Wed

Aug 3
2005

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

The Cornucopia of the Commons

Apologies to Dan Bricklin! While chatting with him before doing a podcast interview for his software licensing podcast series, he mentioned that I've been attributing to Clay Shirky one of the seminal insights that has shaped my thinking over the past couple of years, when in fact it came from Dan.
 

The insight, which Dan outlined in his paper, The Cornucopia of the Commons, is as follows: There are three ways to create a collective work: 1. Pay people. 2. Get volunteers. 3. Architect your product in such a way that people create collective value by pursuing their individual self-interest. By way of example, Yahoo! built their directory using method 1. Many open source projects as well as shared content projects like Wikipedia use method 2. But many of the great successes of the internet age have discovered method 3.

The genius of Napster, for instance, was the simple choice of opt out rather than opt in for the default value of P2P sharing. If you downloaded songs, you automatically served songs as well. This setting meant that people built the network just by using it. Along with Larry Lessig's book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which emphasized the importance of fundamental architectural decisions in shaping the fate and ultimate direction of technologies, Dan's essay led me to formulate the idea that the architecture of participation is a fundamental axis on which we ought to evaluate internet-era technology projects.

I made the mistake of confusing Dan's insights with Clay's, alas, because both of them made keynote presentations at our P2P Conference in 2001, and both were published as essays in our 2001 book Peer to Peer. Clay's talk/essay was entitled "Listening to Napster", a title that echoes Dan's key point. (I even remember asking Clay about this point, saying I couldn't find it in the essay but remembered him making it, and he didn't make the connection either.) Oh well, Clay is the Oscar Wilde of the tech generation, so I'll just have to excuse myself by echoing a remark from celebrated wit Dorothy Parker: "I never try to take the credit. We just assume that Oscar said it."

tags:   | comments: 4   | Sphere It
submit:

 
Previous  |  Next

0 TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.oreilly.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/4221

Comments: 4

  Ross Stapleton-Gray [08.03.05 07:44 PM]

> The genius of Napster, for instance, was the simple choice of opt out rather than opt in for the default value of P2P sharing.

Absolutely that was a contributing factor (and certainly marketeers understand why one should have "Yes" as the default for the radio buttons for "Send me regular news of other fine offerings?"... the lazy/careless responder will always buy in...). But the single most important factor vis-a-vis Napster was a monstrously large inventory of intellectual property in digital form that people (1) wanted; and (2) believed it was their right to share freely. Or, at least enough of them were comfortable enough with copyright infringement that it busted out all over...

Take away someone else's content to swap and share, and you've got, I dunno, maybe Plaxo.

  Tim O'Reilly [08.06.05 12:05 PM]

well, yes, Ross, free music was definitely a huge part of what drove Napster. But nonetheless, Napster taught the industry something powerful about how to build network effects into software architecture, an insight that has since been exploited, to a greater or lesser degree, by many other companies since.

  Ross Stapleton-Gray [08.10.05 10:11 PM]

Have you got any pointers to Napster traffic flow analyses? I recall seeing a discussion some time back to the effect that there was a considerable imbalance, with a relatively small number of "super sharers," and a larger number of users who seldom shared, but mostly consumed.

  Nazareno andrade [08.18.05 12:04 PM]

I think there is evidence of such behaviour in this paper.

In a similar study for BitTorrent, we've found that users which use broadcatching to download their files upload more, and this seems to happen because their clients start downloading automatically and keep contributing until their users opt-out.

I'd think that in spite of what the idea that forcing users to opt-out to stop uploading may improve cooperation may have thaught us, this mechanism alone is rather fragile in driving users' selfish behavior. Actually, I'd think users don't take long to circumvent these mechanisms.

On the other hand, I see BitTorrent's tit-for-tat and eDonkey's queue as more mature manifestations of the architecture of cooperation you've mentioned.

Post A Comment:

 (please be patient, comments may take awhile to post)






Type the characters you see in the picture above.