Participation Literacy

1990, Richard Stallman said “I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses” (Denning, 1990). Stallman’s statement is a more balanced version of Stewart Brand’s poetic words “Information wants to be free” from 1984 (Clark, 1999). It is possible you could say that information wants to be free, but it is also a fact that pigs and cows want to be free (I think). But we do not let them.

It is self-evident that all information cannot be free. Stewart Brand’s poetic words might be true if information would be counted as organisms with free will. I guess every entity with free will wants to be free. The problem here is how we categorize and group things. Is it really possible to create a group called information and give it a common set of properties? I do not think so. Commercial information cannot be free in every sense of the word. Amazon.com, for example, would not exist if all information the company is housing would be free – at least not in a substantial form. It is also a fact that Amazon.com probably would not be the icon, as it truly is, if they did not understand the poetry of Stewart Brand’s words. It is a truism that collective intelligence would not work if we had to pay for it. The rise and fall of Web companies will to a great deal depend on their ability to create a balance between commercial and free information. Free information is an asset for all commercial organizations and an absolute must for some of them. In the future a substantial part of this free information will be about user participation.

There are some forms of information corresponding especially well with Stewart Brand’s and Richard Stallman’s word – academic information. With academic information and knowledge, I mean information and knowledge produced in research by government financed resources. To this category I count most information and knowledge produced by universities and other forms of higher education institutions. I do not count information and knowledge produced by private companies. The form of information and knowledge produced by companies such as Microsoft and Sony belongs to another discussion.

Before the digital era, before Web 1.0, publishing companies had a substantial role since those kinds of resources were needed to select, distribute and spread information about the information created in research institutions around the world. In the Web 1.0 era there has been a growing resistance against the very nature of research publishing companies. Most of these voices are based on the notion that “information wants to be free”. Many universities have built their own publishing environments. The reason is not only because they want the information to be free. It is because they have realised that the business model in the academic publishing industry is out of date. A university produces large amounts of high quality information and knowledge and much of that information and knowledge is collected by publishing companies, printed on paper and/or locked in expensive digital suites and sold back to the university in the form of very expensive Journals and database subscriptions. The only reason this business model still works is because the academic norm is very conservative. The model is strongly linked to academic quality and ranking system. I do not think most researchers are so conservative though; the conservation mechanism mostly lies with the research funding and career system in the academic society. That system is still extensively focused on how many articles or books a certain researcher has published in a defined set of well known academic journals or by academic publishers.

The first point to make for a research 2.0 concept would be to free the academic information and knowledge from commercial slavery - if you publish an article in a journal, or likewise, always keep the right of reasonable usage, like a creative common license. In a connected research environment, we cannot make valuable information invisible.