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What kind of open money do we need?
One of the things we follow at the P2P Foundation is the social conflicts that arise around peer to peer logics of cooperation, and a few months ago, we attempted to formulate a typology of social relations in the article, The Social Web and its Social Contracts http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=261 (some interesting comments by Geoff Cox are here http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/projects/2008/antisocial/notes.php.


Users of the P2P Foundation wiki will know that we focus part of our attention to the emergence of open money systems http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Money.
In this article we note the crucial difference between commons-based peer production proper (Linux), sharing through proprietary platforms, and crowdsourcing as 3 distinct modalities. We monitor conflicts that arise between peer producers/sharers and the netarchical businesses through a delicious tag http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Conflicts. These new forms of exploitation have been called digital sharecropping http://p2pfoundation.net/Digital_Sharecropping


The logic for me is undeniable: 1) just as we can now peer produce content, software and now designs, I think it is a logical conclusion that we can also produce civil society based money; 2)the current money system uses protocols that induce pathological behaviours http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_a_new_beginning and ultimately destroys the biosphere.
Seth Finkelstein http://www.sethf.com/infothought/blog reports on a interesting recent case study in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/31/wikipedia. It involves a "dispute (over the amount of space devoted to advertising) between the wiki-hosting startup company Wikia, Inc and the creators of the sites it hosts, is a case study of the conflicts between so-called community and commerce".


Once we have said this though, things get a little more complicated, as there seem to be quite a plethora of open money or 'monetary transformation' proposals out there.
Here's the crux of the case:


I'm familiar with the following:
"At the start of June, Wikia's CEO announced that many changes would be made to the appearance of sites, mainly to have more advertising and for the ads to be more prominent. As Wikia's community development manager put it: "We have to change things in order to make Wikia financially stable. Unfortunately, Google ads in the footer pay pennies a click, and nobody clicks". He went on to explain that ads paying based on view count were needed. And that type of advertiser wants their ad to be displayed where viewers are sure to see it, such as within an article, near the top.


- Bernard Lietaer, former Belgian central banker, who takes a macro view of change, building on the existing, but transforming it to a different logic. He proposes a four-tiered monetary system, http://p2pfoundation.net/Four-tiered_Monetary_System_of_the_Future combining local and affinity based open monies with a global Terra to replace the dollar http://p2pfoundation.net/Terra
In reaction, various content creators made it clear they understood the needs of the company and had no objection to advertising per se. But putting ads inside content risked changing their material from articles into decorated billboards. The conflict between management and (unpaid) labour became acrimonious. There were declarations such as: "If Wikia does not resolve this situation to our satisfaction, then we will leave, taking our content, our communities' inward links, our established service marks and our fellow editors with us."


- Thomas Greco, who has studied extensively the experience with alternative currencies (and their failures, for example in Argentina http://p2pfoundation.net/Argentine_Social_Money_Movement), stresses the mutual credit function http://p2pfoundation.net/Credit_Commons, but also wants objective safeguards to maintain the value of such new money
Seth then mentions one of the more active opposition groups:


- Michael Linton, who stresses that money is only trust, and has written money to easily create such open source money systems, on a local and affinity basis
"at least one group - devoted fans of the shape-changing toy robots called Transformers - is determined to secede from Wikia. This site was used as part of the chief executive's initial announcement above, but now has a page of accusations against Wikia management. One member working on the move wrote on his blog http://deriksmith.livejournal.com/29985.html that "the attitude towards the people generating the content they're making money off of has been to lie, pacify, misdirect or condescend".


As you may guess, various people are criticising the weaknesses of other proposals, and though I would wish for an integration, it is beyond my skills to offer it, so I'm hoping for the next best thing, opening up a dialogue.
Note that the planned new site, at TFWiki.net http://www.tfwiki.net/, will still have advertising. But, wrote one member, the ads "will be placed more tastefully than the current trend on Wikia ... it's when it goes into the article area that we get testy".


Here are my own a priori assumptions:
The struggle between community and platform is but one modality however, and the TFWiki initiative points to an alternative, which is for peer producers to build their own platforms and not to rely on the goodwill of the platform owners.


1) I'm partial to Lietaer, because he covers all the different levels and recognizes the existing world structure to inform strategies of change
This is the purpose of Jesse Vincent, who in a great presentation on digital sharecropping http://www.slideshare.net/IgniteBoston/12-jesse-vincent announces http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3098 the launch of Prophet, a distributed database that allows the sharing of "data with your friends and coworkers – all without a central server." The aim he says, is to obtain a post-Web 2.0 independence on the proprietary platforms.
 
2) Thomas Greco is very precise about why local currencies fail. Having myself been familiar with LETS, I see it as a high effort alternative that cannot structurally replace what we have now. From Greco we can learn what is needed to make such initiatives work better and grow into a real alternative
 
3) Michael Linton has done and is doing what needs to be done to have open money tools at our disposal
 
What prompted my initiative is that I was contacted by Michael Linton, who is proposing a podcast conversation on the issue, at Blogtalk Radio's Open Money channel http://www.blogtalkradio.com/openmoney
 
He described open money as an expression of our capacity for social agreements - money systems are systems of agreement and varieties are virtually unlimited - almost any practical community can enhance its process with appropriate community money systems / measures / records.
 
Practical requirements for open money include
 
1) an accessible operating platform that enables users to form or join networks generally rather than one by one
2) an intelligible social organization for collaboration on naming accounts, systems, registries
3) a menu of standard cc systems and provision for variations
4) ideally, some education, maturing and appreciation 
 
Michael Linton and co-conspirator Ernie Yacub  say that "generally, open money means we can end monetary poverty - quickly, and for ever." They believe that "community way systems http://p2pfoundation.net/Community_Way will soon demonstrate the engine of open money with sufficient clarity for others to replicate - software matters, and will matter more as networks emerge and populate - open money tools will become increasingly used in open source projects, media ventures, creative processes - carbon counting cards are coming http://teqs.net ."

Revision as of 13:53, 2 August 2008

In the sandbox you can play with wiki syntax and more.


One of the things we follow at the P2P Foundation is the social conflicts that arise around peer to peer logics of cooperation, and a few months ago, we attempted to formulate a typology of social relations in the article, The Social Web and its Social Contracts http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=261 (some interesting comments by Geoff Cox are here http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/projects/2008/antisocial/notes.php.

In this article we note the crucial difference between commons-based peer production proper (Linux), sharing through proprietary platforms, and crowdsourcing as 3 distinct modalities. We monitor conflicts that arise between peer producers/sharers and the netarchical businesses through a delicious tag http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Conflicts. These new forms of exploitation have been called digital sharecropping http://p2pfoundation.net/Digital_Sharecropping

Seth Finkelstein http://www.sethf.com/infothought/blog reports on a interesting recent case study in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/31/wikipedia. It involves a "dispute (over the amount of space devoted to advertising) between the wiki-hosting startup company Wikia, Inc and the creators of the sites it hosts, is a case study of the conflicts between so-called community and commerce".

Here's the crux of the case:

"At the start of June, Wikia's CEO announced that many changes would be made to the appearance of sites, mainly to have more advertising and for the ads to be more prominent. As Wikia's community development manager put it: "We have to change things in order to make Wikia financially stable. Unfortunately, Google ads in the footer pay pennies a click, and nobody clicks". He went on to explain that ads paying based on view count were needed. And that type of advertiser wants their ad to be displayed where viewers are sure to see it, such as within an article, near the top.

In reaction, various content creators made it clear they understood the needs of the company and had no objection to advertising per se. But putting ads inside content risked changing their material from articles into decorated billboards. The conflict between management and (unpaid) labour became acrimonious. There were declarations such as: "If Wikia does not resolve this situation to our satisfaction, then we will leave, taking our content, our communities' inward links, our established service marks and our fellow editors with us."

Seth then mentions one of the more active opposition groups:

"at least one group - devoted fans of the shape-changing toy robots called Transformers - is determined to secede from Wikia. This site was used as part of the chief executive's initial announcement above, but now has a page of accusations against Wikia management. One member working on the move wrote on his blog http://deriksmith.livejournal.com/29985.html that "the attitude towards the people generating the content they're making money off of has been to lie, pacify, misdirect or condescend".

Note that the planned new site, at TFWiki.net http://www.tfwiki.net/, will still have advertising. But, wrote one member, the ads "will be placed more tastefully than the current trend on Wikia ... it's when it goes into the article area that we get testy".

The struggle between community and platform is but one modality however, and the TFWiki initiative points to an alternative, which is for peer producers to build their own platforms and not to rely on the goodwill of the platform owners.

This is the purpose of Jesse Vincent, who in a great presentation on digital sharecropping http://www.slideshare.net/IgniteBoston/12-jesse-vincent announces http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3098 the launch of Prophet, a distributed database that allows the sharing of "data with your friends and coworkers – all without a central server." The aim he says, is to obtain a post-Web 2.0 independence on the proprietary platforms.

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