Virtual communities constitute a building block of the information society. These organizations appear capable to guarantee unique outcomes in voluntary association since they cancel physical distance and ease the process of searching for like–minded individuals.

In particular, open source communities, devoted to the collective production of public goods, show efficiency properties far superior to the traditional institutional solutions to the public goods issue (e.g. property rights enforcement and secrecy).

This paper employs team and club good theory as well as transaction cost economics to analyse the Wikipedia online community, which is devoted to the creation of a free encyclopaedia. An interpretative framework explains the outstanding success of Wikipedia thanks to a novel solution to the problem of graffiti attacks — the submission of undesirable pieces of information. Indeed, Wiki technology reduces the transaction cost of erasing graffiti and therefore prevents attackers from posting unwanted contributions.

The issue of the sporadic intervention of the highest authority in the system is examined, and the relatively more frequent local interaction between users is emphasized.

The constellation of different motivations that participants may have is discussed, and the barriers–free recruitment process analysed.

Open source software constitutes the most popular and successful example of purpose–built community, characterized by cumulative dependency. Concerning the size of open source projects as a criterion for their classification, Krishnamurthy (2002) found that the community model is a poor fit for software production. Indeed, the top 100 mature projects on Sourceforge [3], are developed by one or a few individuals. However, Krishnamurthy does not argue that such result implies a sort of crisis in the open source community; as the author correctly recognises, large communities may exist and do things other than produce software. For example, communities may try out products and suggest new features.

Wikipedia.com was born in January 2001 as a complementary project of Nupedia.com, which was aiming to create a freely available online encyclopaedia [4]. The publication of articles on Nupedia, in order to maintain high–quality, was based on a traditional review procedure of the publishers responsible for coordinating the project. The result of such process was that the volunteer contributors had to face a long and deterrent itinerary of submission, review and, if necessary, negotiation that ended up in very few articles published. At this point, the idea of Wikipedia emerged as a laboratory in which the advantages of massive collaboration could have been exploited, with the intention of choosing the best articles and letting them take the hard and costly review path leading to Nupedia.

The project has been successful. Six months after the birth of Wikipedia, 6.000 articles were written. Currently, there are more than 170,000 articles. [...]

Wikipedia is based on the Wiki technology that characterizes many Web sites. A Wiki community is open in the sense that it allows anyone to participate, freely viewing information contained in a site, permitting editing of that information as well. Editing Web pages can be done without submitting changes to a publisher and negotiating for them.

Why does this approach work? One might assume that graffiti attacks would eventually frustrate an approach on this sort of large scale. However, Wikipedia has been successful with a great deal of notable content as well as content in a state of constant improvement. For the most part, content disasters — in terms of quality — have not occurred. [...]

Wiki technology in a way literally cancels transaction costs for editing and changing information. Hence, this reduction in transaction costs acts as a catalyst for the development of the community. In turn, these reduced transaction costs means that there is full exploitation of massive collaboration economies. Hence, in the case of horizontal information assemblages, we might argue that any incentive that allows more authors to freely join in a given task, the larger the assemblage of information that is eventually produced (or in the case of Wikipedia, a larger number of articles is possible).

Another secret of the success of Wikipedia is related to the incentives that contribute to a "creative construction" of information, rather than a "creative destruction" of it. As noted earlier, I expected Wikipedia to be engaged in an endless war among reliable contributions and graffiti attacks that would have blocked the development of the Web site. In reality, that has not happened, basically because all changes made to any article are stored; it is possible to undo any unapproved modification with a single click. This makes the activity of littering a page extremely more expensive for an individual (in terms of time and reputation), than it is for anyone else. Therefore, also in this circumstance, it is a matter of costs.

Through this mechanism of editing and undoing meaningless changes or graffiti, an evolutionary process is fostered and only the best contributions survive the selection (Neus, 2001). Moreover, other factors contribute to Wikipedia’s success such as sources of authority and coordination. [...]

Whilst registered users can write articles, edit and discuss changes, administrators can exercise a certain degree of institutional authority. Indeed, they are allowed to ban IP addresses and permanently delete pages and their history. Such actions are undertaken when specific users are responsible for graffiti attacks, or when their writings and edits are not completely objective. Hence it is a general rule of the community that articles should be written from a neutral point of view. For example, one user was banned, who had written numerous contributions on German history [11]. These articles were perceived as right–wing by most, hence ignoring this standard of neutrality. In this case, the decision for banning the user was secured only after a long and lively discussion on the mailing list. [...]

Final policy decisions are up to one of the founders, Jimmy Wales. However, if this sort of benevolent dictator attempted to deviate from a neutral and objective policy towards content (for example, in order to push a specific political agenda), then the license provides a strong counter–balance to his power. The contributors may and should, in such a case, take the database and the software and set up a competing project. [...]

The case of Wikipedia, a successful project committed to the creation of a free online encyclopaedia, was examined. The principal reasons for the success of Wikipedia — namely, the drop in the transaction costs of submitting contributions and erasing graffiti — were described. It was shown how procedural and institutional authorities work for this site. In particular, the importance of reputation, as a source of authority, was emphasized. Reputation is accumulated through participation and that shapes a system of distributed authority in which every participant potentially may have a role in the development of the project.

Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It's straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they're equal, both move aside. If they both think they're dominant (or if one isn't paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and muttering apologies. But this doesn't happen if you meet a frail or half-blind person: You move aside for them. It's only when you think the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember doing it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and gently moved me out of the way -- it still rankles. Old people tend to cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately 'not notice' others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously exchanging status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person stepping aside.

Johnstone is interested on how this subliminal body language and status-checking can be exploited, to both powerful and comedic effect, on the stage. I'm more interested in its implications for human behaviour in a crowded world. I didn't believe the above passage was true until I started observing people (and myself) moving in crowds. You can easily pick out who sees him/herself as dominant, and who's going to move aside, a mile away by their demeanor and body language. It's hilarious to watch. Older people almost always expect, and subtly signal to younger people to move aside, even young people in gangs with attitude. And they do move aside, belying their whole superficial demeanor. Women tend to defer to men of the same age, but old, frail and pregnant women somehow trump everyone else -- everyone moves aside for them. I watched adults puff themselves up and brace for collision with children (especially those of cultures that let their kids learn these status rules slowly) rather than simply get out of their way. In one case I watched a very respectable, well-dressed middle-aged man actually deliberately kick a child out of the way, and then apologize to the mother (not the child) that he (the man) 'wasn't paying attention'.

I never realized how arrogant I must appear in crowds. I tend to dislike them, 'pretend not to see' people in them (much to the dismay of people who later tell me I 'rudely' ignored their smile or nod or wave of recognition), and take on a hurried, distracted, disinterested, hostile and elbows-raised demeanor. It works very well, except with some children, and except when I have to pass people from behind.

What disturbs me most is what this bodes for us idealists trying to establish non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures -- communities of peers. Are such structures unnatural? Or do we simply need to learn to recognize the pecking order for what it is -- a primeval tool for minimizing conflict and deciding who will do the breeding -- and what it isn't -- a license to take an unfair share of wealth and power?

Synchronicity is a term made famous by the psychiatrist Carl Jung. He defined synchronicity as an "occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time". Further, it as "an acausal connecting principle". Which is to say that a connection occurs through the sharing of a common meaning, not because one event caused the other. Jung went so far as to boldly state that "synchronicity could thus be added as a fourth principle to the triad of space, time, and causality".

Synchronicity has come to mean a variety of things. Laurence Boldt claims that synchronicity reflects the "underlying interconnectedness of all things within the Universe" [my emphasis]. An attractive theory for those of us addicted to Web culture! Stephen J. Davis states that synchronicity is "a very personal and subjective observation of this inter-connected universe of which we are but a small part". Another keyword that pops up in writings about synchronicity is "flow" - which of course reminds me of the Web's Information Flow. When used to describe synchronicity, it's all about the "flow of life". For example, this quote:

"When we are in the flow we experience more synchronous events, more pleasure and less pain. The flow of coincidences is our path to higher ground."

You will usually benefit if the members of your network do not know one another. Ronald Burt, in his innovative and influential book, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition, provides fascinating support for the argument that both people and companies benefit by sitting in a “structural hole” of a network. A structural hole exists when there is only a weak connection between two clusters of densely connected people.

For example, let us say you are the head of German country sales for Hasbro, Inc., a major manufacturer of games and toys. Your value to Hasbro is as a pipeline to the German market. It is in your interest to build relationships with many people in both Hasbro headquarters and in the German market. You fill a structural hole between those two groups. In order to preserve that structural hole, we recommend you should probably not introduce the two pools of people (the American Hasbro toy-sellers and the German toy-buyers).

The wisdom held in this brief book now informs most of what I do in life. Its key distinction--that there are two types of games, finite and infinite--resolves my uncertainties about what to do next. Easy: always choose infinite games. The message is appealing because it is deeply cybernetic, yet it's also genuinely mystical. I get an "aha" every time I return to it.

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
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Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
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To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
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The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play.
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I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over.
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Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will play by initiating their own.
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Evil is the termination of infinite play.
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No one can play a game alone.
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There is but one infinite game.

I think Phil Jones provides a powerful insight in his page on Google Juice. As attention online becomes explicit and accounted for, we may "start to apply it more, to put it to better use, going out of our way to earn it by writing more, and thinking more and offering other favours to our net-friends. In other words, an attention economy can stimulate people to do stuff the same as the money economy."

In the old money economy, passing money around was the definition of or the creation of economic activity. It's what let us "measure" economic activity. In fact the indexes of economic growth can be increased simply by pulling gifts, favours, friendship services from the non-accounted realm into the payed realm.

Though explicit social networking could be considered the hot new trend in software today, it is a solution without a context. Only by placing digital Identity, social networking and web services into a particular context – can their full potential be exploited.

Next generation on-line communities will combine all their predecessor’s features (message boards and blogging/RSS) with a timely relevance to individuals and particular groups of people.

What’s been missing from social networking up until now are the activities and transactions that should follow once people have found each other!

Dialogue, as we are choosing to use the word, is a way of exploring the roots of the many crises that face humanity today. It enables inquiry into, and understanding of, the sorts of processes that fragment and interfere with real communication between individuals, nations and even different parts of the same organization. In our modern culture men and women are able to interact with one another in many ways: they can sing dance or play together with little difficulty but their ability to talk together about subjects that matter deeply to them seems invariable to lead to dispute, division and often to violence. In our view this condition points to a deep and pervasive defect in the process of human thought.

In Dialogue, a group of people can explore the individual and collective presuppositions, ideas, beliefs, and feelings that subtly control their interactions. It provides an opportunity to participate in a process that displays communication successes and failures. It can reveal the often puzzling patterns of incoherence that lead the group to avoid certain issues or, on the other hand, to insist, against all reason, on standing and defending opinions about particular issues.

Dialogue is a way of observing, collectively, how hidden values and intentions can control our behavior, and how unnoticed cultural differences can clash without our realizing what is occurring. It can therefore be seen as an arena in which collective learning takes place and out of which a sense of increased harmony, fellowship and creativity can arise.

Because the nature of Dialogue is exploratory, its meaning and its methods continue to unfold. No firm rules can be laid down for conducting a Dialogue because its essence is learning - not as the result of consuming a body of information or doctrine imparted by an authority, nor as a means of examining or criticizing a particular theory or programme, but rather as part of an unfolding process of creative participation between peers.

In trying to think about the success factors for Open Source (OS) projects, and evaluate their character and structure, as well as thinking about extending this idea to other areas, I had the insight that the essential character of OS project organization is anarchy. As a political/intellectual movement, Anarchy is probably the most pure form of Libertarianism. Forget any associations you may have with the idea of creating anarchy in communities or societies by throwing bombs and other disruptive acts, since these are both factually incorrect, and have nothing to do with what Anarchy advocates. The correct association is of anarchy with "a state of nature", the Garden of Eden, if you will.

Humans, being highly social animals with highly advanced systems for communication of symbolic knowledge, have the ability to impose rules of all sorts on this original state. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this, but history shows many examples where "the rules" become highly oppressive. In tribal societies, the social unit is a small group where social "norms" can operate effectively, and it can be argued that the "norms" are essential for the survival of the tribe, but human development did not stop there. With the development of agriculture, the stage was set for creating hierarchical structures, monetary systems and large scale warfare (i.e. beyond inter-tribal conflicts for territory).

It is well know that Libertarian thought is pervasive in the highly technical software development community, and it is easy to see the attraction of these ideas to a class of highly intelligent, somewhat individualistic people. Add youth to that, and you get a lot of contempt for conventional systems of power and authority. In the beginnings of the software industry, there wasn't much of a market for additional copies of specific programs, and a lot of development happened in academic and other research labs, so there wasn't much thought or attention from the capitalists. Programmers freely shared their code with anyone who asked, and nobody thought about cashing in by selling millions of copies of a program. Richard Stallman created the GPL in reaction to the way code sharing was being closed down by the potential to cash in by selling code over and over. [...]

All of this is the essence of an anarchistic organizational system. Yes, formal structures are developed and put in place, but only with the tacit support of the community. It only works because everyone is free to participate or not, according to their desires and interests. There would be no debate about any of this if we weren't embedded in a system of market capitalism where value is equated with money, and money is necessary for each of us to be able to live and make choices. [...]

The bottom line is that while monetary systems and markets work well to efficiently distribute scarce commodities, they also tend to simplify complex systems of values into a single dimension, and they are particularly bad at promoting the efficient development of IP resources that gain their greatest value the more widely they are shared. It should be clear to most of us by now that this one-dimensional value system becomes non-functional in an information economy, as well as undervaluing the diversity and quality of the natural environment necessary for our long-term survival. The way forward will involve the emergence of new value systems based on sharing of information. To get there from here, we need to operate in the context of market capitalism, and actually exploit it to fund the transformation. This will involve convincing those who control the money to fund the rapid development of the IP Commons for the benefit of everyone.

Despite her bureaucratic title [Microsoft vice-president of corporate and industry initiatives], Stone is a creative thinker who has coined the term continuous partial attention to describe the way we cope with the barrage of communication coming at us. It's not the same as multitasking, Stone says; that's about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we're scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon: "How can I tune in in a way that helps me sync up with the most interesting, or important, opportunity?" She says: "It's crucial for CEOs to be intentional about breaking free from continuous partial attention in order to get their bearings. Some of today's business books suggest that speed is the answer to today's business challenges. Pausing to reflect, focus, think a problem through; and then taking steady steps forward in an intentional direction is really the key.

"The trick may be to filter events so that only those that are material intrude on our reflections and heads-down work. We shouldn't jump up and run in circles every time the wind shakes the leaves, but we cannot afford to become so engrossed in what we are doing that we miss the leopard about to pounce.

There is no absolute here. Those that simply refuse to carry cell phones, or never log in to IM are dangerous to their organizations. If you are a solitary journalist, or a very senior executive, such behavior may be workable: in the former case, no one is harmed by your opting out, and in the latter case you are likely to have staffers who filter the outside world for you. But for the average person, linked in a dense, cascading social network of collaborators who depend on your timely response to critical events, it will prove increasingly difficult -- if not impossible -- to veer away from continuous partial attention. We will have to learn a new balancing act, and it will be strongly canted toward spending more cycles scanning the horizon and fewer looking down at the piecework in our laps."

Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale University, has called this "commons-based peer production." The commons refers to the sharing of the underlying code or the output that is open to all, akin to the public land that farmers once grazed their livestock upon. Peer production means that producers participate for their own varied reasons and in ad hoc ways, not necessarily via legal contract or management fiat. Benkler calls this a third mode of production for the market, distinct from the company and the "spot market" (or, in employment terms, the freelancer). Open source shows that it is possible for part of the economy to function without companies but with many self-employed individuals contracting with each other.

"Asking favors is fundamentally different than offering them. People gain by being bridges. Thus, to be able to tell you about a job gives me whuffie in our relationship. Feeling pressured to connect you to an open job makes me uncomfortable. In all of the networks described above, the bridge got to control the information flow. In Milgram's "Small Worlds," if you didn't know that i knew the target person, you may not have tried to pass it on to me. If you don't know that i am dating someone who has something that you want, you won't try to pressure me into giving you access to it. Thus, i can choose when to reveal my connections in a situation where i can come across as being helpful, rather than being put in a position to feel cornered. Revealing the network shifts the power."

Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a "person" in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.

Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

A business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

"A standard definition of a weblog is a series of posts in "reverse chronologic order". I can't give you a reference here because the standard online reference sites don't have a definition for "weblog"

But, as a geologist, I understand "reverse chronologic order". Reverse chronologic order is youngest on top and older as you go down. This is a stratigraphic order. Younger deposits bury older deposits, so you get progressively older as you dig down. So weblogs view the world in a stratigraphic order.

It would be nice if the weblog folks acknowledge those who have gone before them. The Earth has been recording events in reverse chronologic order for over 3.8 billion years. The oldest weblog is the Earth."