The SA Free Culture tour: learning from communities
The iCommons staff are back in their green-walled office in Jozi after a whirlwind SA Free Culture tour in Cape Town last week. In honour of Larry and Jimmy’s visit, the iCommons worker bees took a break from the Skype meetings, the e-mail back-and-forths and the iSummit registration system, and swapped our monitor tan for the real deal. Yes, for a short while we stepped away from our laptops and our ‘virtual’ community with whom we interact everyday, and took to the streets of Cape Town, to find a very different kind of community, but none the less ‘ a community, that we could talk to, laugh with, and party with, in real life, without having to press an ‘enter’ button.
Now this is not to say our online interactions are not appreciated ‘ without our community and the technology that glues us together, we would not be able to do even half of what we do - but let’s face the fact that at the end of the day, meeting in person is a type of ‘Prodigal Son’ experience. I suppose this is why the iCommons Summit is the highlight of our commons efforts every year. In fact ‘community’ is what we here at iCommons, are all about. That’s why the presentations at the Digital Freedom Expo were of such interest to us ‘ we could find out more about the workings of other communities around the world.
For example (Jimmy Wales pointed this out in his presentation), did you know that from 5 December 2005, 13 922 articles have been added to the Wikia project, ‘Muppet wiki‘? That’s a whole lot of enthusiasts devoted to contributing to the wealth of knowledge about Muppets. As Jimmy said, the strength of Wikipedia is invested in the communities who contribute to them, not necessarily the technology. The benefit here is in the social interaction or process. And when it comes to a whole lot of people interacting on such a huge platform, the key to success is trust. Jimmy commented that he needs to hold on to the assumption that most people want to be helpful, and based on that assumption, and through this culture of trust, a strong community bond can be created, as is evident through Wikipedia’s success.
Talking about community building, though with many more facts and figures, and graphs, was Rishab Ghosh who presented his findings on the economics of open source software, based on the paper titled the ‘Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU“. Rishab had a huge amount of information to present, thankfully the paper can be downloaded for more detailed reading, but there were two interesting points he made.
Firstly, through the study, Rishab found that the skills gained by being involved in FOSS projects could compensate for the lack of a formal degree or training, as employers highly valued the skills acquired through the collaborative process integral to this community where one learns by doing, such as mastering how to work in a team, and management skills. This is an interesting observation, as we see that people too are at the heart of sharing information in FOSS projects, and that this community is seen as a place for learning and developing skills, and through this collaboration better training can take place that is, very importantly, valued by future employers.
Secondly, in terms of innovation, Rishab discovered that industry saves over 36% in software research and development investments. Rishab highlighted an interesting example of how Nokia saved ‘¬900 million on the development of the Nokia N770 by using an open source platform for these handheld devices, which are neither smart phones, nor laptops nor PDAs, but are ‘versatile wireless devices’. Nokia used the Maemo development platform, and as stated in the report: ‘the software is available to third parties under the FLOSS licenses corresponding to each package, and Nokia encourages others to use and improve it, expecting that it ‘will result in a feature rich, mature and well-supported software base that could evolve as a de-facto standard for Linux handheld via the open source process.'’
Nokia used the power of collaboration to launch a product that was experimental and risky, it saved on research and development costs, but also focused on developing other innovations (such as a clear colour display, an important feature of the tablet) ‘ the device was a hit and sold out quickly in the US and Europe. And that’s thanks to a huge amount of individuals, organisations and companies who came to the party - numbers revealed if Nokia had undertaken this project on their own, internally, it would have taken under 12 000 person years to develop. It may seems that Nokia is the only winner in this example, or maybe not? As was explained in the report, Nokia’s contributions on Maemo have now also benefited other FLOSS users ‘ especially in areas where Nokia has expertise, such as Linux Bluetooth functionality. Rishab’s example is also a very important one as it shows how FLOSS is being used as a Research and Development substitution mechanism.
So, in both the Wikipedia and FLOSS communities, it’s a matter of share and share-alike, but most importantly, for the benefit of research, development, and human knowledge. Back to the streets of Cape Town, we were overwhelmed with the support at our Bring ‘n Braai ccSalon at the Armchair Theatre. It was fantastic to meet the people who are part of the iCommons community on a local level, perhaps some day soon there will be studies done on how we interact and get projects done. In the meantime, let’s keep sharing our stories through this website, let’s keep chatting through e-mails and Skype conversations, and let’s keep hitting that ‘enter’ button to build a stronger community based on trust, in the pursuit of free knowledge, culture and education.
Photographs:
Larry and Heather at the Digital Freedom Expo, by Lucio K, CC BY 2.5
Jimmy Wales at the Digital Freedom Expo, JC Bukenya, CC BY 2.5
Some of the iCommons staff members at the Digital Freedom Expo, by Lucio K, CC BY 2.5