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When minds collaborate
Sharing for free: Kios is one of Indonesia’s widely used internet forum sites
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Sharing for free: Kios is one of Indonesia’s widely used internet forum sites.
Former Wikimedia Indonesia executive director Ivan Lanin always keeps in mind an interesting quote on the nature of the collaborative movement of free online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
“The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”
Simple and powerful, it likely reflects the essence of a larger issue: collaborative communities.
They work for their own pleasure, knowing that, no matter how small, the freelance contribution they make will be useful for others. No strings attached, no ulterior motives and more importantly — or should we say amazingly — no financial gains for the energy and the hours collaborators spent on this kind of activity.
Be it writing entries for Wikipedia, tweaking open-source operating systems like Linux and its derivatives, or simply creating emoticons to be used for free in an online forum like Kaskus, the actors behind them do it all for pleasure in this Web 2.0 era associated with web applications that enable users to share information and collaborate online. And for free!
Free as in free speech, free enterprise and free will, free culture proponent Lawrence Lessig once wrote. It’s in short creativity unleashed from the restrictions of the saying that “time is money”. It’s an evolution of the previously hierarchic knowledge society strangled by academic titles or the profit-oriented creative class.
Welcome to the era when the educated middle class has risen to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: self-actualization — in perhaps its truest sense.
Wikipedia contributors like Revo Soekatno — initiator of Wikipedia Indonesia — or Ivan Lanin, for example, don’t mind spending almost eight hours at a time in a day writing and refining entries in the free online encyclopedia.
“It’s a productive pastime. It feels good to be able to write an encyclopedic entry in your own language and to disseminate it on the Internet,” Revo pointed out.
“It’s addictive,” Ivan added.
Currently, 1,400 active Wikipedia Indonesia contributors and more than 165,000 other registered users couldn’t agree more. Those who fall into the first category do at least five edits a month.
Founded in 2007, Wikimedia Indonesia, the Indonesian arm of US Wikimedia Foundation Inc. that operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, is only one among dozens of similar collaborative community movements in the country.
Like-minded souls chip in their specialized knowledge or specific interests in certain subjects to a website that had become a reference for many. From high-school students to academics, from journalists to simply anyone looking for a reliable source of information.
The contributors know well that knowledge and information is power and both should not be made exclusive to certain parties for their own benefit. Sometimes, not even for public recognition.
“The Wikiholics that I know just want to share what they know. Very few are narcissist, perhaps I’m the only one that falls into the latter category,” Ivan said jokingly.
A contributor using the nickname “Geboy”, Ivan said, wrote dozens of entries on astronomy just because he has expertise in the field and wanted people to learn more on the subject of his interest.
“That’s how this movement tends to roll in the country,” he said, adding the current top subject entries in Wikipedia Indonesia include biology, chemistry and celebrity.
The latter is perhaps another side of the collaborative movement open for anyone, including those who seek popularity.
“It’s the nature of an open-for-all community like this. There will always be free-riders, but if it does no harm then we just consider it part of the dissemination of information,” Ivan said.
The Internet and Web 2.0 has indeed revolutionized the way information, innovation and knowledge in general is disseminated. At least to those having access to the global cyber network.
The global Wikipedia movement initiated by Jimmy Wales in 2001 even surpassed the number of entries contained in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The number of entries in Wikipedia Indonesia itself grew from less than a dozen in 2003 to more than 114,000 today.
And one thing that follows is a new understanding of what intellectual property rights mean. Following the move of Wikimedia Foundation Inc., its Indonesian arm has recently adopted the Creative Commons concept, Wikimedia Indonesia activist Meutia Chaerani said.
The concept formulated by Lawrence Lessig and his non-profit organization under the same name offers a counter-movement against the “all rights reserved” conventional copyright. It aims to be the proponent of the free culture.
Offering six major licenses varying from attribution to non-commercial usage, Creative Commons allow creators to choose how they want their works to be used by the public.
“The opposite of a free culture is a ‘permission culture’ — a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past,” Lessig wrote in his book Free Culture.
This is where Wikimedia displays the same idealism as advocates of open-source.
“It’s wrong to think that the open-source community doesn’t respect copyrights. It’s the exact opposite, except that we take into account the right of the public to access whatever innovation or invention, and for its creator to choose what to do with them,” Ivan explained, adding that Wikimedia Indonesia with the help of lawyer Ari Juliano is currently drafting the Indonesian adoption of Creative Commons.
Realizing that previously the advancement of information technology tends to be monopolized by certain parties, advocates of open-source make use of this concept for the benefit of the public.
For example, an open-source software programmer can allow others to contribute and make changes to his work to help refine it. The result of the open collaboration is thus more often than not disseminated for free.
After all, don’t they have to make a living doing what they do?
This is exactly where the fact that most of collaborative community members being part of the established middle class with a shared idealism comes into play. They all have their commercial work – be it individual or as employees – and feel that they want to make a public contribution.
And there are also those who couldn’t or wouldn’t contribute their time and energy tweaking open source software or writing Wikipedia entries, but want to share the “feel good” sensation.
The Wikimedia website, for example, announced that as of end of last year, it has collected US$7.5 million donation from its users, most of whom wished remain anonymous.
“Wikipedia is about the power of people like us to do extraordinary things. People like us write Wikipedia, one word at a time. People like us fund it. It is proof of our collective potential to change the world,” Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote.
He believes in us. Do we?
