WHO’S DOING IT RIGHT…?
May 26th, 2006
The Open Business Project needs help defining exactly what an open business is. That’s a tough one. To way too many people Open means the same as Free. But there is very little that can be truly free since we all need to eat and clothe ourselves. Somebody, somewhere has to pay. But I’m willing to engage in the discussion. From OBP:
Now we are beginning to understand how in the digitally networked world “attention” becomes not only a currency with which you can attract advertisement revenue, but a much more diverse and crucial feature of emerging open business models built around participatory architectures, where co-creation and collaboration are the norm and not the exception.
Given this our working definition of ‘open” includes mechanisms for opening up ways to create, produce, collaborate and share a wide variety of informational resources.
Yet, thinking practically, MySpace — one of the best known ‘open” platforms for sharing content and information – recently changed its copyright policy following acquisition by Murdoch. Today everything which is uploaded to the site, your pictures, movies and recordings belongs, legally at least, to them.
This position is clearly in opposition to some of the benefits sought by loosening intellectual property restrictions. The definition of ‘open” also depends, in this regard, on encouraging communities which are sustainable.
There is also another aspect of how “Openess” changes the way business operates: Big industrial organisational models which were made for the era of mass-media and mass-production make no sense anymore. An online record label run by a staff of three can perform similar functions to a big record label run by hundreds of people.
New organizational forms, new management styles and cultural norms are emerging, as well as new revenue models. But are these businesses more ethical, because they can re-distribute more, or radically reduce the costs of publishing making access to educational resources much cheaper?
Twenty-five years ago when I began to preach that all media should move to the Internet, the first question out of every publisher’s mouth was: How do you make money from it? The question is still a good one. But now I’d frame it this way: Which are the successful open busiensses and what are they doing?
