I’d taken a long break from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks – I had a lot going on, and, well, it’s a really, really meaty read. But I picked it up again, and was in the middle of it around the same time as the discussions around the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change happened. And as I finished reading the chapter, it came clear to me that the chapter might well be Yochai’s two cents on our conversation (not that I’ve asked him, but some things seem kinda clear from this chapter.)
The chapter is titled: Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information and Law. Basically, it talks about the kinds of ways that individuals live, and the kinds of things that increase autonomy, and things that decrease it. He starts out laying the framework: the networked information economy puts materials in people’s hands for action, it provides non-proprietary sources of communications, and it decreases the extent that people can be manipulated by those they depend on for communication. He then goes into detail into each of these ways that the network information economy increases autonomy.
There’s a lot in this chapter, and I can’t possibly do it justice – go read it. But what I want to highlight is his section on autonomy, property and commons. First, because it bears most closely on issues of open content in the nonprofit sector. Second, because it’s a set of concepts that are pretty new to me, and I found interesting, and the arguments compelling.
First, both markets/property and commons have something in common – the ability of people to have some amount of certainty that there is available to them a set of resources so they can, as Benkler says “execute plans over time.” I’d just say, live our lives, or in the case of nonprofits, accomplish their missions. But markets and commons create these certainties in different ways, as you can imagine. Markets are dependent on the willingness and ability of people to pay for goods and services, and are constrained in certain ways. Commons are also constrained in certain ways. He says:
Whether having a particular type of resource subject to a commons, rather than a property-based market enhances freedom of action and security, or harms them, is a context-specific question.
Basically, we have to take things on a case-by-case basis. There may be times (I’d say home ownership is a good one,) where a property-based market would enhance security and flexibility, and a commons-based resource might not. And there will be examples (see below) where the opposite is true. It is his opinion, and based on his arguments I agree, that a mixture of proprietary (market-based) and commons provides people with the most flexible set of resources leading to the greatest autonomy:
Given the diversity of resources and contexts, and the impossibility of a purely “anything goes” absence of rules for either system, some mix of the two different institutional frameworks is likely to provide the greatest diversity of freedom to act in a material context.
He goes on to say:
As to information, then, we can say with a high degree of confidence that a more expansive commons improves individual autonomy, while enclosure of the public domain undermines it. This is less determinate with communications systems. Because computers and network connections are rival goods, there is less certainty that a commons will deliver the required resources. Under present conditions, a mixture of commons-based and proprietary communications systems is likely to improve autonomy.
He thinks that if conditions change, including increasing peer-to-peer networks, and wireless mesh networks, a commons-based communications policy would increase autonomy.
Later in the chapter, when he talks about mass communications, he uses a great metaphor of storytellers. I won’t detail it here, because this is already getting pretty long. But it’s worth reading – it has to do with how free we are to tell our own stories, and to hear the stories of as wide a range of people as possible.
I think that his contribution to our discussion about open content in the nonprofit sector, would be that, since it is information (a nonrival good), and since information is both output (I write a whitepaper that people read) and an input (someone takes the information from that whitepaper, and updates it, or uses a piece of information about one of the specific aspects of that paper in another paper with a different focus) a commons-based approach is the approach that will provide the greatest security and flexibility. In other words, an approach that will allow nonprofits to best fulfill their missions, or in Benkler-ese “execute their plans.”
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