Page:The digital public domain.pdf/42

Rh in social and networked peer production that is highly generative, because it is modular, granular and inexpensive to integrate the results. At the first Communia workshop, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh explored the need to protect and foster open standard in the research community worldwide, to best embrace the collaborative networked projects. Ghosh noted that “our technology future will be based on collaborative, open projects of such large scale that global policies and regulations will become more ﬂexible to meet the needs of every stakeholder involved”.

A great deal of attention has been paid by Communia to sharing and networked peer collaboration in education and research, especially at the second and eighth Communia conferences. In particular, at the second Communia conference, Jerome H. Reichman, a member of the Communia Advisory Committee, discussed the introduction of a contractually reconstructed commons via the ex ante acceptance of liability rules to promote the exchange of materials in a globally distributed and digitally integrated research commons. At the same conference, Uhlir proposed a model of open knowledge environments (OKEs) for digitally networked scientific communication. OKEs would “bring the scholarly communication function back into the universities” through “the development of interactive portals focused on knowledge production and on collaborative research and educational opportunities in specific thematic areas”.

However, the revolution is far more massive and distributed than collaboration in education and research. Technological change has brought about cultural change, because the audience has become an active participant in its own culture. Open networks and networked peer collaboration have transformed markets by enabling amateurs to innovate. Individual experimentation, sub-cultures, and a community of social trust have created Linux, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, and major political websites. Flexibility, decentralisation, cooperative creation, and customisation out-performed corporate bureaucracies unwilling to experiment because it was thought to be too risky and costly. Moreover, new models of decentralised and cooperative creation out-perform themselves, as it