Full Circle Associates

David Bollier of OntheCommons.org shares an interesting report on a Berkman Center meeting on What Can Evolutionary Science Teach Us About Designing Online Commons?

Yesterday I attended a fantastic workshop sponsored by the Berkman Center and Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research on the lessons that evolutionary science and commons scholarship might teach us about the social architecture of online commons. As workshop co-organizer John Clippinger put it:

“One of the key challenges for contemporary institutions and organizations is how to scale trust from the personal to the impersonal…. With the rise of global forms of social and economic exchange, digital technologies may provide new ways for scaling trust and governance.”

Digital technologies can leverage our innate propensity to self-organize ourselves into cooperative online communities. Indeed, dozens of different Internet-based genres demonstrate this – open source software, collaborative websites and archives, community listservs, peer-to-peer file sharing, social networking software, the Wikipedia community, and so on. So the question we should consider is: How ought we to design and build online communities to leverage our evolutionary propensities for cooperation?

Drawing upon empirical studies of biology and natural resource commons (mostly in developing countries), the workshop focused on such issues as how trust, reciprocity, social signaling, reputation and governance actually work in online environments. Participants were mostly lawyers, biologists, techies, social scientists and policy experts. An audio webcast and a few Powerpoint presentations will be posted on the Berkman Center website soon.

Towards the end of his great report, David shared this tidbit from Doc Searls:

One comment by Searls really reverberated with me. He said that the word “authority” means that we grant certain people the right to “author” who we are. Now that hierarchical authority is being supplanted by decentralized, networked authority, in effect, “We are all the authors of each other.” A fitting tagline for the commons!"

Now I have to check out the OnTheCommons work! So many blogs, so little time.

[Via Kolabora]

commons, collaboration, social_architecture, online_community