Latitude

One Great Limitation, One Great Freedom–and a Wide Web.

“[The founders of the Internet] had one great limitation and one great freedom as they tried to conceive of a global network.

• The limitation was that they didn’t have any money.
• But they had an amazing freedom, which was they didn’t have to make any money from it. It’s folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to, or because they were expecting to make a mint off of it.

That ethos led to a network architecture, a structure that was unlike other digital networks then or since.”

(Jonathan Zittrain, TED: “The Web as Random Acts of Kindness”)

World in the Web, & Web in the World

The good-will community “architecture” that the Internet arose from–and which the latter continues to affirm in new ways–mirrors the actual network architecture of the Internet.

“The system [of Internet addressing and routing actually] relies on kindness and trust… how packets move around the Internet, sometimes in as many as 25 or 30 hops, with the intervening entities that are passing the data around having no particular contractual or legal obligation to the original sender, or to the receiver.”

(Jonathan Zittrain, TED: “The Web as Random Acts of Kindness”)

Internet-Inspired Community “Architectures” in the Wider World

Recently, we wrote about the Stranger Exchange, a hyperlocal dropbox (in Cambridge, MA) located conceptually betwixt Craigslist/Freecycle and PostSecret (a community art project).

Rachel Botsman discussed the notion of “indirect reciprocity” with respect to how individuals were interacting with the Stranger Exchange–as well as collaborative networks and sharing communities at large.

Interestingly, the early “members” of the Stranger Exchange seem to be participating for similar intrinsic motivations that are fueling the open peer-to-peer movements such as Flickr, Wikipedia, BitTorrent, BePress and so on.

For these systems to keep flourishing, people need to “give before they get,” a dynamic that is built on a new kind of trust, trust in people you don’t know or are not even friends with.

Rachel Botsman, “The Stranger Exchange”

This seems to be the organic social system that grew up from Yochai Benkler’s apt accentuation of the social-psychological and intrinsic motivations of individuals comprising peer-to-peer networks–essentially, a new kind of social contract, ever-so-slightly colored “karma.”

What Will the Next Generation of Shared Service Platforms Look Like?

This psychology of sharing, of internalized accountability, and of “indirect reciprocity” underlies new systems of collaborating, innovating, and funding–as peer-based networks and crowdsourcing’s varied applications.

It encourages–first, it makes possible–home-grown, person-to-person shared service platforms. Netflix and Zipcar are superb, forward-thinking models, advocating sharing and anytime-accessibility over ownership–but one has to wonder if the next iteration of shared service models, enabled by new social-psychological understandings, won’t look something a little more like this:

Post inspired by Jonathan Zittrain’s TED Talk, “The Web as Random Acts of Kindness”

Header images courtesy of PostSecret community.