 Jimmy really does need no introduction. Talk about people who need no introduction and who have come in a very short time to personify a state of being. A state of being that 10 years ago would have been thought of as a quirky, largely pinco ideal. And now tends to describe the lives of, I don't know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, probably tens of millions at least, around the world. Sorry? I'm still quirky though. You're still quirky. No, no, it's nothing personal. I'm not talking about you, just the symbol. And so it's really remarkable to be able to have this conversation with him and to have him and what he stands for and how he thinks be part of this celebration. Jimmy? A few slides, we had discussed this whole on off thing with technology still escapes me, so. Yeah, so we, I just have a few slides really to frame certain remarks that really are inspired by Yochai's concept for what we should discuss here today. But I also, of course, I saw Jay-Z speak about the early days of Wikipedia this morning and I've seen him speak about it before and he is absolutely right about one thing. This idea back in 2001 to say, I'm gonna open up a website, I'm gonna let anybody edit it at any time and it's gonna become the world's largest and most relied upon reference work sounds completely crazy. So the first thing is, as Jay-Z puts it, this is a really crazy idea. The whole concept of Wikis, the whole concept of Wikipedia is really counter-intuitive. And I actually think that the counter-intuitiveness of it is actually increased for those of us who are on the internet for quite a long time because I think there were a lot of mistakes made in what I call the early social design of the internet. The idea that we had, and this came out in the media a lot and there was actually a lot of truth to it when the internet first became popularized, was this idea that the internet is this inherently very hostile, angry place. There's flame wars everywhere. It can be just a complete sewer and the classic poster child for this was the unmoderated Usenet Group. The Usenet Groups were, it's particularly the unmoderated hierarchies were not just unmoderated but in a very practical way they were unmoderatable. It was really, really difficult for anybody to control what was going on there. It was really difficult to exclude people for bad behavior. When spam was invented and the unmoderated Usenet Group started getting tons and tons of spam, there are actually people who went out and started trying to kill the spam in some ways violating some of the rules. I mean it was a little bit controversial that they would send out these cancel messages, forged cancel messages that very quickly were accepted as socially okay because they were forged for a good cause. But it was a pretty hopeless task. The design of the system was such that it just really couldn't be moderated. So there were really low barriers to entry. I mean it was really easy to get on Usenet and post. You just run a command and start posting and so forth and this led to early popularity but the same low barriers to entry also led to destruction. Spam, trolls, flame wars. It got to be a pretty nightmarish environment and still exists today. Although, and I don't know if the volume is actually increased or decreased but I'm pretty sure the volume of anything other than spam has decreased quite a bit. And so when you have that kind of a background, when you come from that world of the internet where you just see the worst in people brought out by software that's designed in such a fat way that the community has really no serious means of being able to self-regulate, to be able to moderate, you really get this idea that your only choice is really sort of top down police state where people are only allowed to do certain things or it's just gonna be a bloodbath. It's just gonna be completely insane people screaming at each other and bring out the worst in everybody. And I think almost everybody who's been on the internet has at one time in their life been involved in a flame war which you later found to be embarrassing. Maybe you didn't do anything particularly embarrassing but you're embarrassed that you even bothered to waste your time arguing with such an idiot. Very common. So the idea that anyone could edit anything at any time made it very obvious, and this is the idea of use net, that it was pretty obvious at that time that most people are horrible and that the internet makes them worse. This is kind of the social view that lots of people had and not entirely without good reason at that time. And so something like Wikipedia is therefore impossible. So I give a lot of talks to technology crowds and to people who are doing design of social spaces online. And one of the things that I've learned and that I try to talk about a lot is this analogy of a restaurant. So imagine that you've been given the task of designing a restaurant. And so you think to yourself, okay, in this restaurant, we're going to be serving steak. And since we're serving steak in the restaurant, the customers are going to have access to knives. And the one thing, see one person laughs, part's supposed to be funny and everybody's all grim today. It's because I'm following Jay-Z who's like the funniest guy around. So that there are knives. And the one thing that we know about people with knives is that they might stab people. And so therefore we'd better keep everybody in a cage. Like this is the way we need to design our social spaces. Everything needs to be locked down. We need to make sure that people can't harm each other. Well, if we think about this and if we think about this as a way of designing restaurants, this makes a bad society. This is not the kind of society we want to live in. This is not the view of human nature that we want to have. And it's a view of human nature that we mostly avoid except at the airport where it is sort of viewed that if you had a knife, you might stab someone. And it's kind of an unpleasant experience to get in and out of the airport because of not just because of the inconvenience but also because of this feeling of, gee, you know, I've been a peaceful person all my life and I'm just trying to go visit my grandma and I'm treated more or less like a criminal. And it's kind of upsetting. And we definitely don't want that spread throughout all of society where we have that. It's a very unpleasant kind of way of living. But this is exactly what we often have on the internet. We often have this idea that the only way to design a healthy social spaces is to have lots and lots of controls and top-down management and that this is the only way it could work. Well, it turns out this is not true, right? It turns out when we look at something like Wikipedia, you can have a very, very open system, a very fluid system, much like the system that we have for restaurants or for going into conferences where you more or less trust other people. They're gonna mostly behave. And if they don't, well, we have social institutions to deal with it. So if somebody does, as they do occasionally, go crazy in a restaurant and start stabbing people, well, we call the police and we have them hauled off to jail. We call an ambulance and try to help the person who has been injured. And the same thing in Wikipedia. If somebody starts misbehaving, we have certain tools to deal with it. The community you call for an administrator and the administrator blocks their IP number for 24 hours or 48 hours or however long is necessary. We go into the history and we revert back to the previous version. So it's like the ambulance. We try to heal the damage that's been done. So this is something that actually works. But what I'm really interested in talking about today is something a little bit higher level than just the technology. The technology allows us to have a space where it's safe, where you can block the worst offenders, where you can actually fix things that have been broken. But I'm also very interested in the more broad question of how neutrality plays into this. So one of the oldest things we have at Wikipedia, probably the oldest thing is that what we call NPOV, neutral point of view is absolute and non-negotiable. This is a core value of the community, a core value of the project. And it's kind of one of your basic things that you really need to agree to before you can become a Wikipedia, right? The idea is an encyclopedia, it's not the job of an encyclopedia to take a stand on any controversial issue, but to rather step back and present all of the reasonable sides in a way that seems fair to everyone. And that lots of different people can agree on. So it works pretty well. Wikipedia is typically very neutral and it's actually, I think that the problems around neutrality are never where people think they're gonna be. The problems are in obscure topics that the only people who care about are the fans. So if you look up some articles on certain Japanese anime, it's not very critical. They don't take very critical view of it because the only people who even care are people who love the stuff, right? For your common really controversial topics, Wikipedia ends up being a place where people are able to come together and make a pretty decent statement of what the problem is. There's a couple reasons for this. One is this foundational policy, this idea that we have that's a core value in the community that you pretty much have to buy into to participate. But there's also the natural workings of the Wiki software. The idea, there's a certain mutually assured destruction in Wiki editing. So if you're a person who has a really hard agenda and you wanna come in and push your agenda, well as soon as you come in and you write your one-sided, very biased inflammatory piece, it's going to irritate someone and somebody's gonna change it. They're gonna change it possibly to the other bias. And pretty soon what you realize is that for your writing to survive, you have to write for the enemy. You have to basically say, look, I understand I have this very strong view on, let's say for example, abortion. I have a very strong view on abortion, but I understand that there are a lot of people out there who are good writers, who are gonna disagree with me. And so whatever I write about abortion, I have to write it in such a fashion that even the people who disagree with me can agree to the statement. So I can't write abortion is a mortal sin, but I can write that the Catholic Church's position on abortion is that it's a mortal sin. Okay, everyone can agree on that and it still gets out the fact or the information that I want people to know. So one of the things that I'm very interested in seeing is I'd like to see people brought together in groups and experimental models to deliberate in a wiki style. I think it's that there's a lot of interesting possible uses of technology to try to find better ways for groups to come to decisions, to help groups find better decisions. And well, that's an area for academic research. So I'm here at Harvard, so please someone research that for me. The last point that I wanted to make very briefly is that we are really strongly focused on consensus. So one of the things, one of the criticisms that you'll sometimes see about Wikipedia is that, well, Wikipedia is simply the majority rules, the majority view. Well, there are related criticisms you could make of the view that Wikipedia puts forward, but majority is not actually the right, is not the right way to describe it. At Wikipedia, we strive and sometimes successfully for consensus rather than a majority rule. And so why is that? What is the idea here? Well, if you're in a group of people, say five or 10 people is typical number who are working on a wiki article together, and you kind of look around the room and you see that you've got 70% of the people agreeing and 30% are disagreeing. Well, if it's all about voting in the end, you just dig in your heels right there because you've won. You're gonna have a super majority. You don't really have to take into account what the 30% think and you're able to ram through whatever it is that you want. But the truth is if you've got 30% of serious wikipedia, people are really diligently working in an article who are dissenting, there's almost certainly a real problem that that article could be improved. And so what we try to do is just continue rewriting until all but the most unreasonable can agree. Now, the problem with consensus as you get larger and larger is it becomes very hard to have unanimity. You never quite get to unanimity, but it turns out that you can get very, very broad consensus and the few who continue to disagree normally are exhibiting strange behavioral problems as well. And so what I mean by that is they're screaming at people, they're reverting, they're inserting curse words, they're insulting, they're violating Godwin's law and calling people Nazis and things like this. And it's pretty easy to say, you know what, actually we're not gonna take into account your view because you're really, you're not participating in this collaborative process to try to find a better answer. So those are some of the thoughts that I had in terms of kind of setting up our conversation and really would like to, during this discussion, talk about some of these ideas about how can the internet continue to move and I think we are moving in a positive direction. How can we continue to move from the old idea of a place where people go to flame and scream and yell at each other to a more healthy environment where we can have very useful deliberative democracy and ideas like that. Thank you. Just a quick change, we hope. I couldn't resist since Jonathan put up my book being blocked by Google and stop badware stopping. I just wanted to mention that I got this email within seconds long before I actually figured it out by myself. Did you know that your site is causing this response from Google with a link to it? Here's the opinion. Here are a bunch of poopy warning. This is a bad site. Why is Google warning that your high bank site is bad? Here's Google's warning. Somebody said so and so showing up for duty. Et cetera, within no time at all, somebody happily downloading, figuring out that it only infects their computer when they open it in IE, not in Firefox posting to solve somebody else opening it, sending me the solution. I solved it or rather I didn't solve it. Somebody emailed me and said, here's the solution. Not sure which way the example then cuts. Let's, what I want to try to think about a little bit and for those of you who know me, what it means that I'll speak for 15 minutes is that I'll go through my 111 slides, no matter what, I'll just speak faster. No, not really. Close two though. How do we think about moving beyond understanding not only originally free and open source software is unique, not only then the networked information society and economy as a special space for a certain kind of behaviors, but a condition that requires us and enable us to look again at how we think we are, who we think we are and how we think our relationships are. That strikes me as the next set of things that are interesting to do. So remember, once upon a time, you used to be able to sell 32 volumes, it was I think, with several thousand dollars. Then 10 years ago, this amazing thing happened. It came out on a CD for under $500. This was newsworthy and this was in some senses the great assault that digitization would change everything. Of course it turns out that this causes the shame, the horror, you can get it now at buycheapsoftware.com for $20 and this was 10 years ago understood as the great shaking of the foundations. But it isn't. I first studied, I first started studying Wikipedia when it was four months old. And if anyone, I therefore remember, that if anyone were to tell you that five years from now, there would be a plausible argument about by scientists, published by nature, about whether or not Wikipedia was as good as Britannica or not. The answer of course being for fully practicing scientists, they're both crap, roughly to an equal extent. Which is okay. You would have been laughed out of the room. And yet it moves. This was the press release saying that it was fatally flawed. The thing to remember, coming from Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. The thing to remember is that the threat is not the money. The threat is the structure of authority over knowledge. The idea that we can know rather than search for authority is what is so dramatically destabilizing about Wikipedia. That knowledge is a process of conversation that is diffused in the society and that we can come and do things together. But fundamentally it also stands exactly for the things that Jimmy was beginning to talk about and was emphasizing the ability for people to have a humane interaction, roughly speaking, without liars, but manage their affairs. And so of course we see this is the market share of Apache versus the Microsoft server over boom and bust for 12 years. This is the BBC finding out that the only sources of information they had from the bombings in the underground were people with their mobile phones. And what we begin to see just as Jonathan's idea about herdict is to take and routinize those same people who volunteered to download the virus onto their computer so they could help me figure out what the problem was. Routinize that in a process that harnesses lots of people moving from self-sacrifice and individuals and things that grow organically to routinization and institutionalization and organization of the same set of human motivations. Just as we see Wikipedia as it grows and becomes more stable moving from saying neutral point of view, we're all quirky people writing encyclopedia, let's do this together to dealing with perimeter defense, with internal disagreement, with governance over time. Of course here what the BBC does, give us the information. Then we have more, we have WikiLeaks, right? We have the, we're all out there able to do research. We have the idea of porkbusters basically saying who put us hold on a sunshine bill, the Obama-Cobrin sunshine bill, people calling up their, using their phone and saying, did you do it to their senator? They say no. They report in by process of elimination very quickly, Stevens does. Again, then you have institutionalization and stabilization. So Ellen Miller, we're talking about Sunlight Foundation earlier. Here's the utility. I ended up looking just for this purpose to see what was here in the location. Here's a particular earmark. It led me to realize that there actually was as it turned out some kind of higher correlation between ALS and the Gulf War, but it made, what's that got to do with each other? And then going forward and looking from there. But you can look and find the earmarks located locally to you. Then there's this interesting thing that you just sometimes can't see the human condition unless you look at it together. So this is learning to love you more. People, do this. In this case, take a photo underneath your bed. Well, one doesn't seem very interesting. But then you start looking at who we are. And only through looking at all of our lives together, you begin to realize how different we are from each other. Then there's YouTube, right? Let's do video. I will broadcast myself. That's step one. But step two then is culture. Let's us all do together. Let's have a collaborative platform that allows people to combine their materials and to edit together in video now. Is the next move from YouTube paying people, like companies like River, for example, were focused on? Or is it about building collaboration? This is a commercial company trying to invite people to collaborate. But it's a commercial company that then tries to put itself in some kind of an ecosystem of talking to Wikipedia. Can we set up something that will be consistent with your values, which we can then allow people to contribute documentaries into Wikipedia? Also in an editable format. But again, we're beginning to see the move from something that's quirky and on the side to something that's mainstream, something that is becoming increasingly understood as a business proposition. And so you get something like threadless, right? We don't design even anymore. You design, you vote on what design you want, we'll stamp them on and sell them to you. You, the designer will become a celebrity. They wear your designs, now read their thoughts. Here's the blog of the people whose designs you wanted. And by the way, you can make $2,500. Cool. And in the same bin we put together, this idea, make money, get paid a cent for solving this trivia question. And that too is somehow put in the bin. I think one of the things I want us to try to have a conversation about as we go through, is it right to put these things together? Is it the same phenomenon? And what sort of tension are there between them? We see them getting brought into politics. So what's interesting here about the Obama fundraising is your own personal fundraising page will put the financial future of this campaign in your hands. You set your own goal, you do the outreach, you get the credit for the results, you do, I give control, a lot more control over my Barack Obama personal pages than any campaign, other one that's currently there. Unfortunately, Jennifer Schabbatour, who's working on this with me at Berkman on looking at these campaigns is in London and can't be here to talk more about it, but in order to harness much more control, but still, are we excited or is this corruption? It certainly works if you look at, this is data the New York Times presented in this way, at the amount of contributions that come by comparison from small donations over the course of the period. So what then shall we learn from all of this? I'd say we need to think about the relationship between cooperation, between loosely coupled systems, between human agency and freedom, and between a condition of pervasive change and unpredictability. So we talked about Britannica and Wikipedia, we see a stable view of knowledge embedded in the technology that is stable, embedded in a human relation where there's a small number of authors and everybody passively is constrained to read that, embedded in a legal system that is stable and copyright and understood as generating a certain kind of incentive and human motivation, challenged by a much more loosely coupled system, allowing much greater human agency to engage, to learn, to teach, allowing for much greater change and unpredictability, the sense of when something is done and when it isn't, when it is good and when it is not, requires a lot more learning, a lot more critique, a lot more turning around, and in order to make it work, all of this freedom to change requires a certain motivation, a certain will to engage in the process of neutral point of view, in the process of conversation, and so it requires a certain cooperation dynamic. This is what Jonathan was talking about with regard to what was possible with a controlled network, versus what's necessary in terms of overlays of human cooperation and structuring the right kind of motivation for the net, and it's not just technical systems or the net. If you look at what happened in this launch Toyota production system studies in the 80s, if you look at what happened in the GeoM Fremont plant, which is sort of the icon of this, it was one of the worst performing plants of GM in 1980. It was shut down, was opened two years later by Toyota, with all the same union leaders, 85% of the same employees became the best producing plant with a completely different revised structure, much more based on teamwork, much greater autonomy for learning, implementation, correction, and adaptation over time, a very different relationship of work, not new and post-internet, but pre-internet, but identifying for me the same thing, a technical, legal, organizational system that is closed, constraining, and understood as perfectly specifying the process with lots of process engineers, shifting to a more open, not like Wikipedia, of course, but nonetheless more open with more potential room for failure, more human agency, more learning, and a necessity to engage cooperation and motivation over time. Essentially what we see is freedom as practical capacity for human agency, given all constraints, technical, legal, social, et cetera. The more it's constrained, the less change there can be, and the less learning there can be, the more tightly coupled system there can be. What happened with the net is so much change and unpredictability occurred, and this turned out to be the same, by the way, with the rates of innovation in other industries which is what forced, for example, Toyota production system. We saw an increase in the range of change and unpredictability, the tightly coupled system failed time and again, and so they had to be more loosely coupled, which allowed for more learning, which allowed for threat, just the threat that Jonathan was talking about this morning, because more people sometimes, when they act, can act badly. And then the question is, what do we do? Do we tighten the systems up? Or can we find ways of engaging human cooperation, of engaging human motivation that will allow us to continue this process of respecting individual agency, respecting the capacity to err and learn, and then nonetheless act well? And the answer to that is, we'll see, but we need a very different model of, I told you, almost all 111. We need a very different model of human motivation in order than the one that we traditionally had with selfish rationality and the rational actor model and the basis of game theory. Now game theory is delightful because it's very simple, very crisp, gives definite answers, and you can write them out very elegantly in the iconography of rationalization, which is to say math. Whereas a lot of the stuff that you see when people try to learn about more complex human relations in anthropology and social theory in other domains, it gets harder. What we need to do as we try to move from the frame, the huge, I was about to say narrow, but huge frame of network life to the even huger frame of how we think about all human productive and otherwise relations through building a system that understands us as much more capable for cooperation than we ever thought ourselves capable of, you need to look everywhere. So from my perspective, it's many disciplines, organizational sociology, experimental economics, a lot of work in experimental economics, the nice thing again about game theory it has very specific predictions, which means you can run experiments that has very definite outcomes and you know that somebody is behaving and as it turns out, in no human society ever studied under controlled conditions do the majority of people act as selfish rationality predicts. That's a nice big finding. Now the question is what do we do with it? Do we ignore it and nonetheless build on the assumption that people will, nonetheless at least 30% do do that. So let's build the systems perfected for the 30% who do behave consistent with those predictions or do we try to expand? We're seeing work now in political science and anthropology, all of the work on social software and peer production, also work in evolutionary biology in neuroscience. Some people behave like home economics, many do not. Cooperation is sensitive to context and basically everybody's got their own limitations. What we see is that we can begin to systematize a set of design levers, even if we can't say what is human nature with that crispness that we cheated ourselves into thinking that we could. We can begin to say but here are things that make a difference. Communication makes a difference, right? So here we have discussion. Intrinsic motivations are central. The ability to feel empathy and to humanize other people. The ability to generate solidarity. The ability to express trust and actually have trust in other people. A sense of fairness in the interaction. Not as something that you do afterwards with transfer payment, but as integral. A sense of efficacy and autonomy in what you do. Humanization, solidarity we know about. We'll skip the nights we say need, but they're very cute. The fact that Wikipedia continues to let you, you say lock somebody down for 24 hours. The continuous placing of the enterprise at the mercy of people as a persistent public expression of trust, which is what engages then trust back and never going beyond what's necessary. We see punishment and reward being interestingly correlated and not transparency and reputation absolutely central. And I think that's something that's worthwhile talking about critical and I think important for our conversation. We see a lot of work on crowding out on the fact that when you frame something as payment, you're no longer in the same system than when you're framing it as friendship or an emotional connection. And you lose some people by offering money and you gain others. How much, depending on the interaction, it's not an easy summation. Absolutely central question. Cost, leadership, exit and entry. All of these are different when we're building systems that have to be loosely coupled because we can't perfectly design systems and that are centrally concerned with allowing freedom as practical human agency in loosely coupled systems designed for cooperation. So that I think is the study challenge we have to how to replace as it were the rational actor model that fits a narrow group of people with something that is much more rich with much greater closer conversation with the way the world is, but nonetheless is usable in the way that that one was. So let me stop there. And what I'd like to start is maybe really with that last point, maybe you wanna switch that out from there. With that last point about the relationship you see between the world you're part of with Wikipedia not taking ads and not looking for a commercial and a very strong constraint on a set of practices that are more tightly integrated with the market and the world that's beginning to try to learn some of those lessons and integrate them into the market, be it ranging from companies like Kaltura that are trying to combine more closely with your side of the world to Amazon and Mechanical Turk that's taking only a very thin slice. Is it a threat? Is it a compliment? Is it another way of thinking about how do we think when we read in the paper that Verizon is now part of Linux on mobile coalition? Is that a threat or is that victory? What's the relationship over time? Well, so I don't know what I think of as a threat or victory in that, so I'll just make some observations of some of the things that I see. So something like Mechanical Turk, this idea, you're gonna go and do something and get paid for piecework, some kind of intellectual piecework. It strikes me as a very, very, very different activity from what people are engaging in in a Wiki community. People in a Wiki community are typically there to have fun as one of the key motivations, and it's not just fun, but it's, you feel productive, you're doing something useful for your community, for other people who are interested in what you're interested in, and you're also engaging with other like-minded or perhaps differently-minded individuals who are interesting to you in some way. And so that's a, it's really a social community activity. And it's very different from what you're doing at something like Mechanical Turk. One of the phrases that I find sort of the business buzzword these days is that I find offensive and annoying is the idea of crowdsourcing. Now that doesn't mean that maybe something like Mechanical Turk is an inoffensive crowdsourcing, you might call it, but the idea of crowdsourcing is something like, gee, you could, you could get this work done cheaper if you outsource it to India, but you could really get it done cheaper if you could somehow trick the public into doing it for free. And companies who think they're in the crowdsourcing business probably really have no idea what they're doing. They're really, they don't understand something really fundamental about the business. So the way I look at it is, so at Wikia, my for-profit company, we have advertising-supported Wikis, and the people who are there doing things, one of the analogies that we draw is it's what we view our business as being is very similar conceptually to what you do if you are managing a bowling alley. Now some people get paid a lot of money to do bowling, and then these suckers do it for free. Well that's a funny way of thinking about a bowling alley. Instead you don't think of a bowling alley as, our objective is to get the public to come in and produce bowling, right? Instead you say, what we're trying to do is, it's a community center, it's a place where people come, we're gonna help them set up tournaments, we're gonna serve some beer and hot dogs, and whatever it is that people wanna do, we're gonna have a nice, safe place that they can come and do it and have fun with their friends, and that's our business. Our business is providing this infrastructure, this place for people to socialize and do whatever it is they want, and that's, you know, that's again, it's very different from something like Mechanical Turk, right, where there it is about paying the people to do some kind of work, so to speak. So, but are those conflicting? Are we seeing essentially the, how much of this is about, you're keeping the spheres very separate, when you're calling it a bowling alley, is that to limit the domain of what matters about with regard to social production or collaboration or peer production, or is there a way to integrate them in a way that's not, so when you say an attitude, does that mean a non-business attitude? Does that mean that as a business person doing this, one needs to have a different attitude about the relationship? I mean, I can imagine the bowling alley basically being, well, we wanna put beer and we wanna make it attractive to people, but is that a form of respecting the social phenomenon or is that a form of commodifying it, making it more commercial? Is there something beyond building a platform? So, is there something different about MySpace and Wikipedia and free software development with an integration of multiple companies? I mean, yeah, I mean, there are quite a few differences between the two and between those three, but there are also some pretty marked similarities, in other words, with, let's just say MySpace and Wikipedia, for example. In both cases, people come and they engage because they get some kind of a personal value from it, whatever that might be, but the personal values that people are getting from it are probably, well, I think certainly quite different. In one case, with MySpace, it's fairly straightforward. You know, you're interacting with your friends and whatever, MySpace escapes me, so I don't understand what people are doing there or why, but what you're doing there is something that you're not necessarily doing it in a, I think in Wikipedia, there is much more of a charitable impulse or an idea that we're here together to build something that we hope is helpful to everyone, and that kind of underlies a lot of the social interactions and things is that we really feel like, as a community, we're trying to do something. So, in a sense, that distinction might be, well, I do certain things like I go to the movies and I do that because I like it and it's fun and I go with my friends, and then people do things like they go to church or they attend church socials and they bring some dishes for everyone to share and eat and so forth, where it really is more of a community activity and it's really, people are thinking of that in a different light. It's not just, well, I'm just doing this because I like movies and I wanna have fun, but it's also a more conscious idea of being part of a community and actually interacting with others in a positive way. So, how stable is that as a description of where Wikipedia is today? Companies, writing things about particular products or particular standards and intervening and having an interest. People with their biographies. People anecdotally talking about, well, I tried to correct and then there are these three people who think they own the entry and I can't get an edge wise. Is this, I mean, you tell a very community soft story which I buy as a description five years ago, seven years ago, I wonder how do you see yourself as dealing with that success? And to what extent is it pushing pressure on your sense? In some sense it's parallel a little bit to what Jonathan was talking about this morning with regard to when you move the net from just the people who have the tin cans to their ears to everyone and mattering to everyone. How do you manage that without becoming hierarchical or clique-ish? Well, so there's several different aspects to that, right? There are a lot of different kinds of pressures and a lot of different kinds of solutions to it. So, one of the things that really helps a lot is that within Wikipedia, there are a huge number of sub-communities on all kinds of topics. So, one of my favorite is WikiProject Bridges. So, I'm at this guy in California and he's a retired, he's not an older guy, he's a young retired software engineer and he likes bridges and he works in WikiProject Bridges and he and a group of people who are into bridges as a hobby, they all know each other from the Wiki and they work together on the bridge articles. And within their little group, it's the same culture that there may have been back when there were 20 people in all of Wikipedia. So, you get these sub-communities that form that are part of the overall system and so they share in the overall global values and things like this. And so that works, it works out pretty well in a lot of cases. It is also true though that as we've gotten bigger and bigger, it's similar to when you grow from a small village to a town to a small city to a big city, you get new kinds of problems. You get new kinds of difficult characters and you get problems that are based on things like, well in the old days, I knew everybody and then after a while, well I didn't know everybody but I knew, I was one step away from everybody. I knew everybody and somebody knew somebody. Now you have people who are administrators on Wikipedia who I've never bumped into at all on Wikipedia and they've never bumped into each other in many cases. And so you can't, as simply as you used to be able to, it used to be very simple, you go to an article, somebody says, oh there's a problem with the article, you go and you look at the history and you see three or four people who you know and trust and you say, oh well I don't need to worry about it because I see that Angela's here and Maverick's here and it'll be fine. Now if I see something or anyone sees a complaint and you go and you look and who are these people? I have no idea who they are and so there is that risk of changing interactions from a real community, small group interaction to this atomistic sort of random people and it's a lot harder to maintain civility in that kind of case for a lot of classic reasons, it's really easy to be rude to someone that you're never gonna see again especially online. It's a lot harder to be rude to someone who you realize you're working with them every day and you see them and you get to know them and things like that. So there are challenges. Some of the things I think that we hear about, companies working on their own entries and things like that I think are mostly overblown and when we've looked at this in some detail we see very little evidence of systematic problems of that type. We actually see that a lot more from small mom and pop companies trying to get an article on Wikipedia than we see from big companies. Big companies mostly have enough sense to know you shouldn't really wrangle with Wikipedia in a bad way or you're gonna be embarrassed and depressed and a lot of communications professionals are actually quite good. They understand this idea of the PR flag who's gonna come on and sort of try and ram their point of view through, they don't last very long in the PR industry because it just doesn't work. So there are a lot of professionals out there who realize like, okay, if we're gonna interact with this kind of social media, we need to respect the norms. We need to go on the talk page and say, hey, there's a problem and here's some references and do it the right way. I guess the last point that I will mention is that I definitely think we have had a problem with a growth in the amount of tradition and terminology and jargon within the community and this is what a lot of times you'll hear people who say, I went into Wikipedia and I tried to change something and I found it to be very frustrating and one of the ways that's frustrating is, you know, somebody reverted me and they didn't explain why or they explained why with some weird codes and I didn't know what that meant and you know, I got all these weird messages and it just, it's too much and one of the things that we really try to put out as a vibe in the community, particularly with respect to people who are trying to fix the biography on themselves, is that people should not be required to become expert Wikipedians before they can join our conversation. Like we should take on that responsibility, right? If clearly somebody is acting in good faith, they're just trying to fix something or maybe they're not being so perfect about it, right? You can see they're mad about something and they're not only trying to fix something but they're actually sort of going a little wild can kind of understand, you know, assume good faith. They probably are acting out of some positive impulse as well and if you engage them in a friendly way, almost every case people will kind of knock it off and go, okay, well, look, here's the problem and then you have a conversation about it but it gets really hard when there's too much jargon. So I have lots of other questions but I'd love to open it up for people, for all the people, either if we have on the board or people over here and who has mics? Anna Massera, you wanna hand it over there? Yes, hello, I'm from Italy and I would like to ask Jimmy Wales, who pays for lawsuits against Wikipedia? The reason I'm asking this is because, I mean, there has been an incident in Italy, a blogger who sued Wikipedia in Italy because he felt defamed and he actually sued me too because I wrote about this incident and I took the defense of Wikipedia so I'm a journalist and I was wondering, first of all, who pays for lawsuits and if you win lawsuits, I mean, how do you defend yourself from people suing? And the other one is who decides, who deserves to be in the encyclopedia in the first place because there's many people who sue because they don't feel they are being represented correctly in the encyclopedia, but I wonder, I mean, in the first place, why are they in there if they don't seem to have any public relevance? The number of lawsuits against Wikipedia is very, very small. There have been a couple of incidents in Germany. There's one, the first one ever in the US, which is in New Jersey right now. I'm not even aware of anything in Italy, so, but I don't necessarily stay on top of everything, but it's a very, very small number and one of the reasons is that we really have an ethic within the community about human dignity and about getting the story right and so really, our policies on biographies, for example, should be so much stricter than don't libel people, right? That we should, in general, we ought to be very, very far away from libel. The community really tries to say, where do you get into difficult areas around libel? It's around original investigative journalism, right? Where you're trying to break some new story and maybe if you get it wrong, you've made some error, you're sloppy, but we are basically just synthesizing and reporting from reliable sources, major newspapers, magazines, books, things like this and we don't try to do original reporting and so the number of cases of this is really quite small and then also people are able to come and complain and interact with us and we try to fix errors very quickly. So it does happen, but it's very minimal. In terms of who decides? This is probably the more interesting question. Who decides when is somebody famous enough or important enough or whatever enough to be in Wikipedia and the answer is the community. It's the people who are working in the encyclopedia and there's a whole set of policies and traditions around this. It's actually interesting because as Wikipedia has gotten bigger in two ways, this has become a much more complex and difficult issue for us. So one way we've gotten bigger is just the sheer size of the work which means that when we started out we were covering George W. Bush and Michael Jackson and these people really don't care what it says on Wikipedia. They're so famous they're sort of beyond all that and as we've gotten bigger and bigger we're of course covering more and more people who are less and less famous and who for whom having an encyclopedia article about themselves can feel very strange and uncomfortable and then second we've become incredibly powerful with the search engines with Google or whatever and so particularly if you have an unusual name if there's a Wikipedia entry about you it's almost certainly the first, second, or third link in Google and so that means that it actually matters to people. When we first started if we wrote a page about somebody who wasn't famous it probably wouldn't even show up in Google because nobody cared. So because of those two factors the growth and the increasing power it's become much more on the minds of the community to say how do we thoughtfully reflect on this question? And so some of the answers are pretty straightforward. One of the things we look for is reliable sources, verifiability. You can, someone could start an article about their own, their mother for example who is not at all famous and it's just somebody's ordinary mother. I mean some people have famous mothers of course but and write wonderful things about mom and it could all be true but the problem is who can verify it, right? There aren't really any published sources. There aren't, there's no sort of infrastructure around that and we just have to say I'm sorry but we really can't have an article about this person because we don't even know if it's a hoax if this person even exists or whatever. So some, there's some sort of norms like that that we look at and then another thing we look at and Jonathan discussed this a little bit this morning is really the question of human dignity is one of the factors we look at and so for example one of the rules about biographies is if somebody's only notable for one event, right? Some, they did some bad thing or some bad thing happened to them. It's just one event and other than that we would have never heard of them and it's a unique kind of odd event. Typically we try not to have an article about the person if we need to have an article we have the article about the event and in some cases like what's interesting about the Star Wars kid that he talked about? So there's this kid who made a funny video of himself which was then spread against his will all over the internet and people made fun of him all over the world and it was hurtful to him and his family what happened. What's important about that and what people need to know about that and what's of legitimate public interest is the event. The event that this kid made a video, a Star Wars video and this and that happened. His actual name is really not important. It doesn't add to the story. Now if he later is elected governor of Minnesota obviously this changes things, right? Then it becomes actually relevant that the governor of Minnesota was also Star Wars kid and it's a great uplifting story that you can recover from a bad YouTube video. But other than that, generally what we try to look at is to say look, what is the impact that this article is gonna have on the person's life? And if that is, if it's unnecessary and it's completely negative there's just no reason to have a biography. But the community decides really on a case by case basis because there's no simple magic formula to come to good editorial decisions. Esther, can I call on you? I know you're, can we have a mic over here? So here's a question to you. Jimmy's been talking about the role of ethics, a certain kind of ethical commitment to a certain kind of way of engaging people. When I asked him about this potential tension produced between people operating in the market and people operating in this social space he strongly emphasized the social nature of what was going on and separated it quite starkly from these other things say like my space that are commercial spaces oriented to give people a space to be social but not necessarily with the same kind of orientation. This is also something that I have to say in my own work as I'm beginning to think now about how we build a motivational profile or an understanding of human motivation to create a stable role for commitment, for normative commitment, for moral commitment of doing the right thing as opposed to just the expedient or the fun or whatever. Also at least theoretically and experimentally seems important. I'm curious to what extent being as immersed as you are in a universe of people who are looking from the business into the social space looking for new ideas about how to do things. The extent to which you see a point of corruption, a point of acceptance, a certain class of person and style of person with a certain orientation to the world being more drawn towards certain kinds of things. What do you see? No? Yes, here we go. Since your question wasn't completely formulated neither will be my answer but it's a really interesting question. I watch business people try to get it and sort of miss it. I wrote a piece about how I thought the future of advertising would not be banner ads but would be something much closer to sponsorship or public relations where the vendor gets engaged and is part of the community much as for example imagine Nike instead of putting ads at basketball games it would hire a local shoe store salesperson to go to the basketball game and be friendly and chat and hand out free shoes. Sort of the way that the bowling alley guy tries to make a nice community. And I got all these letters because I mentioned behavioral targeting right at the beginning saying oh yes, how great. You talked about behavioral targeting and they didn't read the rest of the piece. And you see these business people like oh great, we'll pay users to have ads on their pages. It's not the point. I was having this discussion with LiveJournal and a lot of discussion about which accounts should users see ads in and if I have a paid account but I go to the page of someone who has a free account should I see an ad then. And what really would be much more interesting is if I have an account, I want to choose the ads that my friends see. It's not a question of choosing the ads that I see but choosing the ads that represent me. But the moment you start paying people to show ads as opposed to giving them the choice of what they feel represents their personality you sort of spoil it. It's the same thing you were talking about earlier, the Tom Sawyer story. You get your friends to do this stuff for free but there's another story which is the old man who lived in a house and these kids moved in and they made a huge racket. But he was a very wise old man. So he went out and he told the children how nicely they were playing and making such beautiful noise and wasn't it great? And he gave them $5. Next day gives them $3. Third day gives them no money at all. And they say, where's the money? He said, well, you know, I can't pay you all the time and they leave and the guy ends up. So the answer to your question is business tries to get it but often really doesn't. The same thing with the attention. The attention economy which is not, I will give you my attention so you can give me free content but I want attention. Businesses don't really understand which is what Jimmy was saying, I think, that people go on the internet to get attention. They don't necessarily want to engage in commercial acts and it's kind of a shock to many businesses that you can go online for some other purpose. So I'm not sure that was your question. No, it was. Basically your answer is no. Many people who think that they're in the business of figuring this out don't get it at a fundamental level. Which is surprising given how much hype and noise there is around the business applications of this new thing that nobody knows quite how to define when they're thinking of it in those terms. And given that they are real people as well. You want to pass it to the person behind you? Thanks. JP, you're on this for me. This is triggered by something you said you're high what might actually reflect something both of you were talking about. You spoke about loosely coupled systems designed for collaboration, for cooperation. Clay Scherke, I think it was who said that if you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as or lower than the cost of damage then you can avoid a tragedy of the commons and something sort of beautiful can emerge as a result. I can't help but think that we're missing a trick that there is some way of reducing the cost of repair by collaborating which you cannot as easily associate with increasing the cost of damage. We might not be able to reduce the cost of damage or increase it because cooperation wouldn't take place as easily but there's something we're not necessarily doing enough of to say that if you cooperate you can reduce the cost of repair and thereby always create something of value in a collaborative space. Is that am I losing my head? Is there something worth trying to get into? No, no, I don't think you're losing your head. I think that actually, but the question is which way the causation goes. It's not a one way, it's not one directional, right? One aspect of, so this was actually in Jonathan's slides today when he identified the function of being able to revert to a prior version, right? That's a basic functionality within the system that limits damage dramatically and by limiting damage dramatically allows you to engage in this act of trust. I mean, one of the things that happens is part of, I certainly very early talked about chunking the work into small modules to allow people at a very low cost to collaborate but another thing that happens when you chunk the system so much is that any given act of damage can be relatively, well, not necessarily when you chunk, but you can and that's essentially what you get with this very easy revert. You create the ability to actually take risks, create the ability to engage in trust, you create the ability to allow people to have autonomy and that then triggers, once they actually have autonomy and behave like decent human beings, a certain reciprocity dynamic, a certain sense, well, you've been trustworthy, I'll be trustworthy to you. You've been fair, I'll be fair to you. At which point people then change their own attitude toward the activity which reduces the risk of damage, at least the risk of purposeful damage, if not careless damage and once you have that, you're again in a situation where you can trust more because now you have these two affordances that lower the risk of damage. One is the attitudinal change and the other is the fact that you've built a system with lots of firewalls and again you can take greater risks or maybe grow greater and have new people who don't have the attitude but now you have more people and you begin to create perimeter defense. This is just lots of words describing essentially what I see Wikipedia as having done very successfully. Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely a lot to this idea of just give up the idea of absolute security and just really think in terms of costs and benefits, just make it a little cheaper all the time to do something good and a little more expensive to do something bad and that it's hugely powerful and it's hugely, I mean, this intentional vulnerability is really important, right? So it's still occasionally, it's not as common as it used to be but if there's some vandalism on a Wikipedia page that makes the news that happens fairly regularly. Some of this is fair if it stayed up for a long time. Sometimes something was vandalism for a minute and then it's like a big news story about and it's like, yeah, well, relax, it's Wikipedia. But what happens is sometimes it's reported on Wikipedia page was hacked to make this happen which we all chuckle at because the sort of advanced computer skills needed to vandalize Wikipedia not that, you know, but that's a big part of it. It's like, you click and you write some curse words and you hit save and well, that wasn't that fun actually. You don't really feel that sense of achievement that you might feel if you managed to get a curse word on the front page of Google. I'm sure that kind of thing, their defense has to be a really strong defense, right? That's sort of looking for absolute security where they say, look, we have to be super careful or to have all these firewalls or to make sure nobody can put a curse word on the front page of Google because that just, we're not here for that, right? As opposed to the idea of, you know, put a curse word in Wikipedia. We don't really care, we'll fix it in two seconds, so what, you know? And so then people, they try it once or twice and then it's not that thrilling and so they kind of knock it off, usually. So this is the lighten up slightly defense. Yeah. We do actually lock the front page of Wikipedia. Now, we didn't for longer than most people realize. For a long, long time, even the front page of Wikipedia was editable. For a while, you couldn't just click and edit it, but it was made of templates and the templates were editable. And we had just won too many giant penis on the front page and eventually decided we couldn't do that anymore, so. There's a question there at the back. What up? What up? This is Rodrigo Arias from Guatemala. I had two questions. You answered the first one. That is how you make people to agree to literally be on the same page. It's very interesting how you manage the consensus. But then I have read about many people who try to extend the Wiki concept to say Jeff Bezos, he mentioned something about trying to make the book review more like Wiki. And I wonder how this consensus work will work. This consensus method will work with a more taste or personal opinion content. How you really can tell them to agree on to be on the same page when it's matter of taste. So this is, earlier, Yokai and I were talking and I was saying about this, how do we get consensus? So part of it is that the Wiki process itself mutually should destruction. It really forces you to try to write for the enemy. But it also, I think a really important point is that as it turns out, most people are pretty reasonable as it is. And you don't really get that, you don't get that sense from a lot of other kinds of media. It's traditional on television to have a political debate by getting two people who are on opposite sides of the issue and you put them up and have them yell at each other. Or in USA Today you have the editorial for it and against it. And that's political debate. But most people are actually kind of in the middle somewhere and they kind of acknowledge that these are complicated issues and I understand that there's pros and cons for different alternatives that we might choose. And so people are able to work together much more effectively than you might think. For the second point is the question is, well it works really well for, I'm gonna rephrase your question I think. Works really well for a neutral encyclopedia but what if you try to do collaborative work around something that's not neutral? So book reviews or something like this. And there is something to that but I used to think that neutrality was absolutely the only thing that made Wikipedia work. I thought it's this idea, this core value of neutrality, everybody can buy into neutrality and it solves a lot of problems. And that's actually true but it turns out that, and I know this now because of watching many, many, many, many other Wikis that are not neutral, thrive and succeed. It turns out that what's really important is that as long as the participants have a shared vision of what it is they're trying to accomplish then they can work together really well. And so just to give one great example is Encyclopedia, which is a parody of Wikipedia, a very good natured site and it's not really a malicious sort of vicious humor kind of site and it's wickedly funny. And why does that work? I mean humor is not neutral, right? And it's hard to imagine that it ends up being funny. A joke written by a committee sounds like a joke itself to even have the idea but it works because there's a community there. They have a pretty similar sense of humor to each other. They've learned a lot of humor from each other. There's kind of a house style that they fall into. There actually ends up being a right and a wrong way to do an Encyclopedia entry. And it isn't just neutrality, it's the idea that, okay, we're gonna write an article about the Berkman Center now in Encyclopedia. There probably isn't one yet but maybe somebody here will write one. There's a right and a wrong way to do that. I mean one of the first rules is it has to be funny, right? And how can people agree on that? Well, it turns out people pretty much kind of do agree on what's funny or not. So I think it's easier for people to collaborate on a lot of different kinds of things but I also think there's some things that it's kind of impossible, you know? Just if you can't get a shared vision, you're gonna have a hard time collaborating. I think it's important to take Wikipedia and even the Wiki format more generally as an example, as an important instance, it's not the whole of the phenomenon of human cooperation. Different dynamics, different interactions, different information and document types call for different kinds of affordances and constraints. The critical question from my perspective is going forward do we understand people as having a diverse motivational profile so that you begin to think about each of these different systems in terms of how would people with a certain distribution of bad intentions and good intentions, a certain decent upbringing for politeness and some other selfish or not, how would they interact on it? And it turns out that when you structure the debate, so an example for example, or just about to recently become colleague, Cass Sunstein runs a lot of experiments with his collaborators on the way in which, or a lot, runs experiments, on the way in which when you put people, people on the left with people on the left and people on the right with people on the right, their views become more extreme and he takes that as evidence that polarization occurs. But somebody else like Jim Fishkin and Bruce Ackerman runs other experiments putting people in a room and finding that after they talk to each other, their positions begin to sum to work to converge, they have richer examples. It turns out the difference between these other than the methodological arguments is that in one case, in Fishkin's case, there's a much more structured interaction, there's a much clearer goal of trying to get a set of agreements, there's some structured presentation and leadership and moderation and it turns out that the same people in the sense that they're randomly selected from a given population don't polarize. So the basic point is people's attitudes are sensitive to the platform through which they interact. The relevant platform should be responsive to the particular project. In the case of taste, you don't want a common amalgam, perhaps. Perhaps you want things alongside each other and the collaboration acts to move to the back that says what we want is something broader, something humorous and that's the level of agreement we need and instead we just need a platform that allows us to stabilize different views of this and that's, I think, that's my sense to you. David, oh, there was another hand up here first. Ethan. Thanks, I wanted to ask a question about what we might call a participation gap and how that relates to the economics of some of these systems. Jimmy was expressing some understandable and fully justifiable pride at how much sort of a peer volunteer community has been able to accomplish. But there's other models out there that are combining volunteer models with some form of payment. In fact, the community that I run has a bit of hybridting to it and I wonder whether in sort of pure voluntary production we end up involuntarily excluding some people from that production process. One of the things that I've noticed is a loose but perhaps real correlation between very active Wikipedia's and countries that have strong subsidies for university students and strong social welfare systems. In other words, places where it's probably easy to spend a lot more time as an active Wikipedia and then it might be in Kenya, for instance. So I'm wondering whether some of what we celebrate about peer production, about network production, about these voluntary systems might be in some ways putting up barriers to entry, cultural barriers to entry for participatory systems where people may need an economic incentive to participate in that production? I think that's a very powerful and important question and I think it's one of the reasons that I certainly am interested in the set of questions that I started out in some sense with Jimmy was the extent to which we can create an interface that includes payment. But that's why I think studying and understanding and crowding out is so important. So one of the things that when you see, for example, the way in which the Brazilian free software development community is beginning to also do here and there, I actually don't know how here and there it is, but long distance software services built on GNU Linux and Linux services. That clearly has not undermined the social production and peer production aspect or the voluntary aspect. While it hasn't undermined it, it is increasingly seeming to be the case that at least for the kernel, a huge chunk of the innovation is coming from companies. So it may be that what we're seeing is a temporary set of opportunities that ends up actually phasing out, we don't know. But that strikes me as one of the most important reasons to try to understand how money plays with peer production. I'll only say that I disagree with one word you used which is incentives, right? You described incentives and I think the concern you were concerned about was sustainability rather than incentives. The kind of thing that you talk about allowing a musician to release their music for free on the net, but make a living, not millions, but make a living as the question of how we as a society do or don't support professional musicians is a similar view but on a local as opposed to a global level. And I think one of the things we're going to have to negotiate is how we think about this money being not about incentives to produce, understanding that the incentives are more complex and mixed, but rather about availability and sustainability given flows of funds. And I think that may be part of the first step toward creating a framing, a cultural framing as well as the way in which you price it and the way in which you understand what is paid for and what the ratio is between what's paid for and what's not paid for to be able to create a sustainable flow of funds that's part of the community and understood as in some sense, fair and sustainable. But I think we're going to have to think about it in these terms in order to allow a sustainable integration as opposed to a situation where you've got some people who are paid, some people who aren't and the concerns with suckers or not suckers or this or that. So yeah, I also, I think that's a very, it's a very useful thing to think about and one of the things that I've been looking at. And so I don't, I'm not necessarily sure that the correlation is subsidized college students and whatever, I think the correlation might be better described as wealth in general. But well, those two are highly correlated, right? Societies that through whatever social mechanism it happens, societies that are wealthy enough that people have the leisure time and the intellectual training to be able to spend the entire weekend debating whether or not a particular type of train was in existence in 1943 or 1944, you don't get that in a lot of parts of the world, right? People have much more pressing concerns than goofing around on Wikipedia all day. And we see this actually across the whole of the wiki world and the peer produced text world in certain kinds of systemic bias in what kinds of topics are covered. So, but I think this is, it's important because there are certain things that we can, I'll give an example. At Wikia, we have the Muppet Wiki. The Muppet Wiki is everything you could possibly ever wanna know about the Muppets. There's more than 15,000 articles about the Muppets if you can imagine, right? There's only about 300 in Wikipedia, which is still a lot. Well, so what is this stuff? So the Muppet Wiki article on Itzhak Perlman. So the Wikipedia entry tells all about Itzhak Perlman, his career as a violinist and where he went to school and his biography growing up, everything you would typically wanna know. In the Muppet Wiki, the article about him is all about the time he came on Sesame Street, which was back in the 80s. He made one or two appearances. I don't remember which. Well, there is no economic model whatsoever that would justify paying someone to write that, right? That's purely a community activity. That person is writing for their own joy and for the joy of their friends who are equally geeked out about the Muppets. And there's essentially no way that you could hire anyone to write that. It makes no sense. Now for some of the fat head type of stuff rather than that long tail stuff, yes, you could hire people to write it. So you do get these kind of strange things where what's being written is, it's not necessarily what you might consider to be the most important, but it's also unique. We're able to produce things. It's not just a replacement for what went before, but it's entirely new kinds of things that we haven't seen before. The real question for the long run, and this is one of the things I really focus a lot of my attention on, is what is necessary, what is gonna be necessary to have a thriving growing, but perhaps small still wikipedia in Zulu, right? It's non-trivial. It's non-trivial for a lot of reasons that are much bigger than wikipedia. But it's worth thinking about because particularly for wikipedia, it's our mission. Our mission is a free encyclopedia for everyone in their own language. And we're doing pretty good in English, French, German, Japanese, but we're doing very, very poorly in most African languages. We're actually starting to do pretty good in a lot of the languages of India, which corresponds directly to the growth of the IT sector in India and the fact that there are more and more people in India who have computers and access and so forth. So I think it's a really interesting question to think about. We now know how to produce a work like the Muppet Wiki, which is a totally new type of work that was never economically feasible before, but how can we produce something else that's never been economically feasible before, which is an encyclopedia in Zulu. And we don't really have that answer yet. And what kind of hybrid model can make it happen? I don't know yet. So we're getting close to the end. I have David, I have Ronaldo. If there's, why don't we hear if it's okay from the both of you and then close up. Okay, so David, read again. And I'm sorry for dominating the conversation. I don't dominate the conversation on Wikipedia, although I do contribute. The interesting thing to me is that there, and I think Yokai was hinting at this, there are lots of other models that are well-developed of peer production that are quite different in kind than Wikipedia. And I'm particularly struck by the fact that Wikipedia is capable of having one or two sort of primary goals, whereas these others don't. The one that is most interesting to me is science as a discipline. Science is one of the few disciplines that has existed for a very long time based on a peer production model, largely. Although it's post-World War II, it's changed. It's now a profit-making model and a careerist model. But before that, it was basically peer production. We see that science, especially in things like climate change and evolution, is not self-stabilizing. It's very much a social construction under pressure from outside. And it makes me worry when, for example, we changed the laws to create this weird notion of research integrity that could put you in jail for doing science in order to satisfy the complaints of people who probably at some point will be complaining about Wikipedia. They just haven't woken up to it yet. And so I'm curious about this as an evolutionary process rather than a stable process. Are we just in an early stage of things like Wikipedia and the late stage will be as screwed up as modern sciences and as little likely to clean itself up in any near term? So you might have some comments rather than just being a statement. It's Ronaldo Lemos from Brazil, iCommons and FGV. My question is, I'm interested in the economic organization of collaborative projects like the Wikipedia. Like, if you take a look at the Mozilla organization, they have also both a corporation and also a foundation. And I think it's the same case for Wikipedia. You have a foundation and then you have Wikia. So what's the relation between the two and how this model represents a sort of a trend for organizing an open collaborative project and how does it answer the economics of the sustainability of projects like this? Okay, so on the first question, it's really important to clarify that Wikia and Wikipedia are completely separate. And the only link between the two is that I'm the founder. And so the idea of Wikia is to take this collaborative production model and try to extend it out into more areas of culture than really fit or seem right as a charity. It's kind of hard to convince the government that the Muppet Wikia is a charity, worthy of tax deductible status. And then also we're trying to do some bigger projects that require more capital than the nonprofit can generate. So they're completely separate. So it's very different from the Mozilla model, which is that they created this free software in a nonprofit that suddenly was able to quite easily, without anybody minding at all, rake in huge, huge sums of money. And so they needed to figure out what they're gonna do about that. And so they formed the two pieces. Wikipedia could follow that model someday. There are no plans to do that. But it's always a possibility that Wikipedia could start generating lots of money somehow. But nobody really is thinking about that very much. In terms of is this a trend? I think there is a certain trend here. I mean, you've got something like Craigslist, which has a foundation, but it's a for-profit company. And but what's important about Craigslist is that almost everybody in the business agrees that they're leaving tons and tons of money on the table. They're deliberately not monetizing things. They could monetize. And they're doing it in part because Craig genuinely believes that it's a community service and that he's just trying to sort of make something useful for people. But also I think it's a pretty brilliant business strategy in the long run. It's really a, it's a more of an old fashioned business model where you say, you know what, we're gonna be the place that people can trust and depend on. And we have a certain vibe about us. And if we're not making every last penny today, that's not as important as building something for the long term. So I think there is a certain trend there. For the other question, I would say that given enough time, I'm sure that humans will screw up Wikipedia just as badly as we sooner or later managed to screw up everything. So at least at the present time, things seem kind of okay. But as long as I'm around, I'm gonna try to make sure we don't screw up too much. But that's too depressing a note to end on. So I see something very closely connected. Connecting these two questions and connecting in many senses to the general theme of the conference of looking back and looking forward and trying to understand this transition, which is to say, David, you were talking about a certain kind of institutionalization of science which with it brings a certain systematization, a certain set of new ways of learning and building bigger things, funding them, organizing things that need perhaps more tightly integrated learning systems. But at the same time, in interface with a more innovation and research developed market that seems to be doing the same thing but isn't quite doing the same thing, all occurring at the time when the cultural idea is markets and property. And so you get this transition of trying to, this will sound ironic, professionalize academia by making it more market oriented. Misunderstanding that professionalism and market orientation are two distinct sets of values that don't always align though they have been aligned in certain ways in certain firms. But it's the same question in some sense using a different kind of model that Ronaldo's asking, which is about stabilization through institutions, through foundation, this one through the non-profit, the traditional organized non-profit model as opposed to the traditional market organization, both as ways of dealing with the uncertainty and ignorance we have simply because we haven't had on such a scale social production occurring in a way that is so significant. And both of these questions tie for me to this basic theme of where have we been and where are we going? And where we've been is that 10 years ago we would not have predicted that this is the conversation we'd be having and it would be plausible 10 years later, which is to say, do we start to rethink about human cooperation? What is the role of morality in organizing our affairs? What does it mean to have a business model that leaves a lot of money on the table because it's the right thing to do and people understand it in it? It would not have been that conversation. 10 years ago it was the big new thing on the front of wired, push! We've suddenly decided to understand things the way it was in broadcast. Now we're at a stage where I think we all know we need to engage this question, but the uncertainties are great. We're beginning to see routinization and institutionalization of these forms. We're beginning to see, as Esther was saying, interest from the market but without understanding and an effort in some senses to subvert. We're see, well, not an effort to subvert, an effort to harness that ends up being subversive in this form. And this is the set of questions that I think is a huge challenge today, which is to say, once we've gotten over the problem of, this just doesn't exist, it's just not here, it's not happening to, okay, okay, I believe it's happening. How do we figure this thing out? And that strikes me as a really big question we need to look at going forward. So let's break and have some coffee and talk to each other. Thank you.