We are Smarter than Me -- Can a Community Write a Book?

It's not very often I get excited reading my email, especially when it's in response to another LinkedIn request.  The latter is usually followed by a groan, but this morning a colleague of mine forwarded a note inviting me to collaborate on a book. (We are Smarter than Me -- Can a Community Write a Book?)

*blink*

I've covered collaborative online authoring through my radio show before, and while it intrigues the hell out of me, there tends to be a common denominator at play:  I do lots of work/someone else makes lots of money.  "Open Source Business" is gaining real traction, and while I continue to actively participate in and value open source communities, I'm also increasingly frustrated by the trend for them to become exploitative sources of great personal investment and a grossly inequitable return.

First, let me tell you what I mean when I say "open source business".  Most people are familiar with the notion of "open source" in the context of software.  I wrote one of the first postcard scripts on the web many years ago and chose to release it in the public domain right from the start.  I had a lot of people ask me why I didn't simply sell it, because at the time it was still a concept that was fairly unique.  My answer was this: I was paying it forward.  The only reason I had been able to author that software in the first place was because people before me had created really wonderful online communities where I was able to tap into resources to learn, free of charge.  People like Eric Tachibana (Selena Sol) and Gunther Bierznieks put their own scripts out on the web, inviting people to download them, learn from them, improve them and share them back in the community.  I got so much personal value from participating there that I wanted to give something back.  Hence, putting my postcard script in the public domain.

It was a double-edged sword giving something away for free.  While it was cool to see it used by everyone from the City of Prague right down to NFL football teams, people came out of the woodwork, and many didn't only need but demanded support in a downright unfriendly way.  So, I set up forums using more code that I had written, and established a developers workbench to make it easier for this new little community to collaborate long before wikis made joint editing/publishing so easy.  That workbench ran for years, and while I never made a dime off of it, I gained something invaluable.  Not only did I make lifelong friends and connections with people that remain helpful to me to this day, I was also offered programming contracts, keynote speaking gigs, teaching contracts and a host of other tangible rewards for having shared my work.  The Developer's Workbench was an "open source business", in that many of us came together to co-author and share web-based scripts and resources.  It was a mutually beneficial open source business because no one got paid on the backs of the others, and almost everyone came away with a toolset that had some level of intrinsic value in our own work.

Not all open source businesses are fair.

In recent years I've become actively engaged in "the business of building a better world".  This is an example of where the lines start to grey.  The only thing worse than being a person with a bleeding heart and a mission is one with access to a community where they can endlessly invest themselves in it as a fulltime job without pay.

Huh?  Getting paid to make the world better?  I've got to be kidding ...

But I'm not.  It's what brought me to Second Life.  After spending several years participating in open source businesses online where the purpose was to tap into contacts, resources, know-how, talents and time, I was just plain burned out.  I was putting in fulltime hours for virtually no personal return.  Seems like an odd thing to say when you're there because you're "world changing", but when you find that you have a talent as a "bridge builder", and that this skill is invaluable to other people but not recognized as a "paid job", it's a problematic thing.  You don't expect people to be in the "business" of charities without pay.  Oxfam and the Alzheimers Society and the Make-a-Wish Foundation all have paid employees because those are businesses with recognized value and require a guaranteed fulltime and accountable commitment to continue to move ahead.  So why not better world scouts?  If the accidental business of acting in a more global way, collaborating on uplift across a broad spectrum of projects and issues globally, was as valuable as it seemed, why not look at ways of taking that new "open source business" and recognizing it in a way that both valued the investment of it's members while allowing them to keep food on their tables and a roof over their heads?

That led some of us to pilot an Open Source Business with a Better World twist ...

I arrived at Second Life and created a SIM called "Better World", a collaborative project that a number of colleagues had been noodling on for some time.  In order to pay the hefty bill for both it's purchase and ongoing maintenance, I started an inworld business, creating and selling virtual pianos, and selling some of my own real life music compositions.  The intention was to simply create a flow of revenue to support the island project until it became self-sustaining.  I wasn't prepared for it becoming a fulltime business on it's own.

In getting sick I let go of the island and was relieved to welcome a new shepherd for that project in Riversong Garden.  Since then, I've been able to work with her to share ideas about ways of making that kind of "open source business" -- the island as a collaborative community of people in the business of investing in a better world -- into something that is both self-sustaining, and that creates opportunities for it's members to be acknowledged as paid scouts.  This remains a work in progress, and one I hope we'll be lucky enough to get right, because it's something many of us have seen great value in.  There are people like Zeke Poutine who add tremendous value to so many better world projects without ever receiving a dime, and yet it's a fulltime calling for her, and one that she is very, very good at.  I see a great deal of value in having a mechanism in place that allows people like Riv and Zeke to effectively "leave their day jobs" and take up scouting as a fulltime, paid profession because of the way communities like Second Life pave the way to the creation of easier Open Source Businesses.  But that's another posting ~winks~ ...

So, back to this morning's invitation: another chance to participate in an open source business.  This time, it's to jointly author a book about the way that businesses are using social networks.  It's an insanely cool idea, and one I was excited about being asked to participate in ...

but ...

will the investment I'm required to make, uncompensated, be a wise use of my time?

Someone is going to profit from the final book.  This fact is acknowledged up front.  It won't be the people who contribute to it's contents.  The only thing that made me stop and consider this was the fact that those people who do choose to co-author will be given the chance to determine which charity a portion of the royalties will be paid to in lieu of personal pay.  This is a Very Bad Thing[tm], because when you're a bleeding heart, you'll say yes to a lot of things that are good to do, but maybe not a healthy personal choice if the time, energy and resources are not something you can afford to write-off.

Wanna collaborate in SL?

So, I'm looking, thinking.  I've signed up and am reading through the contents that have already been posted on the wiki, and while I'm still not certain if I will indeed contribute to this book, it's got me thinking about something else in the context of SL.  First of all, the book is an example of a "knowledge product", and this is in fact something I've spent a great deal of time talking about the past ten years in the context of ways that communities can turn their collective knowledge into a form of revenue.  I won't go off on this particular tangent right now, but I'll likely come back and share some thinking in a future post.

What I -am- thinking about right now is how this particular idea might be adapted to something else.  Baron and I have been wanting to have a coffeeshop/bookshop as part of the new SIM, inviting inworld authors to share their own work there.  Ironic that I caught a posting by Saiyge this morning where she was talking about her own musings about finding a way to earn a living off of her writing in Second Life.  The "We are Smarter than Me" project got me thinking: what if we were to use something like Basecamp (Baron and I use this now to organize our inworld businesses) and the "writeboards" (simply wikis) to invite people to collaborate on a community book of some sort?  Poetry, building know-how, photography, whatever.

Seems like a simple way of testing collaborative authoring, and it would be fun to find out just how lucrative this sort of open source business might be, not for one person or group, but for everyone who collaborated.

If enough people are interested, I'll open up a space at our Basecamp to invite collaboration around a test book.  Baron and I have been talking a lot about wanting to cultivate a group of professional communities around technology and various arts inworld.  This seems like perhaps a cool and simple place to start.

So, consider yourself invited!

Who's game?