Open Source Movements
Discussion
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
"What started with the open-source software movement has since expanded into various areas such as open access for knowledge & education (e.g. MOOCs), open science, open government data, as well as open-source design which is gaining increasing importance with the rapid developments in the space of additive manufacturing. All these movements form around “digital information goods”, which unlike physical goods can be used by thousands of people at the same time without subtracting any of their value. What all these movements have in common is the shared belief that breaking out information from today’s silos will have a profound impact on the collective intelligence and the creative and innovative capabilities of society as a whole.
For this to become viable on a large scale, a shift has to happen within our economic and legal systems that support this transition: There need to be economic incentives to openly share valuable information within the digital commons. Additionally, all data has to be secured on robust and distributed open-source infrastructure and protected by cryptography. The technological possibilities are present today, especially in the blockchain industry where open source platforms (e.g. Ethereum, IPFS), incentives for data collaboration (e.g. Ocean protocol, Numerai) and privacy technologies (e.g. Zero-knowledge proofs, Homomorphic encryption, Multi-party-computation) are being developed simultaneously. Furthermore, information needs to be organized to be useful and actionable. An open-source version of Google’s page rank algorithm could certainly be a starting point, but the even greater promise lies in leveraging collective intelligence for curating information. Given a system for managing economic rights directly connected with information production and consumption, information curation seems like the missing piece for a complete infrastructure, where individuals highlight relevant information for others out of the vast amounts of available data."