“If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.” Steven Johnson</blockquote> Around the 14th century, the second huge information revolution was brewing thanks to Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Unlike its predecessors, this invention included moveable type faces enabling efficient and affordable printing production. By opening information dissemination on a larger scale and breadth than ever before, this invention fostered a new culture which created new opportunities for intellectual and societal growth.

It appears that each time a new information technology becomes available, a number of patterns start to emerge. As a thought experiment, if we would overlap today’s technological renaissance with the 14th-17th century renaissance we would observe the following:

If we draw the parallels we can see how information technologies enable positive growth within society since Mesopotamian ages. It furthers progress in most fields by creating accessible mediums of information and that lead to a participatory culture with lesser or without social limitations.

In the 20th and 21st century, humanity as a whole accelerated immensely. The first big step towards creating a new medium for information that propelled our society into the information age was the invention of the microchip. This technology made general computing possible. Later on, the Internet emerged as a global system of interconnected computer networks that use a standard protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link billions of devices worldwide.

Today, the Internet is an international mesh network connecting more than two billion people allowing the free* flow of information, wealth and services to be exchanged without boundaries. This has set the stage for an explosion of interesting new concepts to materialize.

The ripples caused by this information revolution can be felt throughout the fabric of our society as storms of bits eroding the pillars of a centralized paradigm. The Internet is one of the most powerful social experiments ever invented.

From a collaborative perspective, the Internet and technology in general became a creation catalyst, exponentially increasing our collaborative potential. Furthermore, the cost of coordination and collaboration was reduced drastically by making all participants with Internet access universally available and connected.

This allowed us as humans to transcend time and space limitations – keystroke by keystroke.

Twitter Network Vizualized

“In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.” Linus Torvalds</blockquote> Started around the 1970s, the earliest form of free software cultural movement has been ignited by Richard Stallman and his peers through their work tackling access and dissemination of information in this new technological realm.

As digital freedom culture ideals spread across this new information grid the number of free software initiatives grew and evolved in different ways from encryption algorithms to operating systems to blockchain technologies.

Many established scholars of innovation did not anticipate the emergence of a distributed and open model for innovation that can aggressively compete with traditionally closed and proprietary models. Looking back, who could have expected that swarms of online individuals acting without monetary incentive would build through distributed ad-hoc processes the largest encyclopedic body of knowledge in human history, or one of Microsoft’s most aggressive competitors?

In this line of thinking, open source can be seen as a pattern of collaboration in itself, being part of a bigger pattern: open collaboration. According to Wikipedia, open collaboration is described as “any system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants, who interact to create a product (or service) of economic value, which they make available to contributors and non-contributors alike”.

Open collaboration appears as a pattern in many areas of our lives and represents one of the underlying principles behind many great achievements on the Internet.

Wikipedia and Linux are perfect examples of open cultures of knowledge advancing, edit by edit. Their existence stands as a monument depicting the collaborative power of loosely associated groups, challenging and transcending centralized architectures.

Open source continues to fascinate many economists, sociologists, scientists and many others thanks to its collaborative ability to defy economic dogmas based on top-down closed-control principles. These communities thrive thanks to decentralized problem solving, self-selected participation and self organization resulting in open collaboration. The emergence of these organizational models and sheer numbers of participants, in the hundreds of thousands, raised the question of motivation: “Why do these people work and participate for ‘free’?”

The common view of purely self-interested participants, is clearly not the answer when many participate with no promise of a direct financial reward for their efforts. If writing code, designing decentralized software architectures, and solving tough cryptographic problems are construed by outsiders to be unremunerated blood, sweat, and tears, the contributors themselves are more likely to insist that the work is a source of significant satisfaction that derives from the pure joy of engagement in the work, or with the group or community, or both.

The answer seems to lie in a more expansive view of ourselves as human beings that acknowledges, as well as the role of economic motivations, notions of enjoyment and having fun together with identity and the social benefits of community. Challenge, enjoyment, and creativity are hallmarks of participation in this paradigm.

Through their work and actions these open source communities, reveal macro homo reciprocan patterns. These patterns are valuable because they can offer insights into why things work this way or more precisely in this case “how do we work this way and what can we learn from it”.

When you start considering the possibility that our species might actually be a collaborative rather than competitive one you’re faced with a number of beliefs deeply encroached in our current society and world view.

The current world wide accepted assumption is that our race appears to be composed of selfish individuals homo economicus, however this theory is challenged by billions of lines of running code and millions of individuals working together for free.

ethereum project as a distributed innovation network