A Network Where No One is in Charge

I intended this post to be related to the previous post "Public vs. Private Benefit." The most glaring example of a "Public Benefit" process in modern times is the tremendous cooperative and sharing attitude of people who developed the modern Internet. This same open source process is growing stronger via social networking tools and provides an obvious and logical alternative to the "Private Benefit" organizations that have controlled the environmental and social justice economies of many cultures worldwide.

Today, John Markoff wrote an interesting article about this topic in the Business Section of the New York Times titled: "The Team That Put the Net in Orbit." He describes the cooperative spirit of the open source software networking movement in the 1980s that lead to the Internet as we know it today.

The article credits Al Gore, then a U.S. Senator, "with introducing legislation in 1988 to finance what he originally called a "national data highway.... Ultimately, in 1991, his bill to create a National Research and Education Network did pass. Funded by the National Science Foundation, it was instrumental in upgrading the speed of the academic and scientific network backbone leading up to the commercialized Internet." Markoff quotes Lawrence H. Landweber, one of the pioneers of "internetworking" who said of Al Gore, "He is a hero in this field."

Markoff notes that "Some 220 of the original Internet pioneers met here at the end of November to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the NSFnet, the scientific data network that was originally constructed to tie together the nation’s five supercomputer centers and that would ultimately explode into today’s Internet. By the time the academic network was shut down in 1996, it connected 6.6 million host computers and extended to 93 countries."

"The story of the network and its impact on the world is a case study in the role of serendipity in technology design and in the power of a deftly managed public-private partnership."

Markoff also states in the article that "According to a wide range of conference participants, NSFnet ultimately succeeded because of both the hacker culture of engineers that built the system and the very nature of the network they were creating; it fostered intellectual collaboration in a way not previously possible.

“The model of a network where no one is in charge is a model that can scale,” said Douglas E. Van Houweling, the chairman of the Merit Network when the NSFnet backbone was constructed."

A Wikipedia page notes that open source software "is often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open-source software is the most prominent example of open source development and often compared to user generated content."

In previous posts here I have tried to connect social networking concepts that promote user generated content with the concept of Common Adventure projects. The open source networking where "no one is in charge" fits well with my experiences and thoughts. The increasing use and value of the Geo Web and the Semantic Web also fit into what I see in the future. I will continue to try to clarify these ideas in future posts.