GoodGNUs

I was reading Cory Docotorow’s short article on the psychology of making gaming pay in The Guardian, earlier this afternoon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/14/technology-2009-14-apr-cory-doctorow-gaming

As it neared its conclusion, it drew a parallel between the Free Software business model (the most common one that is: download our software for free, but pay us if you want help), and arbitrage between time-poor & cash-poor game players, exchanging in-game items in fantasy worlds for real money.

Whether attained by coercion, social engineering, generosity or guilt, this arbitrage of the cash-rich and the time-rich is at the centre of many of the new business models emerging on the net. It’s damned close to the GNU/Linux business model – get the OS for free, pay us (or some other group of geeks) if you can’t be arsed to figure out how to make it work.

All very interesting, of course, but something that stuck out in the article is the final paragraph.

This business model has a certain attractive stability to it, in that it relies on technology being in a constant, perpetual state of semi-brokenness, which is a fundamental characteristic of the information age, where constant change ensures constant chaos.

Now we’re back in Cult-of-Done territory. We’re in a time of change, and that means what worked yesterday, may not work tomorrow. It’s easy to see why some people don’t find such a world very easy to adapt to, and some decide that the whole thing is not relevant to them – but for knowledge workers (see Clay Shirky’s much talked-about post on the Death of Newspapers), this is the territory we’re in.

Looking for Quality

The problem now becomes not “How do we work with technology being in a constant, perpetual state of semi-brokenness,” but “How can we adapt this changing, semi-broken mess into something not just useful, but something of quality”?

In my case, it’s by being the interface between various great (but not necessarily complete) bits of Free Software, and some Voluntary Sector organisations that just want to get things done, and not worry about technology.

More specifically it’s with some very exciting new Social Enterprise start-ups that’ll be blogged about here in the next few weeks & months.

Down the garden path

However embracing this chaos has meant me letting go of cherished ideas of over-engineering, and instead building robustness from flexibility & quick response to change.

No wonder it’s such a pleasure to leave all this behind for a bit of gardening now and then - a time-tested source of predictability & chaos, with quality in the eye of the beholder. :)