iCommons, Networked Communities and Pre-colonial African Societies

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At the iCommons Summit in Rio, Brazilian Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil gave a lyrical account of his world view, as well as an unusually for a Minister – singing us a few choruses. One of the things he said was, “I am still cultivating this strange and provocative taste of bringing together ideas that seemed to be bound to be eternally separate. just like parabolic and camara. I like to see the world echoing just like the head of a berimbau. I like to connect the differences.” (In the interests of global confusion – the English text of this speech can be found on the Australian Creative Commons site.)

So, in the interests of making the world echo, and of putting a different spin on the challenge posed at iCommons for developing countries, to leapfrog from the 19th to the 21st century, I would like to make a link between pre-colonial history in my part of the world and the iCommons discussion of the 21st century networked society. Perhaps the 21st century networked world has something to learn from 18th century Southern Africa.

Judy Breck, in her Golden Swamp virtual learning blog, describes the networked society in relation to the lateral, nodal structure envisaged for the iCommons. This has been greeted with perplexity by some.

In a 2002 article in the Journal of Social History,1 Clifton Crais (whose book2 on pre-colonial Eastern Cape history I co-published at Wits University Press in 1992) describes how social reality of the people living there was remade by the colonists of the 19th century. The idea that these societies were territorially-defined, top-down chieftainships was an invention of the colonial officials trying to make sense of the social and political order in the only language they knew – that of the nation state. What Crais describes could have a number of intriguing parallels with those battling to understand a networked iCommmons:

Political power tended to be localized, boundaries fluid and vague, and the authority of chiefs highly variable. The political landscape was both homogeneous and kaleidoscopic, with widely dispersed material and symbolic resources and constantly changing political domains. Even at moments of relative stasis domains of authority very frequently overlapped. Political identities were multiple, with the fluidity of identities generally increasing with geographical distance from any given center of power.

The absence of any unequal distribution of economic goods, trade, or population mitigated against the centralization of power. Second, military technology and strategy were widely democratic. Third, there were multiple nodes and overlapping domains of authority.

I also enjoy the parallels when it comes to the nature of leadership:

Europeans and especially early colonial officials very often found African polities to be exasperating and scarcely intelligible. One thing seemed reasonably comprehensible, that is most easily translatable into their own political epistemologies: that there were some men of elevated status who wore and laid claim to the skins of leopards and lions. These men often practiced polygyny, lived in larger communities, usually possessed more livestock than others, and were referred to and used the title “inkosi” but beyond that seemingly little differentiated chiefs from most everyone else…

Leopard and lion skins might be an appealing garb for the plenary panel at next year’s summit, although I am not so sure of the polygyny aspect. But seriously, where is the historian or anthropologist who could take this analogy further for us…

1Custom and the Politics of Sovereignty in South Africa, Journal of Social History,39 (3) 2002

2White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865. Cambridge University Press, 1992

Ideology or Network – the iCommons Summit stirs up the debate

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The iCommons summit in Rio a few weeks ago was a very successful and lively event and is still generating waves – like a stone thrown into water – creating web discussions and blogs in ever-widening concentric rings. The major trigger for the debate that has followed the conference – at least overtly – was the acceptance of sponsorship from Microsoft for the iCommons Summit and Larry Lessig’s welcoming of Microsoft’s initiative to provide a plugin for attaching Creative Commons licences to Office documents. In the ensuing discussion, particularly in Tom Chance’s Newsforge article, I was surprised to see the Open Society, which provides my Fellowship and which was the driving force behind the Budapest Open Access Initiative, one of the major Open Access declarations, lumped with Microsoft and Google as commercial organisations with the potential ultimately of corrupting or undermining the more altruistic goals of the Commons. Where does this come from?

Behind this all, however, is the much older argument between the pragmatic approaches of Creative Commons licences and the more ideologically-driven approach of the GNU licence, or the Free/Libre movement, which considers only share-alike licences as being truly free. At the iCommons, Lawrence Lessig and Jamie Boyle both said that at the heart of the Commons movement was the idea of choice – rather than ‘the one true answer’. Creative Commons is not a movement with a single ideology, Lessig said and Boyle made a plea for the recognition that there is not a ‘single deified freedom’ and that ‘it is a mistake to make my freedom your freedom.’ There is good reason, in many cases, Lessig argued for the choice of Some Rights Reserved, or Non-Derivative licences – for example the moral commitment, in one case, to children who had been the participants in a project.

In the end of the conference, the Summit had to address the distinction between Creative Commons and the iCommons. This is the second iCommons Summit and the time seemed to have come to articulate how the two organisations should relate to one another. Up until now, it seemed that iCommons had been in an undefined way some kind of umbrella body pulling together a Creative Commons that had spread horizontally into a number of countries (including South Africa) and vertically into a variety of projects. Now it has been decided that Creative Commons will be a body concerned with licences, while the iCommons is a network advancing an (as yet undefined) vision of the Commons as a community.

So, if you want a lively discussion about pragmatism and idealism, networked communities, oligarchies and democracies, socialism or liberal democracy, professionalism and amateurism, all related to the Internet community and its values, then go to the various online debates and blogs, of which the best is probably the Open Democracy debate: Remix World: Towards the Global Digital Commons. Here Tony Curzon Price puts the pragmatic view, while Becky Hogge provides a more radical challenge. Then follow the links.

Journal Publishing Gets a Makeover at the iCommons Summit

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At the iCommons Summit in Rio in late June, copyright scholar James Boyle, author of some remarkably incisive critiques of copyright conventions, put it in a nutshell – “We have a scientific publishing system’, he said, ‘that is massively dysfunctional and really, really broken.’ If that is the case in the USA, how much more so in South Africa, where scholarly publishing of any description struggles to survive in what is a really, really marginal market? We need to ask ourselves, therefore, whether we are capable of taking up the challenge put out by our Brazilian hosts at the conference, to take a leap from the 19th century to the 21st, thinking of ourselves in the developing world as capable of being in the front line of new approaches. Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian Minister of Culture, said in his opening address: “The player who today loses can become the winner. Everything changes, all the time. And only those who understand change can conquer victory, or yet, victories, which are always partial.’

So what are the new developments that emerged at the Summit, at least in relation to scholarly publishing? It is now well established that Open Access publishing increases citation rates, sometimes dramatically, particularly in developing countries. For example, Subbiah Arunachalam said that going OA had radically increased the impact and reach of a number of Indian journals, with the Journal of Public Medicine now getting over 1 million hits a year. OA, he said, is a way of getting local and relevant knowledge disseminated, too, as it can also dissipate local boundaries.

But now Open Access journal publishing is moving into version 2.0 at the Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS ONE has a number of radical new features, built, around an understanding of the potential that can be unleashed if one takes full advantage of what the networked environment can offer. It will be launched later this year, as an inclusive peer reviewed publication that blurs the boundaries between the different scientific fields. Rather than regarding a journal article as being ‘some form of absolute truth’, PLOS One will be set up for ongoing debate and discussion and will also allow for interactive development of online papers, building on conclusions and strengthening data. Most strikingly, it will allow for publication within weeks of acceptance, with open and continuous peer
review happening in the open, after publication.

There is enormous discussion going on around journals and scholarly publishing and there might well be batter alternatives to the way we do things. With the Academy of Science’s major review of journal publishing in South Africa newly published, is it not time to open up the discussion here?