Archimedes' Lever

[Mazer]

Multi, I saw one of the articles you posted over at P2PC about the peermog idea. Following some of the links on the page eventually led me to a guy named David Galiel who wrote this article on the subject of online communities and virtual worlds. For someone who's never really been involved in P2P he has a great understanding of the social aspects some of us have sought since Napster croaked.

We have all heard of Open Source software. Its ubiquity, less often noted, is remarkable:

• 69% of all Web sites run on Apache software (as compared to Microsoft's 23%)
• 30% of the servers on which those sites run use the Linux operating system (Microsoft has 50% of the market, but Linux use is growing much faster, at about 50% annual growth rate according to IDC's Q3 2003 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker)
• 88% of Secure Shell (SSH) implementations, used to connect securely to remote computers over the Internet, are OpenSSH, up from 5% in 2000 and 50% in 2001.
• A February, 2004 Forrester Research survey found that almost 50% of businesses questioned already use open source software.

There are many other examples. Most significantly, according to CMP TSG/Insight, 41% of all development tools used are open source. Thus, open source serves as its own network-enabled bootstrapping technology.

P2P as a social concept has been around since the Internet was born and file sharing is simply the most recently added feature. Open Source software engineering is also an old idea but has picked up a lot of momentum. As a younger generation has been initiated into this already well established social sphere they've bestowed it with mass appeal, making it more accessible to everybody else. Filesharing and Open Source aren't new threats to old industries, they are incrimental improvements on a concept that has been brewing for decades.

Open Source software, however, is only one, and not even the most significant, manifestation of what Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler calls "commons-based peer production," a networked model of economic production that is not organized in either markets or businesses—as virtually all other economic activity is and always has been in capitalist societies. Peer production on the Internet has enabled distributed masses of people to share open production of complex products and services, largely for no financial compensation.

While the idea of non-market, non-corporate production is not new—science has traditionally worked this way—large-scale, decentralized, sustained open production by diverse groups of peers on a wide variety of focused projects is a new phenomenon that has been enabled and encouraged by the confluence of computers, networking, and the information economy.

Currently Galiel is working on an online community that will eventually become a full scale simulation of the future colonization of Mars, it's called 'Mars First!' It will be a 3D MMOPG in which inhabitants of Mars will found cities on the site of their choosing (they'll have the entire globe to choose from), draft laws for the citizens of these new communities, conduct scientific experements and civil engineering projects, and interact with other cities around the planet economically. Mars First! aims to educate people, mostly students, in each of these aspects in a future world with its own storyline, and it's being funded by the non-profit Public Interest Entertainment Corporation.

But here on Earth, Napsterites and other P2P users will be setting up online communities like NU and P2PC, eventually migrating to specialized software that suits our purposes nicely, combining basic filesharing with social tools that until now only bulletin boards and IRC channels could manage. We won't be the only ones doing it, simply the newest group to try in a history of online society that stretches back a quarter century.

Link