PA R t ICIPAt Ion As sUs tA In A BL e CooPeR At Ion In…

   PA R t ICIPAt Ion As sUs tA In A BL e
          CooPeR At Ion In PURsUI t
                  oF PUBL IC GoA L s

                           Yochai Benkler




  "   Large-scale collaboration, among widely-dispersed


                                                                "
      populations, is manageable, sustainable, and effective.




t       he networked information economy changes a set of physi-
        cal facts and enables a cultural trend, which could make an
        appreciable difference in the basic architecture of participa-
tion in contemporary democracies. The physical capital necessary for
effective production and communication of information, knowledge,
and culture is widely distributed in the population. Processors, stor-
age, communications capacity, as well as audio and video sensors,
are now in the hands of everyone with a computer or mobile phone.
This means that the practical limitations on large-scale collaboration
among geographically and socially dispersed people have been dra-
matically reduced.
     Domains of action that require the acquisition of information; its
organization and analysis; its production into knowledge structures
                                  8
Yochai Benkler                                                     n    


and structures of meaning; and the capacity to tell stories about how
things are and how they might become no longer depend on access
to significant material capital resources. Individuals can act socially in
ways that traditionally had local effects with little economic or politi-
cal salience, but now can have significant effects in both social and
economic-political domains. These technical and social facts have
given rise to a cultural trend of greater engagement in individual and
collective social action aimed to achieve results in the world without
going through the traditional structures of effective action, power,
and authority that typified industrial society. This is how we got free
or open-source software, which practically anyone who uses e-mail,
browses websites, writes blogs or edits wikis uses without even know-
ing it, because it is what runs major portions of these services. This is
how we got Wikipedia. This is how we got YouTube, MySpace and
Facebook.
     Two critical points emerge out of the experience of the networked
information economy. First, people can, with relatively moderate and
manageable levels of effort, come together to act effectively on prob-
lems that they could not tackle in the past. Second, people can and do
work cooperatively together, needing neither markets nor hierarchies,
governmental or otherwise, to organize them. Large-scale collabora-
tion, among widely-dispersed populations, is manageable, sustainable,
and effective.
     This is a new and important realization. It can be, and in many
instances already is being, applied to problems of democratic gov-
ernance: from the construction of the public sphere, through the
harnessing of cooperative models for implementing government over-
sight on an ongoing basis, to harnessing peer production to define
problems and solutions for public action.
     The networked public sphere. The mass-mediated public sphere
used to concentrate the production of stories about who we are, what
0    n   PARtICIPAtIon As sUstAInABLe CooPeRAtIon In PURsUIt oF PUBLIC GoALs



challenges face us, and how we might overcome them. The public at large
was reduced to passivity in this model of production; we were no more
than "eyeballs." The networked public sphere is comprised of e-mails
and e-mail lists, blogs ranging from individual thoughts to professional
and semi-professional new voices like Instapundit or Talking Points
Memo, to vast collaboration platforms like DailyKos with thousands of
contributors, or flash campaigns that re-purpose other platforms, like
the Burma campaign on Facebook. A dozen or more years of experi-
ence with the networked public sphere has taught us a lot about how it
can operate. It is not, it turns out, the republic of yeoman authors that
some hoped it would be. But neither is it the trackless cacophony of
antagonistic echo chambers that others predicted. Instead, we have seen
a public sphere where millions, rather than hundreds or thousands, can
participate in setting the agenda, filtering what is important, and telling
our common stories. Not everyone; but a large and significant change
from where we were a mere decade ago.
    The most visible successes of the networked public sphere have
been in the domain of playing watchdog. Older stories from the past
half decade are well known: the critique of Diebold voting machines;
the CBS/Dan Rather report on George Bush's military record; the
debates that led to Trent Lott's resignation. More recently, Josh Mar-
shall at Talking Points Memo uncovered the U.S. Attorney purge that
resulted in Alberto Gonzales's resignation. A collaboration initiated
by Porkbusters, and ultimately encompassing blogs on both sides
of the American political blogosphere, mobilized readers to investi-
gate the identity of a senator who secretly blocked legislation that
required more transparency in government spending, an investigation
which successfully identified the culprit and forced removal of the
block. Recently, we have begun to see organizations like the Sunlight
Foundation provide better tools for collaborative production of the
watchdog function. This foundation funds projects that take govern-
Yochai Benkler                                                     n    


ment data and collate and render it in platforms that allow citizens to
collaborate on investigating and identifying problems about which
they particularly care.
     Both the rise of networked debate and the rise of a peer-produced
watchdog function characterize a vastly different role and level of
mobilization for citizens than was typical as recently as a decade ago.
The social distance between any citizen and someone who can speak
and be heard by a substantial community has shrunk. Instead of six
degrees of separation, it is now no more than one or two. As we walk
around with video cameras in our pockets (our mobile phones), we
can capture images and sounds and expect to be seen and heard, as we
never could before. As these capabilities increase, we are already seeing,
and will likely continue to see, a shift in attitude--from passive accep-
tance of forces greater than ourselves, to a sense that what we see, care
about, and say could become the subject of a broader community of
concern and action. And this attitudinal change is the linchpin to the
possibility of a change in practice.
     New forms of engaged collaboration. The next phase in the inte-
gration of large-scale cooperation into democracy will come when we
begin to use platforms for collecting, filtering, and refining propos-
als for action and active contributions. It is simplest to imagine this
occurring at the level of local government. People living their day-to-
day lives encounter a multitude of obstacles and overcome them using
diverse solutions. Some problems cannot be solved systematically.
Some can, but require attention and effort unavailable to local govern-
ments. Developing systems that allow people to report problems, offer
solutions, vet them, compare solutions across municipalities, and pro-
pose action could overcome the limited resources at the local level. On
the free-software model, everyone is a beta tester of their own physical
environment, and all bugs can be fixed in that environment if enough
people look at the problem. Taking this approach to the national level,
    n   PARtICIPAtIon As sUstAInABLe CooPeRAtIon In PURsUIt oF PUBLIC GoALs



there is no reason that federal agencies cannot implement similar
systems. We now have the Patent and Trademark Office experiment-
ing with the Peer-to-Patent system, which gives patent applicants
fast-track treatment if they submit their patent application to com-
munity peer review, which in turn advises the patent examiners on
whether the patent is indeed novel and nonobvious. (Please see Beth
Simone Noveck's essay beginning on page 192 to learn more about
the Peer-to-Patent system.) There is no reason the Federal Commu-
nications Commission could not implement a similar platform for
its decisions, such as in the area of wireless communications regula-
tion, or why states and the federal government cannot create effective
platforms for teachers to participate in the development of teaching
materials, or to connect schools to volunteers to help with reading,
math, and history.
     Implementing such systems is complicated. There are risks of
cacophony, strategic gaming, and incompetence. And yet these were
once objections to the plausibility of Wikipedia or free software. We
have found ways to avoid both malevolence and incompetence in
large-scale collaborations, without re-introducing a hierarchy that dis-
empowers most citizens. And that is what we must do in designing
systems for citizen participation in the ongoing process of managing
our collective lives.
     While the implementation may be far from simple, the basic prin-
ciple is. The widespread distribution of physical capital necessary to
produce our information environment has triggered a set of new cul-
tural practices oriented around effective, active social cooperation on
a wide range of activities, including the provision of important public
goods. This new culture is not yet universal, but is growing rapidly as
the number of people who have edited a Wikipedia article, uploaded
a video to YouTube, or commented or tagged a post increases. This
cultural shift in self-perception, from passive couch potato to active
Yochai Benkler                                                    n   


participant in collaborative practices for making one's own informa-
tion universe, opens the opportunity for a more robust, sustainable
level of involvement by citizens in the governance of their society.
It allows us to move from the minimal implementation of universal
participation as the formal right of suffrage, to constructing platforms
that will actually engage people in effective, sustainable efforts aimed
toward identifying our differences and commonalities, and acting
together to further our common good.



About the Author
Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal
Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School,
he was Joseph M. Field `55 Professor of Law at Yale. He is the author of
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and
Freedom (Yale Press 2006).