own concepts of fairness.

The only significant cases of overstocking found by the leading modern expert on the English commons involved wealthy landowners who deliberately put too many animals onto the pasture in order to weaken their much poorer neighbours’ position in disputes over the enclosure (privatization) of common lands. (Neeson 1993: 156)

Hardin assumed that peasant farmers are unable to change their behaviour in the face of certain disaster. But in the real world, small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions and rules for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons community survived through good years and bad.

Why does the herder want more?

Hardin’s argument started with the unproven assertion that herdsmen always want to expand their herds: “It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. … As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain.”

In short, Hardin’s conclusion was predetermined by his assumptions. “It is to be expected” that each herdsman will try to maximize the size of his herd — and each one does exactly that. It’s a circular argument that proves nothing.

Hardin assumed that human nature is selfish and unchanging, and that society is just an assemblage of self-interested individuals who don’t care about the impact of their actions on the community. The same idea, explicitly or implicitly, is a fundamental component of mainstream (i.e., pro-capitalist) economic theory.

All the evidence (not to mention common sense) shows that this is absurd: people are social beings, and society is much more than the arithmetic sum of its members. Even capitalist society, which rewards the most anti-social behaviour, has not crushed human cooperation and solidarity. The very fact that for centuries “rational herdsmen” did not overgraze the commons disproves Hardin’s most fundamental assumptions — but that hasn’t stopped him or his disciples from erecting policy castles on foundations of sand.

Even if the herdsman wanted to behave as Hardin described, he couldn’t do so unless certain conditions existed.

There would have to be a market for the cattle, and he would have to be focused on producing for that market, not for local consumption. He would have to have enough capital to buy the additional cattle and the fodder they would need in winter. He would have to be able to hire workers to care for the larger herd, build bigger barns, etc. And his desire for profit would have to outweigh his interest in the long-term survival of his community.

In short, Hardin didn’t describe the behaviour of herdsmen in pre-capitalist farming communities — he described the behaviour of capitalists operating in a capitalist economy. The universal human nature that he claimed would always destroy common resources is actually the profit-driven “grow or die” behaviour of corporations.

Will private ownership do better?

That leads us to another fatal flaw in Hardin’s argument: in addition to providing no evidence that maintaining the commons will inevitably destroy the environment, he offered no justification for his opinion that privatization would save it. Once again he simply presented his own prejudices as fact:

“We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust — but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”

The implication is that private owners will do a better job of caring for the environment because they want to preserve the value of their assets. In reality, scholars and activists have documented scores of cases in which the division and privatization of communally managed lands had disastrous results. Privatizing the commons has repeatedly led to deforestation, soil erosion and depletion, overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, and the ruin of ecosystems.

As Karl Marx wrote, nature requires long cycles of birth, development and regeneration, but capitalism requires short-term returns.

“The entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits, stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations. A striking illustration of this is furnished by the forests, which are only rarely managed in a way more or less corresponding to the interests of society as a whole…” (Marx 1998: 611n)

Contrary to Hardin’s claims, a community that shares fields and forests has a strong incentive to protect them to the best of its ability, even if that means not maximizing current production, because those resources will be essential to the community’s survival for centuries to come. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive, because they will not survive in business if they don’t maximize short-term profit. If ethanol promises bigger and faster profits than centuries-old rain forests, the trees will fall.

This focus on short-term gain has reached a point of appalling absurdity in recent best-selling books by Bjorn Lomborg, William Nordhaus and others, who argue that it is irrational to spend money to stop greenhouse gas emissions today, because the payoff is too far in the future. Other investments, they say, will produce much better returns, more quickly.

Community management isn’t an infallible way of protecting shared resources: some communities have mismanaged common resources, and some commons may have been overused to extinction. But no commons-based community has capitalism’s built-in drive to put current profits ahead of the well-being of future generations.

A politically useful myth

The truly appalling thing about “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not its lack of evidence or logic — badly researched and argued articles are not unknown in academic journals. What’s shocking is the fact that this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and environmental destruction, and adopted as a basis for social policy by supposed experts ranging from economists and environmentalists to governments and United Nations agencies.

Despite being refuted again and again, it is still used today to support private ownership and uncontrolled markets as sure-fire roads to economic growth.

The success of Hardin’s argument reflects its usefulness as a pseudo-scientific explanation of global poverty and inequality, an explanation that doesn’t question the dominant social and political order. It confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and factual errors are nothing compared to the very attractive (to the rich) claim that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The fact that Hardin’s argument also blames the poor for ecological destruction is a bonus.

Hardin’s essay has been widely used as an ideological response to anti-imperialist movements in the Third World and discontent among indigenous and other oppressed peoples everywhere in the world.

“Hardin’s fable was taken up by the gathering forces of neo-liberal reaction in the 1970s, and his essay became the ‘scientific’ foundation of World Bank and IMF policies, viz. enclosure of commons and privatization of public property. … The message is clear: we must never treat the earth as a ‘common treasury.’ We must be ruthless and greedy or else we will perish.” (Boal 2007)

In Canada, conservative lobbyists use arguments derived from Hardin’s political tract to explain away poverty on First Nations’ reserves, and to argue for further dismantling of indigenous communities. A study published by the influential Fraser Institute urges privatization of reserve land:

“These large amounts of land, with their attendant natural resources, will never yield their maximum benefit to Canada’s native people as long as they are held as collective property subject to political management. … collective property is the path of poverty, and private property is the path of prosperity.” (Fraser 2002: 16-17)

This isn’t just right-wing posturing. Canada’s federal government, which has refused to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, announced in 2007 that it will “develop approaches to support the development of individual property ownership on reserves,” and created a $300 million fund to do just that.

In Hardin’s world, poverty has nothing to do with centuries of racism, colonialism and exploitation: poverty is inevitable and natural in all times and places, the product of immutable human nature. The poor bring it on themselves by having too many babies and clinging to self-destructive collectivism.

The tragedy of the commons is a useful political myth — a scientific-sounding way of saying that there is no alternative to the dominant world order.

Stripped of excess verbiage, Hardin’s essay asserted, without proof, that human beings are helpless prisoners of biology and the market. Unless restrained, we will inevitably destroy our communities and environment for a few extra pennies of profit. There is nothing we can do to make the world better or more just.

In designing a community, sponsors were more likely to offer transparency than they were to offer accessibility to external community members. We found that sponsors faced a control vs. growth tension. To leverage the ability of communities to contribute to their firm’s bottom line, sponsors sought to maintain control over the community’s strategic direction. However, sponsors soon discovered that by restricting access to community processes, they limited their community’s ability to attract new members and grow.

We contribute to the literature on open source communities, technical communities and firms and community collaboration in three ways.

First, we identify some key distinctions between sponsored communities and autonomous communities that can help further research on firm-community collaboration and innovation.

Second, we develop the construct of participation architecture and show how it is operationalized in a sample of open source communities.

Third, we illustrate the “control-growth” tension that sponsors building communities face when making design decisions.

2. Allows Collaboration Across Boundaries.

Most of today’s best research comes from connecting disciplines which seem to have little in common, and many new ideas come from people who happen to be involved in multiple fields. Shared designs break down some of the traditional organizational boundaries, allowing innovators to collaborate more freely. ZeroPrestige.org, a website for sharing the plans of kites used in the sport of kiteboarding, allowed aerospace engineers to collaborate with extreme sports enthusiasts to produce superior kite designs that are rapidly capturing the market. When people with diverse skills, knowledge, and experience cooperate, the resulting ideas are often revolutionary.

3. Accelerates Technical Evolution.

The usual model of research requires a team of researchers in the same organization working toward a single goal. Shared designs allow multiple teams in multiple organizations to pursue different goals at the same time. For example, the relatively easy sharing of recipes allows thousands of cooks to develop dishes to satisfy the public’s changing tastes much faster than makers of packaged food. This type of parallel development increases the speed of innovation and allows technologies to follow societal changes faster than large organizations are able to.

4. Increases Societal Wealth.

A big part of the world’s wealth is based on technologies that are well understood and belong to everyone, such as telephones, wheat farming and concrete. In today’s climate of fast-paced technological growth, it’s easy to forget how many designs we already share, and the incredible value we derive from their slow but steady improvement. In many areas, we can’t afford to wait 20 years for patents to expire, and we would derive more total benefit from releasing ideas into the public domain now.

5. Coordinates Efforts to Benefit Underserved Communities.

Shared designs work best in areas where needs are diverse and pressing and where there is a relatively small opportunity for profit. For example, small-scale energy production, products for the developing world, seeds and agricultural techniques and many areas of the medical industry match this description. These are also areas served poorly by expensive R&D and mass production, and may be served better through a different model.

One might also add, however, that sometimes a modular system can improve in performance even faster than a fine-tuned system. To the extent that such a system benefits from “collective intelligence” and rapid-trial-and-error learning, the improvement in the parts can dominate any benefits from fine-tuning. Personal computers are again a case in point. PCs have come to outperform first mainframes, then minicomputers, then RISC workstations, all of which, in their day, made their money as fine-tuned non-modular systems (at least relative to PCs). Again, the extent to which modular innovation can outperform fine-tuning may depend on the degree of inherent integrality in the system.

The benefits of an integral system in systemic change are related to the benefits of fine-tuning to which Christensen points. Fine-tuning is after all systemic change to improve performance. Thus integral systems may have advantages not only when users demand high performance in a technical sense but also when they need performance in the form of change and adaptability. This latter may also be a function of how quickly the user needs the system to perform; the front-end costs of a modular system may take the form of time costs – the output forgone while waiting for the modularization to crystallize or the visible design rules to get worked out. If a modularization is already in place, of course, the system can adapt and respond quickly by simply plugging in new modules to suit user needs. But if there is not yet a modularization, or if the user needs a level of performance greater than can be achieved even with the best possible assortment of available modules, then an integral system may do better.

(The terms autonomous and systemic are from Teece (1986). There is a third possibility, what Henderson and Clark (1990) call architectural innovation. Here the modules remain intact, but innovation takes place in the way the modules are hooked together. (For a paradigmatic example of this kind of innovation, visit Legoland.) The possibility of architectural innovation underlies the benefits of economies of substitution discussed earlier.)

Blender / Sketchup / Max / Maya

Although, I give my utmost respect to the programmers that have developed these projects, to say they are crude, is to pay them a compliment. What invariably happens is that after sharing these links with the many people that ask, they come back (if they come back at all) even more confused and frustrated having labored through the elaborate and evolved process of copying and pasting pieces of code back and forth between one program and the other. The process is about as easy as painting with rice grains.

Having had a number of conversations over the year with people about this, I can say with confidence, that SL’s lack of portability is the number one hurdle for our demographic and the main reason why many people never come back. Although speculation, I would imagine this is a major hurdle for other groups as well.

What I don’t really understand is why this issue is not pushed more by the SL community at large. I have noticed there were a number of issues posted on SL’s Issue Tracker that call for portability of a number of various file types, such as .OBJ, .3DM, .3DS, .DXF, & .DAE.

What I don’t really understand is why, firstly, the overall SL community is not voting on this en masse and secondly, why have some of these grass-roots initiatives outlined above, just withered on the vine? Some of these projects are over two years old, with no sign of life or continued evolution since they were first posted.

Having been in the middle of this conversation for awhile, it seems the standard responses usually involve two factors: technology and/or SL’s economy—Technology, from the aspect that it’s currently still too difficult to do and economically, from the aspect that the sudden influx of new models would dilute the value of existing in-world creations, resulting in a negative impact on SL’s economy. Although I’m sure there are more reasons, these seem to be at the forefront of the discussion.

What confuses me, from my perspective anyways, is that these reasons still don’t seem plausible to me and I’m found wondering if I’m missing a valuable part of the equation.

First, although I have a limited background in programming, it appears from the existence of these grass roots projects, that portability is indeed obtainable. Having dabbled a little with each project above, I realize the process is laborious—cutting and pasting code from one program to the other.

I also realize that most of these conversion programs drastically simplify the form when imported into SL, such as textures being stripped off, and meshes and certain objects such as cylinders and sphere’s being simplified down to plain ‘box’ prims in SL. Although these are indeed hurdles, the technology is currently there to do this on a very limited basis.

I think the biggest problem with bridging the gap here is going to be the attitudes of people in contemporary mainstream environmentalism, which is sliding toward a kind of self-absorbed religious extremism with an apocalyptic obsession. There’s much more pragmatism in the Eco-Tech camp and so they more readily accept the notion of appropriateness even though they desire to push the edge of that as rapidly as possible. But it’s a different story for the environmental mainstream. People are not really using and advocating soft technology because it’s demonstrably or provably more sustainable. They adopt it as an aesthetic and cultural statement and take it on faith that primitive equals sustainable. You don’t even hear the term ‘soft-tech’ used very much in the environmentalist community anymore even though it coined it. Any implication that what they are advocating is any kind of technology, and not an alternative to technology, is now blasphemy. I’ve had arguments with self-professed environmentalists where they actually objected to my use of the word ‘efficiency’ in any environmental context claiming that was a corporate culture buzzword. Increasingly, discussions of eco development mirror the sentiment of survivalists, with the same Malthusianist logic -which often stands in stark contrast to their veneration of the virtues of community. Environmentalism as a movement seems to have given up on the future and now, like the Christian right-wing, is just waiting for -praying for- apocalypse to come and sweep the non-believers out of the way. So much more convenient than actually having to negotiate with people you don’t like…