In the public domain

Continuity and sustainability through innovation. To the book-bound mentality, such a strategy may appear at best unlikely and counter-intuitive, at worst simply wrong-headed. But as we’ll see in this and the next blog entry, it accurately describes how oral tradition and the internet operate in the public domain, the arena in which each thought-technology thrives most naturally. Despite what our default cultural reflexes encourage us to believe, OT and IT prosper not via the textual program of fixation-through-capture, but via morphing and regeneration. For pathways-based media, it’s rule-governed, ongoing evolution – rather than the dead-end of fossilization – that promises continued usefulness and accessibility.

Two aspects of OT and IT, both of them foreign to the textual world, stand out as especially important reasons underlying this counter-intuitive behavior. The first is a radical openness to change, and I mean “radical” in two senses – fundamental and innovative. The second aspect is an unprivatized community of makers and users, a cyber-democracy if you like. These two qualities make for a creative scenario that favors access, exchange, and diverse contributions over ownership, licensing, and proprietary products. Instead of micro-societal restriction by legal instruments and entrenched resistance to shared innovation, so typical of the régime of the book and page, OT and IT offer an invitation to cooperate and jointly innovate across the broad swath of the macro-society.

OT accomplishes its goals by opening the performance arena to all performers and (let’s not forget) all audiences, subject to individual cultural rules. Likewise, IT’s ever-emerging openness and ever-expanding community are sponsoring more and more “open source” and “open standards” sorts of activities. In short, if OT and IT operate like matched “bookends,” it’s precisely because they flourish by not closing the book on sharing, by conducting their business very much in the public domain.

Let’s consider a few examples of IT behavior along these lines. (In the next entry I will examine ways in which the Open Source Definition of digital creativity and rights can be applied to the dynamics of OT.)

In recent years the so-called “open source” movement has begun what some are already calling a major revolution in software design and development. The trend away from proprietary, vendor-regulated products and toward open source software has meant that innovation of any sort can take place without the usual restrictions of licensing, commercial purchase, and penalties for modification. The source code is open, experimentation is open, and redistribution is open – all across the eAgora.

In the simplest scenario, this initiative fosters adaptation of freely available applications to any subsequent purpose without abridgment of copyright, so that anyone can tailor preexisting “open” software to a particular purpose without monetary impediment or fear of legal repercussions. Would your business function more smoothly if you could tweak a particular application by adding or substituting modules, or even by rewriting basic code? Under open source rules, feel free to go ahead and tweak – no questions asked, no fees incurred, no laws broken. Likewise for the next innovator, and the evolution goes on unhindered.

Complementary to the open source movement is a commitment to open standards, such as the OpenDocument standard recently adopted by the state of Massachusetts as a replacement for proprietary, non-conforming productivity applications. By January 1, 2007 all state offices will be required to install software that supports this new standard, which in effect will disqualify any proprietary software that doesn’t do the same. As of that date Microsoft Office is out, as are WordPerfect and Lotus Notes, none of which support the OpenDocument standard. Technophiles and ordinary citizens of the cyber-democracy, on the other hand, will profit from decreased costs and increased access, as will state workers – once they master the new applications that will be required when “open season in Massachusetts” begins. Capitulate to broader, community-based rule or suffer the consequences, the Massachusetts folks are saying to software vendors, even as they warmly welcome makers, users, and workers into an open, seamless eCommunity.

Add to these symptoms of a deeply rooted and growing commitment to sharing – as opposed to owning – another remarkable phenomenon: MIT OpenCourseWare, which makes public and available many hundreds of courses over 34 departments and programs. MIT President Susan Hockfield describes the broadening and leveling of the educational eAgora in this way: “educators and students everywhere can benefit from the academic activities of our faculty and join a global learning community in which knowledge and ideas are shared openly and freely for the benefit of all.” IT opens doors (through pathways), just like OT.

On the eCommerce front, the phenomenon of “market mavericks,” third-party bloggers and screeners who are taking advantage of web democracy to help correct information asymmetry and rebalance the process of informed purchasing. These responsible cyber-citizens provide the consumer community with easily available, independent evaluations of products and buying advice. (Visit the bzzagent website for an example, or consult the Commuri-Radford research
partially sponsored by the Center for eResearch at the University of Missouri-Columbia.)

So. . . the state of Massachusetts, the MIT faculty, market mavericks – what do these three groups have in common? Briefly stated, they’ve decided that the way forward is not to hoard ideas but to distribute them as widely as possible, not to try to corner the market but to trade with everyone else, and on as equal a footing as possible. They see their best opportunity for sustained contribution as members of a radically open community of makers and users – indeed, a community wherein the (essentially proprietary) distinction between “makers” and “users” really doesn’t apply in the default sense. Instead, and again as in OT, all involved become in one way or another participants, actors or doers participating in a process of mutual exchange whose strength derives from morphing and innovation.

That’s what’s meant by a truly public domain – an IT-based community in which ownership has given way to sharing, which is in turn a recognition that ideas just don’t hold still. In such circumstances, is it really any surprise that open source software, open courseware, and third-party cyber-advisers have begun to take center stage? As with OT, people are once again starting to prefer pathways to paper.

Post-“script”
This just in, as the anchor newspeople say! Only a few hours before the present blog entry was posted, Microsoft submitted its Open XML document format technology to the international standards body known as (Ecma). While this action doesn’t meet Massachusetts’ call for an OpenDocument standard, it does represent a new direction (dare we say a concession?) on the part of the giant software vendor. It also constitutes one more piece of evidence that the eAgora is moving away from ownership by proprietary fiefdoms and toward sharing across an open community.