IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

222 Chapter 10
local user experts whom people can call on for help and advice. The
scheme is being orchestrated around the BBC’s well-known gardening programs
and aims to create local peer-to-peer communities of learning and
support. 29
Unlike the point-to-mass paradigm of the manufacturing era, a collaborative
or open model implies mass participation in creation of a service
or situation. A new kind of immersive innovation emerges as the functional
divisions between users and producers of a service become blurred.
More than seventy-five thousand collaborative software projects are listed
at Sourceforge.net, a website for the open-source community with eight
hundred thousand registered users. Sourceforge is part of the Open Source
Development Network, whose websites deliver more than 160 million page
views and reach 9 million unique visitors per month. Projects listed
on Sourceforge range from communications (10,327 projects) and games/
entertainment (9,648 projects) to sociology (262 projects) and religion
(194 projects). 30
Canadian writers Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirsh call this collaborative
gathering and analysis of information ‘‘open-source intelligence.’’ Its principles
include peer review, reputation, the free sharing of products, and
flexible levels of involvement and responsibility. 31 For Thomas Goetz in
Wired, ‘‘open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line
did for mass production.’’ Goetz tells the story of how an intravenous (IV)
saline drip was redesigned by a group called Design That Matters to make
it cheaper to use in cholera outbreaks. (These most often occur in lessdeveloped
countries, where the high costs of products designed in the
North are hard or impossible to sustain.) The team needed to draw on
more medical expertise than it had available, so it turned to ThinkCycle,
a Web-based industrial-design project that brings together engineers, designers,
academics, and professionals from a variety of disciplines. Physicians
and engineers pitched in—vetting designs and recommending new
paths. Suggestions that emerged from ThinkCycle’s collaborative approach
led to an ingenious new IV system that costs about $1.25 to manufacture,
against the $2,000 of previous solutions. ‘‘Open source harnesses the distributive
powers of the Internet, parcels the work out to thousands, and
uses their piecework to build a better whole,’’ reported Goetz; ‘‘it works
like an ant colony, where the collective intelligence of the network supersedes
any single contributor.’’ 32