A New Dawn: The Economics of Global Mass Collaboration in Real-Time (First of Two Parts)

A new dawn is empowering a dynamic revolution, open-sourcing is the 21st century's fire, because it is already advancing the human race into the future. Enabled by the Internet, it's a platform for wiki-sharing, aka global mass-collaboration. The synergy of a real-time, leveled the information curve, combined with 1.4 billion minds collaborating to solve the world's problems, a powerful tool that will rechannel human development has emerged.

In the 1990s, the business battlecry was “think global, act local.” Open sourcing has changed the way we do things so much that this has morphed into “collaborate or perish” that a viable company is an outsourced company, because mass collaboration delivers exponential benefits that homogeneous processes can only dream of attaining.

Linux and Moore's Law

Perhaps the most well-known example is Linus Torvald and his open source Linux computer operating system. It has the potential of becoming as influential Watt's Steam Engine, or Bell's Telephone, and is a symbol of the Open Sourcing Age. It also captures the essence and power of mass collaboration.

Linux encourages everyone to create, download, and use applications for the PC. Virtually no proprietary rights are involved, and the products are generally free. The result is a system that keeps growing, as an interconnected mass-collaborating base, builds on each other's, previous work. It has the potential of breaking Microsoft's 98% market chokehold on PC operating systems (Apple accounts for 2%, but is growing.)

It is the reason behind Moore's Law, which states that technology (power) will double every 24 months. Mass collaboration provides the impetus behind technology development. As each breakthrough feeds itself, an exponential, amplifying process results, hence the speed in product and systems development.

It has since been applied to realms outside of Technology; and it is now changing business and their dated processes. This interconnected collaboration is cutting across the entire spectra of business, reinventing the way products and processes are done in Banking, Manufacturing, Marketing, Research & Development, Technology...

21st Century Equalizer

This wiki, or open source collaboration is substantially dismantling structures limiting information with monopolistic paradigms and pricing. This 21st century equalizer will liberate proprietary information, brining it from inside conglomerates' R&D labs, to the hands of its origin – the individual.

Consequently, the secrets of technologically advanced countries, are being shared. Already Asia outstrips the developed countries' Internet usage, at 38%, versus North America's 18%, or Europe's 27%.
This intellectual shift is contributing to “CHINDIA's” economic dominance who, at the forefront of manufacturing, stand to reap great benefits. As Asian minds are reverse – engineering and reproducing goods sans the costly patents and marketing that makes US and European goods so expensive, everyone is turning to CHINDIA for manufacturing.

The New Renaissance

A Renaissance-like flood of declassified information is hitting the Internet. Already companies are releasing proprietary rights, floating information that would have been, 10 years ago, a “gold mine” for conglomerates.

Like the Human Genome Project (HGP). Pharmaceutical companies like Merck, have opened their information – 15,000 gene sequences - freely, perhaps validating that with open source, proprietary rights have limited validity: eventually, someone will build a better mousetrap.

HGP would certainly have languished without this sharing, and the Internet's peer-to-peer, collaborative forum. A few scientists would mine HGP data, some 100,000,000,000 “letters” of genetic code for merely 165,000 organisms (as of 2005), too slowly. But with a huge, exponential base, say the Internet's 1.4 billion minds its gifts - such as mapping the cancer genome, to develop effective treatment; or diabetes, to synthesize drugs – are being unlocked sooner.

Already, mass collaboration is being used to solve one of the world's most most bedeviling problems: our vehicles' dependence on fossil fuels. Recent paradigms have identified ethanol, and hydrogen fuel as the next generation, low emissions, power source, but this is shifting, at the hands – or brains – of global mass collaboration. It turns out that methanol for hydrogen fuel cells and batteries may be a more viable solution, and may eclipse even Lithium as the preferred source for portable power.

We all stand to gain.

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In part 2, we will explore how opens source is reinventing the way we do things, and how it can help our country's plight.