The Cornucopia of the Commons

Cory Doctorow called it "sheep that shit grass" -- when acts of self-interest benefit the commons

The thing that defines peer-to-peer, I think, is the degree to which the power of the technology depends on Metcalfe’s Law. In the end, a word processing program is only a word processing program whether you’re the only user or the millionth user; its utility doesn’t change. Napster is not Napster if you’re the only user. Napster is nothing more than a folder full of MP3s if you’re the only user. Napster doesn’t tell you to share your files, but the system is arranged so that the files you have plundered are available for others to plunder during the time you have the software running so that you can plunder more files. The problem is congestion; the more users you have, the [80] harder your network is to connect to. What a peer-to-peer network can do is provide a commons where the sheep shit grass, where every user provisions the resource he consumes.

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. NY: Perseus, 2002. pp. 79-80.

Tim O'Reilly called it "the architecture of participation" when the design of online media make it easy for acts of self-interest to enhance the commons (e.g., when downloading music from peer folders in Napster made the downloader's folder available to others to download).

Open source coders call it "scratching an itch."

Source: Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, Andy Oram (ed.)
Pub: O'Reilly and Associates, Inc.
Publication Date: March 2001
URL: http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm

Authors:

Bricklin, Dan

Findings:

Users must want to use the shared repository, i.e. it should contain things that are of value to them.
Adding to the commons must be a "a natural by-product of the user's work" i.e. users should be "adding to the value of the database without doing any extra work."
Sharing should be the default.

One Sentence:

One Paragraph:

Dan Bricklin examines ways to induce a pool of users to contribute to a commons without extra effort, using the architecture of the commons (as in Napster's default to sharing in the way download directories are available) and leveraging user's self-interest. The key to understanding the success of Napster and other file-sharing technologies resides not in their 'peer-to-peer' nature but in the fact that they provide users with access to a database of desirable things and enable people to create a public good in the process of seeking their own interests.

One Page:

Bricklin identifies three ways to fill a database: organized manual, organized mechanical, and volunteer manual.

CDDB succeeded at motivating volunteer manual data entry because it leveraged the desire for users to have their data in the database so that CDDB-aware programs could access it, for example when a user would insert a CD into their computer.

Bricklin calls this "harnessing the power of individual selfishness."

Napster cleverly avoided manual data entry by automatically indexing anything in the user's 'Shared Music' directory. Thus "storing the copy in the shared music directory [was] a natural by-product of the user's work with the songs."

Sharing is the default. This results in users "adding to the value of the database without doing any extra work."