Citizendium Blog

Should be fun:

Is the Future of the Internet the Future of Knowledge?
Tuesday 27 May 2008 16:00 - 18:00

Larry Sanger, Editor in Chief of Citzendium and a founder of Wikipedia
Andrew Keen, author of ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture’

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS. This event is open to the public. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk

This event brings together two of the leading figures in media and academic debates about the value and potential of user-generated content. In this moderated debate, Larry Sanger and Andrew Keen will be challenged to answer a range of questions relating to the Internet’s role in creating and disseminating knowledge.

This event is organised by the Weidenfeld Institute Leadership and Scholarship Scheme in collaboration with the OII.

A few days later I’ll be in Santa Barbara (UCSB) for a social computing workshop.

We hope to make the initial announcement, finally, of that free educational content project in June.

What do the following pieces of jargon have in common?

• free software
• open source software (OSS, FOSS)
• open content 
• Internet communities
• Web 2.0
• strong collaboration
• mass collaboration
• collaborative revolution
• crowdsourcing
  (Can you add to this list?)

Answer: they are all used to describe the phenomenon of a bunch of people working together online, in open communities, to create specific bodies of free information, like open source software, Citizendium, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Slashdot, Web forums and mailing lists, and so forth.  Granted, they each mean something slightly different.  Internet geeks can expound on the differences and meanings at great length.

What name will win out in the long run?  Or does that question not make sense — are we really dealing with many significantly different phenomena here, which really need all these different descriptors?

The Citizendium is different. Well, you already knew that. It’s not quite like anything out there. But what you might not realize is how it is different. You might have thought that it is different mainly because it makes a special role for experts, or because we require real names and identities. Yes, it is different for those reasons, but in those respects, it is very similar to academic projects.

The way in which our little (but growing!) project is different from almost everything out there is that it is, arguably, the first truly self-governing content community.

Or to put it more pithily: Citizendium is different because it is yours. It is owned and controlled by you, Citizens, and it always will be. That is how we have designed it and that is what our still-developing governance system will guarantee. I do not mean only that your content has a Creative Commons license. Instead, when we get the funds and size to enable our breaking free of the Tides Center, we will become a membership organization: our Citizens will be the literal legal owners and controllers of the project, the servers, the domain names, everything. We are developing an online polity.

This isn’t true of, say, YouTube. YouTube is owned and controlled by Google. It isn’t true of MySpace, which is owned and controlled by NewsCorp, or FaceBook, which has private owners.

But it also isn’t true of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is owned and controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation, management of which is largely cut off from Wikipedia contributors. This is not surprising, since Wikipedia contributors are largely anonymous and for that reason simply cannot be organized into a coherent polity. This is why most online content projects cannot become true self-governing polities: to be self-governing, we have to know who we are.

It also isn’t true of most open source software projects. Many of them are controlled by “benevolent dictators” or by what would be called “oligarchies” in the political world.

I’m not saying that these other projects (or companies) are evil or wrong because they are not pure self-governing polities. But I do think that the Citizendium is showing the world a better way, one that is more in keeping with our common democratic principles of governance, and one that, in the long run, will prove to be more robust and responsible.

I’m also not saying we are absolutely unique. But can you think of a single reasonably successful online content project that is not only open content, but also governed and owned directly by the contributors? Can you think of one the founder of which has pledged to step down as chief organizer in order to begin an orderly, rule-governed transfer of power? Can you think of one that cares about things like constitutional rule of law and separation of powers? I don’t pretend to track everything going on online, but I am hard pressed to think of one.

If you can think of any politico-philosophical allies of ours, let me know below!

(By the way, see also “No membership without ownership!“)

There’s a rather positive description of the Citizendium, and especially Eduzendium, in an April 28 article in Inside Higher Ed.  Eduzendium co-ordinator Sorin Matei is quoted.  The project is compared to Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, and Knol.  The question is: which system is best for scholars?  Well — let a thousand flowers bloom and we’ll see in 5-10 years which are prettiest.

CZ is also positively mentioned in a well-reviewed new book by Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

As many people have pointed out and discovered, Encyclopedia Britannica has been made free for bloggers and wiki writers.  (Here’s a take on that from a Citizendium editor — John Dennehy, who is also behind a CUNY experiment with Eduzendium that seems to have gone pretty well.  Do we have microbes?  We’re absolutely disease-ridden.)

The notorious Valleywag blog reported that the Wikimedia Foundation is “gerrymandering” its board, and as my name came up, I appeared on the scene, Voldemort-like (at least to read the post).  It seems that the Wikimedia Foundation has reserved a seat for a “Community Founder.”  Hmm.  As Valleywag says, “Here’s an amusing thought: Why not have Larry Sanger, whom some say has a better claim to founding Wikipedia than Wales, bid for the spot in December, when Wales’s term expires?”

Yeeah.  Well, I’ll be busy.  Very, very busy.  We’re going to announce a major new educational content project in the next month or two, and between that, the encyclopedia project, and other stuff, my plate is full.  Besides, Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to CZ in a few more years.  Uh,