By Christopher Lind
October 2010
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. So what can we do about it? This is one of the most challenging questions I hear. On the one hand the questioner agrees with me that things are deeply wrong. On the other hand they see the engine of destruction frozen in place and no mechanic in sight. What is to be done?
My own approach is two fold. On the one hand I focus on the moral values or ethical principles that have stood the test of time and have shown themselves to be reliable guides in stormy weather.
On the other hand I focus on the new possibilities that globalizing technology and new ways of thinking are making available. Take Wikipedia for instance. Wikipedia was only started in 2001 and as of January 2010 it was attracting 78 million visitors monthly to a site created by 91,000 voluntary contributors.
So Wikipedia is not only an online encyclopedia, it is also representative of a new way of solving problems, of forming community and of sharing knowledge. It is a mechanism for harnessing the power of the crowd.
One of the ways an unregulated market economy works is it allows for capital to find or develop monopoly situations which can be exploited until something breaks. One of those little situations involves the publishing of highly specialized but very important scientific journals. An example might be Nature, the most cited scientific journal. This year the University of California threatened to boycott the Journal because proposed subscription charges were going to increase 400%. In spite of the argument by Nature Publishing Group that they were simply trying to eliminate a historical discount benefiting UC and few others, the news resonated deeply with university librarians who had seen journal subscriptions increase in price faster than any other segment of their budget, often after journals were taken over by larger for-profit corporations.
A Canadian librarian from UPEI, Mark Leggott, is leading the rebellion. In his case the last straw was a science database subscription, Web of Science, which was increasing its price by 120%. His response, and the response of UPEI, was to cancel the subscription and then to organize an alternative based on the power of the crowd. The response is called “Knowledge for All” and it is being supported by the Council of Atlantic University Libraries. Knowledge for All is not a small project. The dream is to index all the world’s scholarly journals, which means something between 4 and 5 million separate articles annually, using an approach that could be called community driven, crowd sourcing or open source, or following a wikipedia model. It will save a lot of money too.
Librarians in PEI and elsewhere are saying the system is broken. However, instead of throwing up their hands, they are teaching themselves how to become their own mechanic. Relying on the shared frustration and shared ingenuity of the group, just like the farmers of yesteryear, they are proposing to build a brand new kind of co-op. It will be light on centralized administration and heavy on group participation. It directs the new globalizing technology to the service of the community and aims at Knowledge for All. How cool is that?
- Visit my website: christopherlind.ca
- Visit my latest book: Rumours of a Moral Economy
- For other moral economy blogs see christopherlind.blogspot.com
- Visit my Facebook account: www.facebook.com/christopherlind2
