James Surowiecki spoke on Openness as an Ethos Monday at the conference, The Economics of Open Content (Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 23-24, 2006). Mary Hodder blogged some notes on his talk. Excerpt:
2. [With openness] intelligence is distributed rather than centralized: the knowledge is spread out in many locations.... 4. We are better off casting wide rather than narrow -- don"t know where the info is much of the time 5. Open access to creativity, knowledge -- benefits are greater the more people are involved -- when people learn more, we learn more.. it"s anti-rivalrous 6. Be very hesitant to filter who belongs to community -- don"t keep people out 7. People act better the more info they have....
11. Systems that allow people to give ideas and innovation a piece at a time are interesting, because lots of people contribute. Prediction markets and prices work this way.
12. Can profit from an open content system.. leave everything open and free and then make money from talking about this stuff.
13. People find pleasure from the value of competition -- from contributing to the growth of the pool of knowledge
14. Many of these systems are inefficient, because in a strict sense, they are redundant, but the point is that even though this is the case, if we expand our ideas of efficiency, it"s tremendously efficient....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
