The following are some of the lessons that science might have to offer other areas of cloud culture:
clouds form around key contributors and interesting questions, which attract contributions from many people
someone trusted has to put in place a kernel, the beginnings of a project to which others add
it has to be easy for people to share knowledge, access codified data and do something with it
leaders of the community respected by their peers must set the rules of engagement
individual contributors must get something from their participation – either in helping them to solve a problem, in terms of their reputation, standing in the community, opportunities to learn and to make further contacts in the network
the collective effort needs to be fed by transparency, open information sharing and rapid feedback, so people can adjust quickly. An approach that is too bureaucratic or centralised will kill off collaboration.
How might we carry these lessons into the field of international relations? Let us examine what it could mean for public diplomacy.
Open Source Diplomacy
The idea of public diplomacy rose to prominence in the 1990s as governments came to terms with an international environment that had become more complex and less stable. Governments had to interact with a multiplicity of international actors – regions, cities, NGOs, corporations, radical political groups. State to state diplomacy became just part of a game involving many more players and ever-shifting sets of rules. A widespread response was to invest more in public diplomacy: attempt to manage the international environment and promote national interests by engaging directly with foreign publics, to ‘win the battle of hearts and minds’, for example through dedicated television and radio channels, education and cultural initiatives. Yet public diplomacy retained an important continuity with the past: it was the projection of power, albeit by soft means, to persuade and attract foreigners to buy into a state’s goals and values, rather than through the hard power of military action and economic sanctions. Public diplomacy was a different tool to do the same job. The soft power of public diplomacy was a license for brand building to be applied to nations much as it was to international products.
This kind of top-down branding approach, which treats people as targets rather than participants in an exchange of views, is unlikely to work in the era of cloud culture, when people will have many more sources of information, places for debate, the means to have their say and an expectation that they will be engaged rather than lectured. A more fruitful model is instead to see this as a task for building cultural relations, links between people through culture. The best way to understand how that might be done is to adopt an approach inspired by open source software.
Open source software is software that anyone can use, in which the source code is left open to be modified by other users. Open source software proceeds from the assumption that the basic code is probably unfinished and at best a rough approximation of what is needed. The best way to improve it, open source programmers argue, is to leave the code open so people can add improvements and fix bugs as they use and adapt the code in situ.
The key to that process of collaborative learning and improvement is that no one – including the originators – has the right to prevent someone else using the code. Generally people who seek to use open software are also under an obligation to contribute back any improvements they make. They cannot prejudice the rights of other people to use the code by locking it up. Open source has set off a cycle of collaborative, shared development among geeks. Most of the web and many corporate computer systems, including Google’s, run on open source software. These communities, such as Linux and Ubuntu, are the inspiration for much of the optimism about the collaborative potential of the web. Steven Webber in The Success of Open Source 40 argues that open source represents a new way for communities to organise work by labour self-distributing itself to relevant tasks rather than following a division of labour handed down from on high. Richard Sennett in The Craftsman 41 argues that the self-regulating, problem-solving work done in open source communities represents a resurrection of the craft tradition. Christopher Kelty in Two Bits,42 his journey through open source communities, describes them as ‘recursive publics’: self-sustaining communities that are simultaneously a market, a network, a public space and a movement. Media theorist Axel Bruns in Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond 43 writes of communities that share resources but reward individual contribution, through a process of peer-to-peer evaluation. This has all helped to feed the arguments of other commentators – Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom in The Starfish and the Spider and Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in Groundswell 44 – who argue that the web opens up a wider menu of possibilities for people to be organised without organisations and leaders.
Eric Raymond, one of the original theorists of open source software, famously distinguished between the cathedral and the bazaar as models for organising work.45 For Raymond, a proprietary software program designed by a central team was like building a cathedral according to a master plan. Open source software emerged through a more chaotic, collaborative and decentralised process that was more like a bazaar in which good ideas spread fast, from the bottom up. Traditional diplomacy is the diplomatic equivalent of the cathedral: teams of experts in endless talks over the detail of treaties. The recent climate change summit in Copenhagen was a classic example of this kind of diplomacy at work on a global scale. However, more of the future will belong to open source style approaches, modelled on the bazaar. These involve mobilising a mass of players, many of them in civil society, behind a new initiative. The Copenhagen talks were shadowed by an encampment of NGOs and other groups, who were the geeks-in-chief of climate change policy-making open source style. From now on almost every large-scale effort at traditional diplomacy on controversial issues, to organise treaties between states, will be accompanied by an open source equivalent.
Creating platforms for these often grassroots, multinational communities to form will be a vital goal for cultural relations. Some international NGOs and charities – Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Oxfam – themselves creatures of the old media world, are developing ways to enable their supporters to become more engaged in campaigns, contributing more than money, and engaging more directly with those they are trying to help in the developing world. Ali Fisher, director of Mappa Mundi consultants, puts it this way:
The open source approach argues for working as a genuine partner with groups that seek to achieve congruous ends through providing them with what they need in an open and transparent manner. The key is control; support cannot be used for coercion. This approach builds a community that is based on common interest and ability – not a hierarchy that is based on power.46