For me the beyond buzzword-ness of web2 is that people are finding their context.
We are starting to understand that the internet is different and includes situations which do not mesh tidily with laws designed for an analog world.
People are looking for ways to work earn and share which are not based on restriction of access. Creative Commons group has moved some way along this path but is still based around flexible rights for creators resulting in licences which allow people to distribute but not participate in information flow. I think one of the unspoken point release versions of web is 1.2 where the broadcast entity retains control and the audience is encouraged to interact but is not a peer or partner in the information space. This for me feels like it is too intra DMCA(EUCD). Law is such a habitat in itself it is not surprising that people who start with law as the framework are scoped by what is, but I think we need to grow beyond those models based on restriction to find ways that we can make business and culture without fencing people out.
The flexible use and flow of information is not within scope for that kind of perspective; individual control is still the starting point. So a photo of a child is still the property of the photographer, the child, parent, person who owns the geographic context, are not seen as participants in making the photo and must request permission to use the photo online. Interestingly I think the same is true of xrays. The patient does not have the right to publish them. (At least I believe this is true here in AU)
I feel that information as a fenced business model is not fair or in many ways useful in a world where we can publish for ourselves. This means that we need to look at ways of making business around creativity differently. This is unlikely to be a one size fits all proposition because the new habitat is less of a monoculture than the old one.
Copyright works if all the businesses are broadcast models. We need law and business models which are participation based and which appreciate the value of a critical mass of participation as a kind of asset in a business sense. I think this is what is being promoted as web2 but I feel that functionally it is not the full new release version yet. People are still testing the waters. I went to a workshop about new digital narratives. All of the authors who spoke were talking about their new interactive narratives. None of them thought that this might have an impact on whether they owned the copyright of the result. That is many businesses can see the value of participation as an input but have not worked through the model from the perspective of the participant to see how they might perceive themselves as participative authors. The fence for the individual creator who broadcasts is still in place.
I expect that there will always be broadcast based businesses but I think we will require a better level of transparency about the kind of participation which is being offered and whether for the participants this looks like something which we want to invest our time in if the results will be something we may not use ourselves. Better yet I hope there will be more projects which can see that value needs to be something which is gained by all those who participate and we might need to be more inventive about how to engineer that in a business and in a law sense.
So I am looking forward to the tangible shift that the Access to Knowledge movement is discussing. A2K people are starting from an understanding that there is a social function of information and ideas.
- In order to do cutting edge research we need to be able to see and understand where the edge is.
- In order to have good dialogue about best environmental practice we need to have open access to data about environmental practice causes effects and theories and experiments. We are collective custodians and need to operate our private practice in a way which values the environmental outcomes or the planet as the primary participant to be honoured.
- In cultural spaces and diplomatic dialogue between cultures too the ability for new generations to build from our current state of play as a world community will be about our ability to understand and work constructively in a large and diverse information space where people will differ from us and that is again a core value. Constructive practice around cultural diversity is a facet where we probably have much work to do because for much of our recent time we have been operating in information spaces which are oriented around broadcast of hostility and judgement, one true way v axis of evil.
I feel like I am learning about myself and others as creatures in a social habitat.
Some of the contexts I am part of include networks, some are larger entities.
Some life is symbiotic, some is companion planting, some is competitive, some is atavistic. Some of my actions work well for others some of them don't.
Some actions of other people work well for me, dome don't.
How do we negotiate change, encourage the growth of our companions and ourselves, understand that some competitive approaches have different value and to know what to invest myself in or not to invest in which is at least in part based around the social habits of the other party, how they interface with difference, how free are participants, who is free to use the results, is participation in the model a process of opening more or restricting more of our cultural resources and flows.
I feel like I am stepping out of the defined roles of human space back into this kind of ecosystem thinking space where we are all factors and are responsible for our impact on others. Organisational structures do not scope our sphere of influence, the character of our message is a factor in the impact of our voice. There is nothing new in this kind of sensitivity, it is a part of Joan Russell's ethic (I am responsible for myself, for my impact on others, I do useful things.) and I am sure there are cousin concepts about.
For me it explains in part why digital spaces can become heated. The dialogue matters.
We are still learning that our voices are audible, infinitely audible and permanent, and that in a space with so many different ideas and people, where a broadcast approach is not desirable, we need to relearn how to let go of individual/personal/corporate winning and losing and to look for wider positives we also need to win gently and to lose constructively. Jimmy Wales talked about differing safely at his talk in Adelaide.
I hope that as we learn to function socially in a more networked information space we are able to step away from the computer with that kind of thought intact and to look at our physical world with an appreciation of value beyond the personal.
My checklist for projects sporting their web2-ness.
- Are there barriers to who may participate? language, cultural, software, hardware, internet, monetary, invitational, age, accessibility, literacy.
- Are the barriers known by the participants before they choose to participate?
- Who can participate in and use the products of the collaboration?
- Who has editorial and structural control of the future openness of the collaborative work?
- Can participants use the work independently of the project and platform it started on?
At the moment I feel that many projects encourage participation but are not explicit about the facets of personal agency and control that are available or not to participants in the project, and that it is not clear whether the resultant work is fenced in some way or whether it is a component we can use as part of our wider human cultural potting mix. =)
