Framing idea for introducing newcomers to concept of public goods

I like “Abundance + Freedom = Public Goods”.

Here’s a version with re-tweaked wording. I find “practically” problematic in that context because I’m not sure whether to interpret it as a synonym for “virtually”/“effectively” etc. or in the sense of practical vs. impractical.

20211027171208
Public goods 2x2.ods (14.3 KB)

However, after looking at the Wikipedia page about public goods, I’m wondering whether we’re stretching the concept a bit too much to match what we want to use it for? The terminology section says:

Non-rivalrous: accessible by all while one’s usage of the product does not affect the availability for subsequent use.

Non-excludability: that is, it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good.

There’s nothing there about copying, adapting, or sharing - just about access / usage / consumption, and non-excludability is described as about the inability to exclude people, not a voluntary decision not to exclude people.

2 Appreciations

Might it be more accurate, and easier for people to understand, to summarize what Snowdrift is about as “Crowdmatching for free software and free culture”?

Or maybe “Crowdmatching for free/libre/open goods”?

I know this requires many people to learn what free/libre/open means, but most people also need to learn what public goods means. I’m wondering if the concept of public goods, as understood by many people who are already familiar with it, doesn’t actually fully explain what we’re aiming to fund, and is easily confused with things like NPR and PBS (which the Wikipedia page on public goods cites as an example of a public good).

1 Appreciation

I love this conversation. I think the thoughts and challenges are really leading toward a great, clear, inspiring result.

I started a reply yesterday, and I’m going to flesh out an edited longer post soon. But some key points are:

  • we are in position to lead here, to refine and define the terms (not needing to absolutely defer to Wikipedia for example). Nobody has yet made the issues clear in the way we are working to do right here (more on that soon)
  • we should present a quadrant system, 2-dimension spectrum, not strict yes/no dichotomies; projects have various features and various rights, and each of them can be more or less abundant or free and the project overall can have a place in the 2-dimensional map
  • I think it’s essential we stick to “public goods” and see it as a much more winning rhetoric than FLO, and we can leave open the potential to fund anything that qualifies as public goods enough
    • “public software” is even a term people have proposed to deal with the flaws in “Free” and FLO and so on
    • economically and rhetorically, “public domain” really is the topic here, even though that has a strict legal meaning; we probably should use it in our explanation of public goods in longer articles
  • The status quo is largely to accept that public goods funding is not effective, so something non-public has to be the "product"
    • Real projects have many elements and they are not all public goods necessarily
    • NPR and PBS access rights are public goods, but they make a product out of the club-goods status of publishing-rights and rights to put in ads
    • This basic “what’s the product” framing is super useful. People point out that Facebook users aren’t the customers, they are the product, the customers are the advertisers
    • Nearly all projects seem to focus economically on club-goods or private goods aspects of their work.
      • This can be really well-expressed through discussions of examples
    • Today, public-goods parts of projects function as either (A) the primary focus that gets supported by the non-public-goods or (B) a way to get a share of the attention market in order to support the non-public goods (which become the primary purpose).
  • Our mission is to take on this core challenge of making public goods economically viable directly without reliance on non-public-goods. And addressing that challenge and the widespread cooperation needed to do it is basically the foundational issue for how to build the cooperative economy and society that we need, i.e. this is the meta issue (per Schmactenberger and others).
2 Appreciations

@salt asked me to chip in, maybe he thought about something like this?

freedom-abundance

3 Appreciations

@mray that’s neat! I I love how it expresses a continuum (instead of binary) and puts the focus on public goods.

I think “free” here still has the dilemma around vague meaning. I kinda think “open” is the best accessible term really. Maybe open + abundant.

Maybe “FLO” is the term, though we have the dilemma that FLO is not itself something naive lay people will understand. Also, we don’t usually apply FLO to Common Goods (FLO fish in the river?).

I have other continuing concerns and questions that are not yet clear enough to even myself to be ready to think about how to present them best. More on that soon.

Freedoms, rights?

I was thinking that freedoms can themselves be considered a thing or a feature of a product, but alternatively “rights” are a way to talk about it. Like, what is the “good”? Instead of it being the entirety of a project, we might talk in terms of features or qualities. I’m thinking in the direction of saying that for a particular project, the publishing-rights are a club good while access-rights are a public good…

Continuing my evolving thoughts

One realization: the traditional analysis as shown at Wikipedia (and which @Salt mentions is from Elinor Ostrom) has a core flaw that is perhaps the issue I’m pushing back on. By use of “excludable”, it is asserting that the economic principles at play are those of exclusivity. That framing fundamentally assumes that anything excludable should or will be made exclusive. Otherwise, why treat anything excludable as a club good? Obviously if there’s no exclusive restrictions on something, then there’s no club and none of the club-goods economics apply. We might note that it’s possible to lock something down, but the economic issues of clubs only come up if and when the restrictions are actually put in place.

We might, perhaps uncharitably, see the original model as presuming that anything excludable might as well be treated as exclusive. It’s like saying, “we only have to worry about the icky, wicked, difficult dilemmas about public goods and commons if we fail to lock things down”, as though the restrictions are the obvious answer. I could imagine (no clue how valid this is) Ostrom basically giving in to the privatization argument and saying “sure, privatization solves things, but I’m here to show you the limits of privatization by pointing out that some cases are impossible to privatize, so we have to grapple with commons and public goods!!”

By contrast, my assertion is that we don’t need to assume privatization-whenever-possible. We can flat out say that there are benefits to retaining FLO public and commons status of things. And as long as that status is retained, then obviously we do face the dilemmas, we are economically dealing with commons and public goods.

If a whole community accepts that some gardening tools are to be left in the community garden and there is no realistic threat of anyone taking them, then these could-be-private-goods are in fact not economically private goods but are common goods. Also, let’s ask: could they be public goods? Clearly only one person can use a tool at any one time. But if it happens that there’s no realistic scenario in which multiple people care to use the same tool at the same time, then it might as well be public goods, there’s no actual rivalry. The core point is that exclusivity and rivalry are economically important factors in understanding how we deal with any situation. It divorces from reality if we try to nail down a universal forever status of each thing or project. We just need the language and framework to say that rivalry and exclusivity are two of the most important aspects of any economic situation.

So, our framing could describes abundance vs rivalry, and FLO vs restricted so that people understand that these are the main issues. I wonder if it could be useful to actually label them that way, as the opposite ends of continuum rather than picking one and asking “yes/no”? So instead of “is it abundant, yes or no?” or even “how abundant is it?” we might consider asking “is it abundant or rivalrous?” and “is it FLO or restricted?”

This is not a proposal as final grid but I’m sharing to prompt further thinking:

grid-thought

html
<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th colspan="2" rowspan="2">Types of goods</th>
      <th colspan="2" style="text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;">Rivalry?</th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Scarce</td>
      <td>Abundant</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th rowspan="2" style="text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;">Exclusivity?</th>
      <td>Restricted</td>
      <td>Private goods</td>
      <td>Club goods</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>FLO</td>
      <td>Commons</td>
      <td><strong>Public goods</strong></td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

FLO as a choice, rivalry less so?

A key thought: Is rivalrousness more inherent while exclusivity is often a choice?

As a musician, I could choose to focus on rivalrous works or not (concerts and lessons versus recordings and writings), but can I turn one into the other? I know I can choose whether to make things more FLO or not (concert in the park for anyone who comes versus ticketed-show, paywalls or ads on recordings versus FLO publication and legal status).

So, we have four types of goods that face different economic realities. Within that, maybe we can emphasize that FLOness is a choice (and one that will involve less trade-offs the more we figure out how to economically support that choice).

Pulling a bit away from the strict public-goods focus, maybe we could emphasize that FLOness could be a choice for rivalrous goods too. It’s the choice between private goods and common goods.

In this framing, we might emphasize the question of the FLO choice instead of putting the main emphasis on public goods. We can still talk about how the methods for supporting the choice to go FLO are different for commons vs public goods, and that crowdmatching is more aimed at public goods.

What about rivalry as a choice? Can someone take normally rivalrous things and make them less rivalrous? In practice, that could be just a matter of providing enough quantity/capacity that rivalry disappears. Supply-and-demand really. When the supply is high enough, rivalry disappears, even for scarce-in-principle physical goods. Another way to adjust rivalrousness might be in the choice of whether to realize an abstract concept more in hardware vs in software.

What about a club-good that is also made artificially scarce? It seems rare in practice, but software can be released with a limited number of licenses to be sold (could even allow resale of licenses or similar schemes). Economically, that would make software be a private good because it would have both rivalry and exclusivity, though both would be artificially imposed.

It might help to separate the issues of the economic factors (exclusivity and rivalry) from the question of artifice.

Better terms than “public” vs “common”?

I do want to flag that “commons” and “common” are commonly used for things that this framework calls “public goods” and this is widespread enough that it’s probably impossible to completely shift everything. Consider “Creative Commons” (which is only used for non-rivalrous works)!

Can we come up with a better way to talk about the difference between the two FLOish, public, categories, one being rivalrous and the other abundant? If we could find better terms, it would be a boon.


Thanks for reading these long in-progress thoughts. I’m finding some important value in long-form working out of these ideas, and I feel better about this process having space for it and still sharing and getting feedback instead of waiting to share ideas until I have a carefully edited concise proposal nor doing it all in back-and-forth conversation.

2 Appreciations

Sometime, I’ll work through all these thoughts shared here and update our core wiki articles presenting the issues with FLO economics and so on. New points:

Everything is pattern, everything is about copying

So, as emphasized by various philosophical and scientific views: pattern is the basis of reality, there’s no fundamental matter. Like even core elements and molecules are patterns not fundamentally different stuff.

So, scarcity and rivalry are really just a matter of how costly/slow/challenging it is to copy and/or adapt things. In a sense, the universe “copies” the pattern of some elements, like the sun keeps making copies of the helium pattern, and it does it by adapting hydrogen.

The scarcity that our economy naturally values comes from copying being difficult. We can only turn out so many copies of apples via all the time and inputs to grow them on trees.

Making copying easier has only the main problem that it no longer works well with our economic system. We would love if making copies of apples was as trivial as copying text files on a computer. So, clearly this is a continuum across how difficult copying is. And instead of dealing with the economic challenge by forcing copying to be harder, we need a new economic system that supports creative progress without trying to artificially limit or frustrate copying.

There can be good reasons to make copying hard. It might be to enjoy the pure challenge, like enjoying a jigsaw puzzle, The other reason to make copying hard is if we actually want there to be less of something in the world. We want less diseases, make it harder for viruses to get copied. We want crazy conspiracy theories or hateful ideas to not spread everywhere, figure out how to add friction to their spread. In these cases, the value is in the friction of the copying itself, it doesn’t support the idea of adding friction in order to force the fit of an economic model.

All in all, this framing helps to see the whole of reality and recognize the patterns. We don’t need any hard line between digital vs other things or between hardware and software etc. We merely recognize that “how hard is it to copy?” is the operative question. And the follow up is “how hard do we want it to be?” And then we have the dilemma of how to support the cases where it’s hard but needs doing. Add in that it’s not just copying but also adapting / evolving / developing… but it’s all patterns and processes, deep-down none of it is just things.

NFT's etc?

Addendum: I suppose this brings up things to ponder around stuff like NFT’s. The whole point of them is about being effectively uncopyable and non-interchangeable (non-fungible). So, very clearly about maximizing the status on one end of the continuum of copying difficulty. That they are currently being used as pointers to the complete opposite end of of the continuum is notable. But they don’t have to point that way. Using my framing, what is it that we want less of that they could possibly relate to? I suppose personal identifiers… so we want less imposters. But my intuition with that is that we also don’t want personal identity to be something we trade and sell in economic exchanges. These thoughts are more half-baked.

ADDENDUM: I continued the discussion about this in a new topic where I got a bit farther on thinking this through Crypto commodification-ideology and techno-feudalism

1 Appreciation

I think this is effectively solved by labeling the axis with “Freedom” (which is not hazy like Free) and to match it the other continuum would be labeled “Abundance”.

I’ve been developing this whole topic for my talk tomorrow. LibrePlanet 2022 online March 19-20

I’ve thought about the language even since I last updated this topic here. I don’t think “freedom” works. It’s not an adjective Linguistically and culturally, it just doesn’t click in terms of people going around in the world and thinking, “oh, yeah, that road has freedom” or similar even pushed toward “I have freedom to use that road”. Most importantly, “freedom” doesn’t clarify the economic distinctions. I have freedom in how I use/adapt/share my chair, but it’s still a private good because the freedom is limited to the owner. We say that software is free-as-in-freedom even if it’s kept private and never shared, as long everyone who has it also has freedoms.

I decided that “shared” and “open” are both acceptable, but “open” is clearly the best term to discuss the economics.

This will all be in my talk, and the progress on this topic that the talk will cover will also be sometime written all out as a wiki page and maybe video or other media.

You’re right it’s not an adjective - that’s why I deliberately modified the other axis label to be a noun as well (“abundance”). They are uncountable plurals - perfect for representing a continuum of “stuff”. An adjective is not necessary in that context, which is the only place I’m suggesting it.

I actually think this statement would “click” with people just fine – not sure why it wouldn’t. OTOH, “I am open to use that road” or something like “that is an open road” is far less clear. And nearly all roads are “shared” - even those that are shared by an exclusive club.

That would be just as awkward if “open” or “openness” were substituted there – OTOH, consider that people do very naturally say that a country has freedom, for example. And they mean it in exactly the right way. you could also say “that’s a free country” or “that’s a free road” with the adjective, which is actually less ambiguous for once than “open” (a freely accessible road through a city tunnel would fail the established definition of “open road”, for example).

Regardless, free and open are both too vague and abused, libre solves this, which I though was the point of coining FLO.

Agreed, though not sure how regressing to “open” is an improvement specifically for economics. But I look forward to your talk!

As a scarce asset, the chair did not pass the first test anyway, so of course it’s not a public good. As far as I understand, we’re not trying to capture all of “public good” with the word, only the spectrum of restrictions.

We also say that software is open source. It’s freedom-respecting, it’s libre, it’s open source. Nowadays they are definitionally equivalent, right? None of them have a say on whether the good/software is shared in practice. But that’s what the first test is for…

Yes, but the key point is that it’s not a common good either. My private chair is scarce and exclusive. And we need to be able to describe things that are scarce but open. We can indeed say “scarcity + freedom” but again, freedom itself can be exclusive and still be freedom. “Freedom” is not the opposite of “Exclusivity”. Freedom is the opposite of Restriction.

So, we could indeed go with Restriction vs Freedom and Scarcity vs Abundance.

But I really think that Exclusive vs Open and Scarce vs Abundant is the superior framing. The adjectives are better, and these words are the most accessible to get people to think about the economic concepts instead of thinking about semantics (i.e. to not get into this discussion we’re having here).

Strictly, that’s right. But “open source” strongly implies being actually public where free software does less so. In terms of connotation, “open” implies public, and “free” implies not being restricted. They have different emphasis. We see a lot of stuff labeled “open” when it is restricted in various ways but publicly accessible, and we don’t see that with the word “free” except when it implies gratis.

Hey everyone, over the past week, I was pushed to resolve most (maybe all) the outstanding tensions I had on this subject in order to give my LibrePlanet talk. I feel great about the updated framing. At some point, the video of the talk should be published. I will also try to consolidate all this into a wiki article or series of articles. It could also be an edited video not just live talk.

It would take too long here to express all the dozens of tweaks and angles I adjusted to get to the updated thinking. But the core points were to go past the single label for each question and instead making it about contrasting poles in the two dimensions. I also decided to specifically mention the standard jargon in order to explain what’s wrong with it (e.g. “rivalrousness” and “excludability” set certain default assumptions that go against public goods) and thus explain why we need the updated terms. So, here’s my tweak of the wonderful illustration from @mray

(side-note: I don’t know how he uploaded an SVG, I can’t seem to do it, I had to switch to PNG export)

I also decided to bring in the explicit mention of “goods and services” and contrast that to make it easy to look at projects and businesses and ask in what ways they are using a goods-based business model vs a service-based one and how that relates to public-goods funding. So, I’m arguing that there is no goods-based business model for public goods, and thus all the support of public goods should have a service framing.

Sometime I will also post somewhere my slides and the script for my talk.

Here’s the video recording: Why our economy fails public goods like free software — GNU MediaGoblin or via PeerTube at Why our economy fails public goods like free software - Framatube

The talk was written specifically for the LibrePlanet audience that knows free software, so it used software more often than I would for a generic talk, and it mentioned insider knowledge within the free software movement.

While there’s much to do from here, I feel like I finally have all the perspectives myself. The work is just about how/where/when to present and spread the ideas.

And I put up the slides and script in current condition, linked at Snowdrift Wiki - Past Presentations about Snowdrift.coop (I plan to develop this into wiki articles and maybe a more produced video eventually, so this is the first published version)

1 Appreciation

Great talk.

Thank you for calling out the FSF and Stallman on the ND clause. I think Stallman did write somewhere that he saw that the science people were just doing CC BY without problems, so he might be open to change. The issues of fraud have no business being indirectly discouraged by modification restrictions.

Dismissing the problems of bootstrapping is definitely a mistake (are there people who genuinely trivialize it?), but I hope you are not implying that bootstrapping isn’t a thing. We see it all the time. Snowdrift is doing it, even, by being a member of its own service.

1 Appreciation

Bootstrapping is NOT a thing. Self-funding is a thing. Don’t call it bootstrapping. Bootstrapping means something that is impossible. You can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps any more than you can chew your teeth or see your own eyes. Since the sarcasm has gotten lost, we need a new quip like “that poor mother doesn’t need food stamps, she can just drink her own milk”. The whole point of “bootstrap” reference originally was to mock the self-made-man myth and the view where people look at those with little resources and put all the onus on each individual for their lot in life.

Bootstrapping is impossible. But getting going without outside investment is extremely hard and unlikely to succeed, but it’s possible. And the bootstrap reference is about mocking those who think it’s a fair way to go.

Systematically, bootstrapping even in the lost-the-meaning way people use it today is a problem term. It has lost the sense of near-futility. That awareness should be more clear. It’s true that some great businesses self-fund with people who aren’t even wealthy to start with. But it’s also true that some people have won the lottery. If we are to understand the issues with our economy today, we need to be extra skeptical of some of the narratives and look at how things really work. The vast majority of projects that have become really successfully got their through significant capital investment, even if their initial spark started without that.

Maybe, I’ve seen him change his mind before. He’s adaptable. But I have had this argument with him in the past, and it ended with him saying that he appreciated the CC clauses that require derivatives to be modified and for associations with an earlier author to be removed upon request, but he still didn’t find those convincing enough to feel comfortable freeing his writings from the ND limitation.

A derivative work is a modification, so I don’t quite understand what you are referring to here.

Sorry, but every dictionary and person I asked disagrees. I found no entries that said it meant something impossible. The original phrase certainly describes something impossible, and as an idiom I’m sure it’s been used that way, but I find that the word “bootstrapping” is seldom (if ever?) used that way.

When I’m talking about Snowdrift bootstrapping, it’s not about funding per se. I would not call simply earning net income bootstrapping. (That’s breaking even and profiting.) I would not call reaching the activation energy of a project bootstrapping either. (That’s kick starting.) What I’m referring to is the recursive nature of Snowdrift as a project about funding projects, of which it is itself now a part of, and how it will come to sustain itself. Now that is the epitome of the bootstrap. It’s the C compiler written in C. It’s git managing the git project repository. It’s developing Linux on a GNU/Linux system. When I say git is bootstrapped, I’m not talking about funding. Snowdrift’s bootstrap just happens to be funding because Snowdrift is a funding tool.

So I must disagree that bootstrapping is not a thing. It’s definitely a thing. I would agree that self-funding is not necessarily bootstrapping. Although, if it was wholly self-funded, that does fit a common meaning of the word. I find that you are refuting a meaning that is rather common (computers have been “booting” since the 50s, I hypothesize bootstrapping has been used in these ways decades before even then), so it doesn’t make much sense to deplore people who mean it that way.

If people underestimate the difficulty of starting a business, I am with you they should get a wake up call. Personally, I’ve not met anyone so naive, though. I’d say most would have no idea where to start.

Oops, writing too fast. It required derivatives to be marked as modified.

On “bootstrapping”, the existence of the phrase is only due to the original idiom which is a sarcastic quip about something being impossible. I’m suggesting that the modern use of the term is unfortunate, I don’t like it, and I think we should get rid of it. I want to retrieve the sarcastic meaning of the original idiom because it is a useful idiom that way. I dislike and advocate against the modern use of the term “bootstrapping” in the same way that some people like Richard Stallman argue for certain specific language to be used with care because metaphors and ideas affect the way we think. A la Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

The current use of “bootstrapping” is unhelpful because it makes it harder to think about how projects get resources and capital by just lumping the idea of not having outside investors into this poorly understood term. What you are describing as “the recursive nature of Snowdrift as a project about funding projects” is not how “bootstrapping” is used today. The word most often used for your idea is “dogfooding” from “eat your own dogfood”. I’m not complaining about that term or concept.

I think just like I set out scarce-vs-abundant and exclusive-vs-open, it would be good to have a broader clear antonym to “FLO”.

FLO is not merely synonymous with “public goods” though it’s mostly overlapping. And while the opposite of public goods is private goods, that’s not the emphasis we want opposing FLO.

“Proprietary” works in a sense, it relates to property and private, but it fails to emphasize the restricted / exclusive / limited language that I want.

Is “restricted” the best term? So FLO-vs-restricted?

FLO software vs restricted software? FLO educational resources vs restricted educational resources?

Go with “restricted”? Looking for thoughts and feedback

Bump! Would still like discussion on that language thought ^

But posting to mention an extra thing: In the past, I’ve described a lot of the status-quo as a matter of power that comes from coordination. The supply side is coordinated (that’s what a corporation is!) while the demand side is uncoordinated when we’re talking about goods and services for regular citizens rather than for enterprises. So, the whole issue amounts to the need for demand-side organizing. Which means like a consumer’s union. Although the other angle is to have a cooperative approach where the demand-side gets included in the coordinated organization so that we end the supply-side vs demand-side separation.

And I was thinking (as I had noted learning this week about SponsorBlock) that adblocking which relies on crowdsourced block-lists is itself a robust form of demand-side coordination. Adblocking is a great example of what happens if the users coordinate! This might be about the best concrete example to mention. Publishers of club-goods push ads into everyone’s faces, and adblocking as a response is possible specifically because of effective coordination by readers and viewers. From that angle, the battle is obvious, and then we can talk about all the ways that organized power is mostly out of balance and about the prospect of a cooperative economy that gets past the battles by actually bringing everyone together.

2 Appreciations

That point I made above is described very well in this post by Cory Doctorow on solidarity-among-the-wealthy. He doesn’t focus on solidarity as specifically within legal organizations like corporations (though he hints at it) but about plain human solidarity among the ultra-wealthy as individuals because there are few enough of them to make coordination easier.

This is key to what I was bringing up in meeting today (with @smichel17 @msiep @Salt and @Adroit ) when we were discussing the need to better focus our Mission. All of my emphasis was on the importance of widespread participation in public goods.

I don’t only want to see public goods funded well. I want to maximize the number of people switching from little or no use of public goods to lots of use and appreciation for public goods. I want to also maximize the number of public goods freeriders who switch to skin-in-the-game funders and volunteers. So, freeriding is bad only in comparison to chipping in. Freeriding is good in comparison to forgoing public goods.

Side-note: I’m sympathetic to the practicality of dollar-goals in projects doing crowdmatching, and I joked about purposely writing a mission statement that would lead to deciding on dollar-goals instead of crowd-size goals (i.e. doing it backwards: writing the mission so it gives a conclusion we want rather than getting the mission clear with our values and determining the decisions by deference to the mission), but it’s obvious by everything I said (which everyone in the meeting seemed to agree with) that it actually would put crowd-size as the priority. I might as well have said it that way: that we’re here for crowd-size not merely dollars. Of course, how the mechanism works is still a separate decision that must also account for what we can get the actual public to embrace and understand, and that’s for later.

Anyway, Cory’s writing helps further emphasize my feelings, we just take this solidarity framing and focus it on public goods. The public goods dilemma is tied into the issue of coordination and solidarity. I’ve been bringing up the organize-the-demand-side, consumers-union sort of language since the beginnings of Snowdrift.coop. And the way in which I see Snowdrift.coop as a model for stuff beyond our scope is that I see us as using the public-goods-funding case which we actually work on as a model for other forms of democratic power through public solidarity.

1 Appreciation