Distributed Innovation and Creativity, Peer Production, and Commons in Networked Economy – Yochai Benkler

After being asked to read the above text, I thought great yeah I’ll give it a bash, I can do this…until I began reading and realised just how complex of a text it was, this isn’t something you can skim over whilst listening to the radio sort of text.

This is my third proper attempt but finally I think I have grasped what he is saying…sort of!

In the first section of the paper Benkler argues that Wikipedia is an example of a radically distributed model of social production….for me I think this is because he says that,

If in February 2001 someone had shown Jimmy Wales’s new project, which consisted at the time of 900 stubs on the web, stored on a web platform that allowed anyone to write and edit, but paid no one to do so, producing a product in which no one claimed exclusive proprietary rights….

He then goes on to say that ‘the core capital resources necessary for these core economic production activities – computation, communications, electronic storage and more recently sensors.’ Which are all the components that make up Wiki and because there is no capital cost this isn’t a factor that can affect the running of it.

Wikipedia is a place of sharing information, it allows people to add to it, edit it and lastly learn from it; within his article Benkler states, ‘existing information is one of the most important resources used to create new information goods’.

He then goes on to mention that given that the information itself, once produced is a publics good then,

The commons is a way of allocating access and use of rights in resources that does not give anyone exclusive rights to exclude anyone or charge them for access.

Some examples given by Benkler are – streets, highways, canals, waterways, major shipping lanes and navigable rivers; basic scientific knowledge, mathematical algorithms. He said that, ‘these have all been kept commons because they provide enormous freedom of action to a wide range of productive behaviour’.

Benkler define peer production as,

large-scale collaborative engagement by groups of individuals who come together to produce products more complex than they could have approached their own.

Flickr could be seen as an example, but he also refers back to Wiki of which he describes,

a self-governing community of thousands of highly engaged contributors and tens of thousands of individuals with lower but still active levels of participation.

Another example of this is Openwear which is an open clothing brand that allows people to co-produce. All you have to do is subscribe to it and agree to the terms of the license. It shares the same values that Benkler is describing as its empathise is on co-production to enable consumers benefits and give co-producers overall governance of the brand itself.

The Open Prosthetics Project again is another platform that is used to enable collaborations between ‘users, funders and wearers with a goal of making our creations available for anyone to use or build upon’.

Benkler defines Open Collaborative innovation as,

a term used to describe a set of productive practices developed by firms operating in complex product and innovation-rich markets. These practices share with peer production the recognition that the smartest and best people to solve any given problem are unlikely to work in a single firm, the firm facing the challenge, and that the models of innovation and problem solving that allow diverse people, from diverse setting, to work collaboratively on the problem will lead to better outcomes than production models that enforce strict boundaries at the edge of the firm and do not allow collaboration based on fit of person to task rather than based on employment contract and ownership of problem

If anyone wants to break that down to me feel free because I am baffled….

Sharing Anchors Community Pg 31-60 Questions

After being asked to read a chapter of Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Hardcover, 2008). Penguin; my lecturer had set us some questions in relation to the text and below is my response/discussion.

In the book Here Comes Everybody Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Hardcover, 2008) written by Clay Shirky he says that a groups complexity will grow faster than its size. By saying this I think that Shirky is inferring that by adding more people into the equation it is going to lead to more connections, making the scenario a more complex one. For example, if we had a group of four people, each person would have 4 different connections totalling 16, a group of 5 people would have 25 different connections, therefore showing that complexity will grow faster as more people are added to the group, and therefore creating more connections.

Within the book he identifies the problem of coordinating large is that due to the large size of the group, the group tends to waste more time on actually trying to maintain and structure itself to keep itself going; which in turn puts the actual aims of the group on the backburner, due to self preservation becoming number one priority.

He uses the example of Flickr as an example of showing how coordination of large groups is changing in the modern world. He says that, Flickr has provided a platform for users to aggregate photos themselves with minimal complications. As long as the user is aware of how to work flickr through the use of ‘tags’ then it would allow for all similar pictures to be organised into the same location. You would simply tag a photo, for example after the London Transport Bombings, some photos taken by evacuees where the first ones published of the devastation; in which they would have tagged, ‘London’ ‘Transport’ ‘Bombings’ grouping all similar photos together, without the need for someone to manually organise it.

The photos taken by these evacuees beat many traditional news outlets at spreading the news of the bombings. Not only that the photos were used for other reasons such as: providing evidence, providing photos of official notices, notes published in schools, messages of support from the rest of the world; and not forgetting it allowed usage by bloggers to reuse and talk about the bombings – “creating a symbiotic relationship between various social tools”.

What pisses you off?

In my first lecture back I was told to blog about what pisses me off, what really grinds my buttons and makes me angry.

I’m not a very angry person, but today, Student Finance have made me high rate and I thought this may be a good opportunity to let it all out and vent.

So, what pisses you off in Social Care?

For me, its the whole issue of accountability, alongside the negative media that the profession gets.

Take for example, the rise in number of cases that we hear of now relating to child abuse. Be it victims that are just coming forward now because they felt that they didn’t have the support to come forward, or did come forward, but weren’t taken seriously or cases that have been dropped by the police force for various reasons. It’s just disgusting.

An article released by the Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/14/greater-manchester-police-failed-pursue-child-abuse-gangs, describes an incident in Manchester where Police, a group in society that we are meant to have trust in, tried to cover up the fact that they had failed to tackle gangs who where abusing young women. If we can’t have trust and have faith in the Police then who are we to turn to? I understand that the article also goes on to say that,

Rochdale Safeguarding Children Board highlighted failures by 17 agencies, including GMP, who failed girls who were “passed around for sex.” (The Guardian, 2014: Online)

Which begs the question, who is accountable? How did 17 agencies that were probably meant to be working together fail to identify 1,400 children that were being subjected to sexual exploitation?

As a Social Care student it angers me to read stuff like this because it paints a bad picture of the social care profession, alongside other once respected professions, such as the police. It came out in that report that the deputy director of the Children’s Services at the time was on £130,000 a year? And for what?

It seems to me that people aren’t doing their jobs, and by the looks of it just sweeping the big issues under the carpet to save themselves a bit of stress and hassle.

I know the media have the right to keep on exposing incidents like these, and rightly so they should as it may help to prevent these reoccurring; but I do believe that they should also start on reporting the good in the world, because the more I read the more I lose faith and I want to go into the caring profession! If that’s my thoughts than I wonder how many other people feel similar?

Here we go again

So I decided that I would have another go at this blogging lark, seen as though my first attempt was pretty pitiful.

I’ve never really understood what blogs were all about so didn’t really see the pupose of me doing one, so I kind of created one quickly the other day with little thought and felt relieved that that was something I could check off my Uni ‘To Do’ checklist.

Bored at work today, I decided to take another look at it and realised that if this was Facebook or Twitter I could be more willing to do it and put my time and effort into it, because you see them Social Media sites as a way of representing yourself. So, I thought, instead of associating WordPress with University, lets try and put my personality into it.

I first began by looking at a few other blogs and seeing how they were written. Finding that some were written more academically but lots were written in a more informal way made me feel a million times better. The thing is, were are never really encouraged to write much, the older I’ve gotten, the less I tend to write, and to be honest I felt afraid about the concept of writing but I am going to reflect on my findings through the use of my blog in an informal way.

See, life has changed now. Ann Frank wrote a diary…nowadays most people share their daily lives openly through the use of Social Media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The reality is that things like these are shaping us and having an effect on our lives, and I am going to try and use my blog to look at how this is happening.

My First Blogging Experience #SCARY

I’m not really sure what to write, where to start or how to start but firstly I think I should begin by introducing myself to you.

My name is Amy-Leigh. I’m a Level Six student at Manchester Metropolitan University, studying for a BA in Social Care. For one of my units I am studying Communication, Activism and Social Change and my lecturer, Clive, said it would be a good idea to start our own blogs and begin getting to grips and utilizing the web…so here I am and this is my first post! Woohooo!

I will be using my blog, as an informal way to document things that I have learned throughout my final year at University; focusing mainly on themes around Communication, Activism and Social Change and sharing it with others who might be interested too!