ZenPundit
Thursday, November 08, 2007
 
OPEN-SOURCE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD



One of the more significant developments in terms of creativity in the past decade has been the advance of open-source platforms that permit asynchronous but real-time, mass collaboration to occur. A phenomena that has been the subject of recent books like Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect and Wikinomics:How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams; or, become a functioning business model as with Ross Mayfield's Socialtext; or, a metaphor for the evolution of a new dynamic of warfare, as in John Robb's book, Brave New War. And nearly everyone with an ISP is familiar with Wikipedia and most have at least heard of Linux.

The open source concept is a very useful one because it has efficiency, in both the evolutionary and economic senses, adapting faster than closed, hierarchical, competitors and at lower transactional cost ( the price for these advantages is diminished control and focus). As with scale-free networks, it was the advent of the internet and the web that brought the potential of mass collaboration to the attention of economists and social scientists. But did mass collaboration on the cognitive level (the physical level is as old Stonehenge or the pyramids) only start with the information revolution ?

Probably not.

If we look back far enough in the history of great civilizations, you will find semi-mythological figures like Homer or Confucius to whom great, even foundational, works of cultural creativity are attributed. Intellects of a heroic scale who were philosophers and kings, lawgivers, prophets or poets and who produced works of timeless genius. Except that they may either not have existed or their works represent efforts of refinement by many generations of anonymous disciples ( eventually, scholars) who interpreted, polished, redacted and expanded on the teachings of the revered master.

This too was mass collaboration, over a much longer time scale and of a much more opaque character than Wikipedia. Scriptural works went through a similar process, whether it was the scribes of King James, or a medieval Ulemna favoring some teachings of the Hadith over others, or Jewish sages translating the Torah into Greek, despite occasional claims of divine inerrancy, most religious texts were shaped by a succession of human hands.

What the Web has done is to vastly accelerate and democratize the process of mass collaboration and render it more transparent than ever before.

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Comments:
Zen,
I have been reading your blog ever since finding you on Tom Barnett's site. I want to comment that this post, for a historian like me is right on. I think one of the byproducts of open-source platform has been the ability to look back into ancient times with even more clarity. Your post is a fine example of conecting the dots.
 
bless you for not saying 'Moses' among the semi-mythological to whom are attributed...

ahh! i said it! ;-)
 
Zen,

You've touched on a pet peeve of mine -- specifically, how so many of us ascribe some kind of "information revolution" to the Internet.

My view is that we are actually over 100 years into the 5th "Information Age". The Ages:

1st Info Age: Interpersonal (oral) communication, allowing social interaction and basic collaboration.
2nd Info Age: Information storage (e.g., cave paintings, Sumerian tablets) allowing a static record to be passed to posterity.
3rd Info Age: Portable information (Egyptian papyrus), allowing that static record to be easily shared with far-flung parties.
4th Info Age: Mass-produced information (specifically Gutenberg's movable type press), breaking the church monopoly on literacy and sowing the seeds of the middle class aristocracy.
5th Info Age: Freeing information from physical form (Sam Morse's telegraph, A.G. Bell's telephone, ARPAnet, etc.), allowing near-instantaneous transmission of information across great distances.

All we've really done today is enrich the bandwidth: the Internet is just a few orders of magnitude improvement over Roman signal towers. (O.K., maybe a few dozen orders of magnitude... :-)
 
Hi Historyguy99,

Thank you very much! That's a compliment coming from a professional historian. What is your area of research interest, if I may ask?

Hi Sean,

Heh. The Ten Commandments was a little too brief to serve as a good example. All of Mosaic Law, another story.

Hi Shane,

Thanks. You're right. It's been an ongoing historical process and each step raises the hackles of those who don't like the massess having access to the " dangerous" technology that will ruin society by letting the unwashed contest the opinions of their betters. Plato had, I think Thamus or Socrates condemning the spread of writing.

Having eats with your fellow director later this afternoon, along with Lexington Green and Mrs. Green.
 
In case you missed it, Wikinomics author Don Tapscott is working with Steve Papermaster and nGenera to implement the concepts of the book for Global 2000 companies. http://is.gd/cjx

Mike
www.everydotconnects.com
 
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