The article cited above is about Noah Kravitz, who gained his far more than 15 mins of fame earlier this fall when his previous employer sued him for "taking" Twitter followers with him upon his departure from the company.
It's a tricky issue, and one that has particularly concerned me. My own claim to fame derives, in no small part, I am sure, from my role with OpenOffice.org. I've tried, always, to distinguish what I do strictly on behalf of OOo, on behalf of OOo's corporate sponsors and my (former) employers, and on behalf of my own interests.
It gets complicated fast, as my own personal interests overlap those of the others'. For instance, I'm interested in open source, open standards, social media, and the theory and practice of developing community. What's more, I've been interested in these issues since at least my first year in college, when I joined the UC Berkeley Student Cooperative Association (USCA) and by the next year was the youngest elected Workshift Manager (think: community manager but having to coordinate all jobs all the time) and then the youngest member to the university-wide USCA board of directors. (I also held several other positions.) How communities work, whether they be cooperatives or collaboratives or some other form of commons-based peer production networks and how to keep them together, so that things that need to get done actually are done, and that everyone more or less agrees with doing those things--all this has long coloured my working life. It also, in a perverse way, shaped my dissertation: I wrote on the romance of the vagabond (tramp) in the US at the turn of the 19th/20th century. The vagabond, or tramp, as the romantics like Twain and others called him, was a community disruptor. Of course, his disruptions enabled and indeed strengthened the affected community, for he figured a threat that unified those making up the community. It's an old story.
Open source relates in abstract ways: it works (as advertised, say) because of the community, which adds a kind of value that intramural employees can sometimes exceed but which is essentially unlimited in its boundaries, unlike corporate walls. But that's the nature of community and its difference from corporations; and it also points to the great difficulty of commodifying the productive community. One can easily put a price on a corporation. Corporate boundaries exist, in part, just for that reason. A peer network, on the other hand, cannot be priced--and indeed, perhaps the historical record of the transition from commons to property can provide a useful analogy--I'm thinking of the British enclosure movement, which more or less is coeval with the rise of the modern liberal (and propertied) state. But that shift was literally violent, and there seems to be (so far?) little violence associated with free software and any migration it might undergo to privatization. In part, that's no doubt because free- and open-source software *starts* from a position of property. It's not a denial of property nor of any of its rights. Rather, it's an extension of it, but instead of limiting access, open source enables it; by the same token, it limits how one can privatize it, and some licenses are more hostile to privatization than others.
As individuals, when we join a community, we thus have to be clear as to what will happen to the intellectual property we contribute: who owns it and for how long? That is, will rights revert to me? And what can I claim about my contribution? But these questions pertain more to copyright assignment. Some community projects require contributors, for one reason or another, to assign the copyright of their contribution to the project. Usually, "the project" means the governing and organizing foundation that will then disinterestedly manage all contributions. (Ideally, the foundation is not beholden to a primary corporation/contributor/sponsor. If it were, there would likely be a failure--or at least questioning--of trust.) We then join productive communities and participate as essentially rational beings (in the classical economic sense), able not only to understand the (immediate and longterm) value of our contribution but able also to act rationally on that basis. Of course, that, like most other planks making up the classical economic ship is fiction. Indeed, part of the lure of community is precisely to get us to act exuberantly (famous word....): in excess of reason--but also in a way that fulfills our enthusiasm.
I tend to believe that for a great many, it's as much the love of what community offers as the value one invests that makes "community" now so immensely important--even regardless whether the community in question is a production or consuming one. (Disclosure: my current work relates to what I've done all my life, only in a more effective and refined way: making community, and using--as needed and strategically [fancy way of saying, "with some idea of what I'm doing"] the ever-evolving social media tools, coupled with another key driver for me, "marketing.") And I also tend to believe that our love of community is sort of like our love of and ability to use--our capability for--language, especially as Chomsky would present it: as something essential to being human. And you cannot carve that quality into quantity and price it, though you can--and this is done all the time--price specific instances.
But identifying and then applying, and doing so consistently and coherently, the boundaries making up a community, especially one that is characterized as economically essential to the production of a commodity sold by a private company, and distinguishing those boundaries from one's own is difficult. It's easy to say, "If you do something on company time, it's the company's." But if you are fully salaried, there is no moment in time when you are not operating on company time and representing the company. Some company's will allott you private time, say, or loosen the legal identity so that you can represent yourself as yourself, without implicating the company in any way. But that's a rarity, though I expect the logic of community participation social media has made and is making possible will force a change in that. Kravtiz' instance is an interesting case, and it's not by any means unique.
For if the historical corporation "owned" your time and implicitly all you did, and therefore all your representations, at least as long as you were employed by them (and for whatever period after you agreed to), the modern corporation must now also deal not only with your multiple engagements, via social media but also, arguably, what you did prior to your employment. (It's Calvinism/Puritanism yet again.) The company can simply decree that no blogs, no Tweets, no other equivalent public communication is permitted without authorization. That will naturally dampen enthusiasm, but the company that decrees that sort of policy also clearly does not really see any value gained by enthusiastic speech. Or, the company can articulate a nuanced approach, and some speech is the employees and other is not. How do--or should--shareholders then view the private rantings of a senior executive? Of course, such an executive is probably a fool for ranting publicly in the first place, modern technology or not; but move it down a notch and the question remains as a fact. Shareholder value is frequently determined by the actions and speech of the company decision makers and producers, and evaluating speech extra-mural speech makes the overall valuation of the company more difficult. It's not unlike the situation of the late 90s, when a company's worth was determined by how many page hits--eyeballs--it received, even if revenue was hardly commensurate with popularity. The belief was that at some future date, the page hit would translate to hard cash. A blog post or Tweet is quite different, but it still suggests a dimension of valuation that is must be appreciated on its own terms and which cannot easily be converted--metrically or any other way--to coins. (This is not an argument *for* privacy as such; it's rather an observation that community today is a manifold unsettling traditional, fixed and bounded corporate modes of valuation. And that this new modality of creating value--the community way--implies virtues that potentially exceed the traditional.)
List of USA Software Companies - USA Software Companies
ReplyDelete