Message posted today on our social mailing list at work:
Do you lendaround ? Let me know if you sign up and I’ll email you an invite which’ll make it easier for you to connect into the network.
According to their website, Lendaround is a free web tool that aims to help people borrow things from one another. It’s good to bring friends, neighbours, families and colleagues together by swapping things, such as DVDs, isn’t it?
Why do such tools exist? Apparently, because somebody had an idea that made them sleepless in the first instance, and this person persuaded others to help make it happen:
Looking around his home, Tim noticed how much stuff we all seem to have that doesn’t get used very much — at a time when there are a billion people in the world who have not very much at all, and when it would be good to use a bit less of the earth’s resources.
The email message reminded me of a good read about The Myth of Crowdsourcing my colleague Amir pointed to me recently:
In the popular press, and in the minds of millions of people, the word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. For the past 10 years, the buzz around open source has created a similar false impression. The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous.
The crowds by themselves, the author suggests, are unable to produce innovation. It is the highly skilled, highly motivated ‘virtuosos’ who are the real engines behind the often misused term crowdsourcing.
Open-source developers are often mentioned as a crowd of motivated programmers ready to meet the world’s software needs. A lot of wishful thinkers love to put forth the notion that all large software companies should be quaking in their boots because a crowd of open-source developers is ready to eat their lunch and create software for any purpose. There is no crowd of open-source developers ready to attack every problem. In fact, most open-source projects are the product of one obsessed individual who wrote the software to meet his own needs. Often this individual was joined by other programmers who shared the founder’s vision and, under his direction, created great software. Yes, there are large teams of developers on open-source projects, but without the virtuoso contribution at the outset, they would achieve nothing.
In OSS Watch consultations with HE projects we often need to correct the general view that open source is mainly the affair of a bunch of bearded geeks animated by common idealistic views. In fact, as mentioned in one of our workshop reports, the open development model that lays at the foundation of most open source commercial businesses is based on what Harvard Internet lawyer Yochai Benkler termed “commons-based peer-production”, a process by which everyone who contributes also gets something back that furthers their interests.
A certain level of pragmatism associated with the business of open source is perhaps not unrelated with the idea of the highly skilled ‘virtuosos’ that make crowds vibrate. Something worth exploring further, maybe in a break between watching two lendaround DVDs.
