Sharing in the Commons

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Infrastructure of sharing in the commons
Tuesday 28 June - Teemu Arina

"What strikes me the most these days is that everyone is talking about sharing in the commons. There is an increased amount of contributions in the commons without any financial interests. People have discovered, that the value of information and knowledge increases when shared. This is the world I’ve been living in during the eight years, but now suddenly everyone is talking (and doing something) about it."

...and...

"There is a second layer building upon the World Wide Web. The complex system we live in is getting a lot smarter and starts to live a life of its own. We are like cells in a human body, possibly completely unaware of the system we are starting to be part of. This layer is more clever and more adapting than the underlying technical information infrastructure. What gave birth to it are several key elements:

* Juridical foundations that made it easy to share intellectual property (FLOSS, Open Content)
* Various technical foundations that enabled sharing information between networked systems (open standards)
* Standards to structure content in such a way that it’s readable by machines (XML)
* New online tribes that include sharing of information, knowledge and ideas as part of their core values (hackers, pro-ams, remixers, file swappers, bloggers and alike)
* Political movements and ideologies that support the birth of a sharing economy
* Peer-to-peer distribution of resources (Skype, Bittorrent etc.)
* New business models that make it economically viable to share information"