Political Collaborative Production

"It’s not yet clear whether experiments in incorporation will do for group action what novel forms of copyright have done for collaborative production, but it’s worth a shot.”

On a Monday morning in March of 2006, forty thousand students in Southern California stunned teachers and administrators by walking out of school to protest a proposed anti-immigrant bill. The students blocked traffic as they marched to City Hall, creating a very visible and public display. They had been inspired by an adult demonstration that had taken place two days prior, and had scrambled to find a way to participate themselves. Armed with MySpace and text messaging, the students were able to coordinate with one another rapidly and effectively, not just person-to-person, but also in groups.

We all know and love these stories of collective political action enabled by new tools. Mobile phones were essential in organizing protestors and forcing the resignation of Filipino President Joseph Estrada in 2001. And now, the Web is being used to organize the pro-Tibet protests dogging the 2008 Olympic torch. These are great stories, and they bode well for a reinvigoration of political protest worldwide.

However, they all share the same characteristic, one that is true of many examples of collective action: they rely on stop energy. The usual stories of collective action have to do with short-term pressure brought upon existing institutions to try to stop them from doing something. Generally, the goal of the action is some sort of capitulation—someone resigns from office, some proposed law is defeated, and so on. There are comparatively few examples of groups using new digital tools to start or sustain long-term political action. These groups wouldn’t be working to elect politicians or to propose or oppose laws, but to solve political problems directly, through the actions of their members.

This seems to be a particularly political failing; there are thousands of examples of large-scale and long-term creativity in the sphere of intellectual production. These efforts create value not just for the participants, but also for the millions of users who access these kinds of products for free.

What would it take to copy that collaborative pattern for politics? How can we find ways to encourage the formation of groups with explicitly political goals? One intriguing possibility is a legal structure similar to that of Open Source software systems such as Linux, or to those employed by open collaborative products like Wikipedia.

The curious piece of legal jujitsu that makes Open Source software possible is the licensing agreement. To qualify as Open Source, a piece of software has to have a license guaranteeing that its recipe— or source code—remains available to programmers, now and in the future. Rather than restricting rights of users through copyright, an Open Source license actually expands them.

Similarly, the Creative Commons project has created a set of licenses that allow writers, photographers, and other content-creators to ensure that their work remains available for republishing as well as for other forms of re-use.27 As Steve Weber points out in his brilliant book The Success of Open Source, these kinds of licensing schemes ensure par-ticipants—of the past, present and future—that their work can never be co-opted. This legal guarantee is critical both to bringing groups together and to sustaining communal work. The common thread is the use of copyright law. While this social mechanism has traditionally been designed to reserve and restrict rights, the models cited above employ copyright law to guarantee and expand them.

Copyright provides a formal mechanism for deferring to the wishes of creators. We don’t have any such tool for group effort outside of intellectual production, but we could, because society also has a formal mechanism for deferring to the decision-making power of groups. It’s called incorporation, and it could be pressed into service to create a new zone of expanded rights for collective action in the same way a Creative Commons license expands rights of production and re-use.

Imagine going into your local bank with four or five friends and announcing that you want to open a joint account. You’d be laughed out of the room. The best you can do is to get one person to open the account and add check-signing privileges, because the bank won’t recognize the group as a unit. Now imagine coming back a month later and announcing that you and those same friends have incorporated— given your relationship a legal and formal body—and you want an account. No problem, just sign on the dotted line. Your group has become legally recognizable.

What incorporation allows us to do is to grant legal personhood to a group, so that group can raise and spend money, make decisions, and enter into contracts. Incorporation so solidifies the existence of the group that even if all the members change, the group is still regarded as a legitimate unit. IBM still exists today, though not one of its founding employees is alive.

The problem, of course, is that incorporating is onerous, and, because the CEO generally has enormous and disproportionate executive power, it generally ends up subverting group decision-making. The analogous bit of jujitsu would be to create a corporate form that allows groups to come together easily and quickly in the ways now made possible by our digital and social tools, while giving those groups the legitimacy that incorporation provides, which includes the ability to raise and spend money, to offer and enter into contracts, and to adopt binding forms of governance.

A constellation of recent experiments points to this model of group action. Beth Noveck’s wonderful paper “A Democracy of Groups” lays the groundwork for deference by the state in order to make group action more productive. David Johnson, a colleague of Noveck’s at New York Law School, has created a Virtual Company model in Vermont, which allows the formation of corporations whose members know one another mainly or solely online. In addition, their productive contribution comes not in the form of invested capital, but in donated time and attention. (In the Virtual Company, sweat equity is the principal form of equity.) In the U.K., the Community Interest Corporation allows for the creation of businesses with social goals so deeply embedded in their charters that even future owners can’t reverse them.

It’s not yet clear whether experiments in incorporation will do for group action what novel forms of copyright have done for collaborative production, but it’s worth a shot. As our society has become increasingly connected, we’ve generated a huge, and largely unused, participatory surplus of people who are ready to contribute to efforts and causes larger than themselves. We are only now figuring out how to tap that surplus, and while protests and pressure groups are a necessary part of any political system, real political change will be generated by groups that start or sustain long-term action. If I had to pick one method of rebooting civic life, it would be by finding new ways to grant groups the legitimacy essential to pursuing long-term and constructive goals on their own.

About the Author
Clay Shirky is a writer, educator, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization (Penguin Press, 2008). He is an adjunct professor at New York University (NYU) in their graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, and consultant to a variety of organizations on network technologies.

27 Creative Commons is a non-profit organization started by Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford University, devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to legally build upon and share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses, depending on the one chosen, restrict only certain rights (or none) of the work instead of traditional copyright, which is more restrictive.