Invitations and Becomings

Inspired by his comment on this interesting piece by John Quiggin, I've been reading some of Jed Harris' posts on his Anomalous Presumptions blog [1,2] about the significance of the rise of peer production.

Two points stand out:

1. The rise of peer production is the consequence of an historic split between the interests of Capitalists (seeking a return on ownership) and those of Entrepreneurs (seeking to create a self-sufficient entity of some social value - e.g. an institution). This is historic because, while we call our free market economy "capitalism", capital is just one factor of production, and given the financial system collapse, it's becoming much easier to imagine exploring other means of allocating resources other than through capital markets.
2. Peer production becomes inevitable when the cost of coordinated production falls low enough not to require initial capital investment. Harris also points out that, at around this point, the cost of enforcing a particular sort of coordination -  through monetary incentives or contractual arrangements - starts to seem excessive, and a potential impediment to creativity and innovation.

I think I may have found a new tool for developing the idea of an Intranet Sociology that has been floating around with me since April.

As I suggested in my previous post, it's easy to treat email and wikis as competitor technologies, especially if you're a wiki evangelist, but this is isn't the best option. The real challenge is to capture knowledge that is being shared successfully through email, i.e. when you wouldn't want to get rid of the email list, but want to capture the knowledge. In light of the interesting responses I got on LinkedIn and here, I now think there are two parts to this.

One by-product of a recent debate about email's compatibility or incompatibility with wikis is that we can begin to understand not only weaknesses as a medium of collaboration, but also its strengths.

It's just after five, and I've been lying in bed for the last couple of hours with ideas running through my head about the possibility of writing a radical sociology of intranets. Let me start to sketch what I have in mind...