Open Engineering Design

Competition vs. Open Collaboration

From time to time I like to check in and see what's going on in the world of crowd sourcing.  I make sure to visit pioneering sites like Kluster and Innocentive when I do.  A few days ago, I discovered a drastic change to the Kluster site along with a video from founder Ben Kaufman explaining that Kluster is going to try something different,  a new business model of some kind.  Implying, I suppose, that the old one was not working out.

ProtoForge, fortunately, is not subject in any way to investors, cash flow, or anything of the sort.  To this date, not a penny has been spent or made on the site and the site is hosted on well supported hardware and software with very stable, fast internet connections.  Because of this ProtoForge is not going away any time soon.

So after seeing Ben's video, I got to thinking...  Open Collaboration is not about business models.  Much to its credit, capitalism is based on the idea of personal property (including intellectual property).  By far this is the most effective way for providing for every day things: automobiles, candy bars, houses, deodorant...  Kluster was competing with an industry that already has many paths for fostering innovation with the possibility of great reward.  The incentive to develop ideas in the existing framework of angel investors, corporate investment, venture capitalists, and so on... is quite a bit higher than the incentive that can be offered on a website, where, by its very nature, intellectual property becomes immediately public.

So one must ask, where is it that massive, public collaboration can be most useful in an already efficient market economy?  The answer lies in those things that are very high risk with seemingly low return on investment and perhaps also in those things that are dominated by monopoly or entrenched traditional practices.  Things where no one is willing to do the work for fear of failure, financial loss or public embarrassment.  This is why many of the very big things you find in a capitalist society are usually supported in some way or another by big government, in order to reduce the risk to investors (baseball stadiums, highways, museums, public transportation, space programs, etc...).  These are things which are high effort with poor or intangible financial returns on investment and yet we feel they are important enough, sometimes in unexplainable and complicated ways, such that we all pitch in to make them happen anyway.

A word should be said here about the nature of competition and open collaboration.  Competition is very resource intensive.  Many companies spending similar amounts of money in attempts to develop similar products in order to gain as much market share as possible.  Many of those companies losing their entire investment along the way.  This is a very expensive way to achieve a goal and therefore only goals with very high returns get pursued and only companies with large, existing resource pools tend to pursue them.  For efforts with low tangible return on investment it becomes desirable to minimize the expenditure of time and resources consumed in obtaining the goal since the return is not likely going to make up for the investment.  The implementation of volunteer time and donated resources encourages minimum expenditure and maximizes the usefulness of open collaboration.  The absence of competition in high risk, low return endeavors means that the speed of development is not important to the overall success of the project.  We now see that neither collaboration nor competition is always the most desirable path for achieving a goal but that it depends in large part on the perceived return on investment.

The volunteer-time, donated-resource, zero-profit, absolutely-open model is the only way to overcome the cultural barriers to massive, open, online collaboration.  People are so used to competitive enterprise in their every day lives that anything less than purely zero-profit and completely-open gives rise to suspicion.  When the donation mechanism gets developed for ProtoForge it will be completely open with all financial transactions being available for public browsing.  The only exception to transparent finances will be that monetary donations can be made anonymously but the amount and recipient of those donations will still be public.

All of this being said, the zero-profit model for massive, organized, collaborative decision making and prototype system development is not meant to replace or compete with any existing systems of human interaction (read as "don't quit your day job, we still need deodorant").  It is instead meant to provide an additional way that people can organize in order to attempt to tackle very high risk, low return ventures that might not get tackled otherwise.  In the same way that governments invest pooled resources to advance the common good in often intangible and unmeasurable ways, online and open collaboration can act in a similar fashion while providing a creative outlet and enjoyable hobby for everyone involved.

Posted at 10:26PM May 20, 2008 by Aaron Schultz in General  |  Comments[2]