Sharing is caring, the adage of social media goes. But, what happens when people use social media for learning or creative purposes? How is sharing information, ideas, and knowledge best done if you want to rely on online communities?
These are questions the American author Clay Shirky touches upon in his work. His two books, Here Comes Everybody (2008) and Cognitive Surplus (2011), discuss the potential that online tools have for reshaping and reinventing the ways we organise societies. Below is a quote from Here Comes Everybody in which Shirky describes the advantages of collaboration without coordination:
“[Flickr] didn’t identify the Mermaid Parade as an interesting event, nor did it coordinate parade photographers or identify parade photographs. What it did instead was to let the users label (or tag) their photos as a way of arranging them. […] The distinction between Flickr coordinating users versus helping them coordinate themselves seems minor, but it is in fact vital, as it is the only way Flickr can bear the costs involved.”
In short, Shirky argues that social media lighten the burden of organising and coordinating, and empower masses by offering them the tools to organise themselves. In his most recent TED-talk, he develops this argument further. To do so, he uses the example of GitHub, an online community for computer programmers.
GitHub is the social network for programming that has emerged out of Git, a source control management system created by Linux-founder Linus Torvalds. Git and GitHub are based on the open-source principle. The term “open source” implies that everyone has access to all documents. In the case of software development projects, this is tricky. Even the slightest alteration to a piece of code can cause major disruptions. So, the classic solution for the management of these documents is a system in which only those at the top of the work chart have permission to implement changes. “It’s not hard to see the political ramifications of this systems,” says Shirky. “It’s feudalism.”
At GitHub every member has access to everything. Its principle is cooperation without coordination. Each change made by users is labeled; this allows for version tracking without version management. The inevitable chaos is fruitful, because the resources that this worldwide community draws from are much vaster than they would be with conventional project management.
Shirky compares GitHub to the first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions. Founded in 1662 by members of the Royal Society in England, Philosophical Transactions was the first peer-reviewed journal. It was meant to disseminate new scientific knowledge and describe the setup of experiments. The most important requirements were pace and transparency. All experiments were to be described in detail, and publication needed to be quick in order to be in tune with other researchers’ activities. “The book was too slow,” Shirky explains, “which is why they invented the journal.”
The comparison is useful to a certain extent, because it shows how changes never happen because of a medium. They happen because of what people decide to do with a medium. Interestingly however, the Royal Society was far from open and transparent in its politics. Their website states that “from the beginning, Fellows of the Society had to be elected, although the criteria for election were vague and the vast majority of the Fellowship were not professional scientists.” So the Royal Society was not only aimed at an open exchange of knowledge. It was also an elitist group that people joined because of their affluence, class, and social standing. As such, Shirky could have chosen a better comparison.
But his argument that open source projects bring along huge advantages is interesting. He states that open source could have enormous potential for a citizen-led development of legislation. If online communities could write law proposals together through GitHub, its version tracking functionality will make its shaping process not only manageable, but entirely transparent as well. Whether realistic or not, Shirky’s utopian dream deserves some attention, if only because of the tribute it pays to the principle of democracy.
