Changing the Way We Organize

May 25, 2004

I don't think "social entreprenuership" is the answer. This suppossed happy medium between corporate greed and saintly selflessless-ness is actually just a facade for people to do whatever they wanted anyways. I have watched social entrepreneurs -- myself being one of them -- for a while, and the problem with us is that no matter what the middle path is externally, we still continue our selfless service or for-profit mentality internally. At best, you have a MIT guy dropping out of corporate America to start Greyston Bakery and give employment to the poor or SF's own Mimi Silbert who used ex-cons to build a $30MM business from a $1000 loan. Unfortunately, that only scratches the surface. They bring in some relief, which is great, but the problems will manifest again and again. As Einstein said, "you can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created". If we operate in and propagate the same constructs that created these problems in the first place, we won't get a cure.

If you follow that logic all the way, you are left with what the sages say-- find the source of all problems, within you. That's really where I'm going with this, but I'm not quite as far as the sages. My suggestion is to change the rules of the game by changing the way we organize.

Open source is called that because the collaboration is open to all and the final product is freely shared. Open source harnesses the distributive powers of the Internet, parcels the work out to thousands, and uses their piecework to build a better whole. It works like an ant colony, where the collective intelligence of the network supersedes any single contributor.

First, we need to move to the ant colony model, leveraging the distributive power of the web. Not just open-source software, but open-source all content. Change our copyright laws, as in Lessig's Creative Commons. I am working with some non-violence educators who want to build peace curriculum for our educational system; my pitch to them is to build an online collaborative model, even beyond OpenCourseWare.

And that's one level. We are now in position to ante up another notch because of what the web really offers.

Let's think about space. (David Weinberger is actually the one who has really thought about it for a long time!) We typically carry two different conceptions of space -- lived space and measured space. One one hand, there's the space we walk in, filled with tangible things like houses, trees and bicycles. On the other hand, there's the space we measure with odomoters, yardsticks and surveying-equipment rulers. We invented measured space because of its utility and we built a "grid" around it. Everything fits into this grid.

Now, enter the web. The Web is a space, but it isn't capable of supporting a gridwork. There can't be an overlay of equally distant points because the Web is a space without distance, at least not in the usual sense. The Web space is composed of pages and sites that are located relative to one another but not in an abstract spatial grid. It's a special kind of a place, this Web. :)

The most significant difference is this-- in the real-world space is a preexisting container in which the things of the world exist but web space is created by the things in it. Web space isn't a container waiting to be filled but is more like a book that's being written. The web is infinite and actively holds itself together. If I write a page, it become part of the web as people links to it; ie. through billions of acts of will, the Web is constructed and expanded. Newton's idea was the container idea but now quantam physics tells us that matter of the universe creates the space it's in, and thus the question of what lies beyond the universe is an absurd one. There is no "outside" for the web and there is no nature, since everything is artificial, a representation of our consciousness.

We usually think of space as a passive container: what you put inside doesn't change space, and space doesn't change what you put inside. Within this space, places are themselves containers, within which lie things that are self-contained. Web space, on the other hand, is build not around things with neat edges but things that point beyond themselves. Links are all that holds the Web together; without links, there is no Web. The top ten sites are always dominated by search sites that get their value -- often valued at multi billion dollars -- by pointing away from themselves. Because the linked pages come from many people, Web space turns into a space larger than us.

Because Web space is linked, dynamic, poorly edged and explosive, organizations have to teach themselves new lessons and constantly evolve. In the real-world, you use the inconvenience of space to keep customers -- buy straight from your shelves instead of walking around to do comparision shopping. The web, finally, isn't about inconvenience but interest. We travel web space by reading. If you want buyers, users, consumers, to stick with you, you better write interesting stuff, write stuff that the universe wants. If it's not useful, it will die, as it should. What holds the Web together isn't a carpet of rocks but the world's collective interests.

Now consider documents. In the "real world", documents are unique originals, high-value, unchanging, and an unusual class of writing. But in the "web world", docuemnts are perfectly copy-able, very trivial (your todo list is a document), they are changed all the time, and they are found everywhere. With normal paper documents, we read them, file them, throw them out, or send them to someone else. We do not go to them. We don't visit them. Web documents are different. They're places on the web and distance is measured by links. Web has created a weird amalgam of documents and buildings.

So, forget social entreprneurship ... what does it to mean to be an entrepreneur in this space that is inevitably going to change the world? Webster calls entreprenuer as: a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk for a business venture. In a web space that is infinite, inherently selfless, governed by our collective interests, and uncontrolled by grids, where we travel to documents instead of buildings, what does it really mean to organize?

I will answer that another time, as and when I get some more time. :) Or just keep watching CharityFocus. ;) If I ever get to it, I want to write a paper on the parallels of nature, web and spirituality.