I worry about the future of Chatroulette. This widely successful site where random strangers from around the world can chat with each other using their webcams was built by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old Russian hacker. And what a compelling story it has been: a teenager bored with school and clearly captivated by the promise of technology, builds a site in his bedroom. A few months later the site gets more than a million hits a day. Ternovskiy has no idea what Chatroulette could be or what the “business model” behind it is. He boasts to a New York Times reporter that advertising on Chatroulette is kept to a minimum, because ads “distract you from what you want to do on the site.” Ternovskiy cares to get just enough money to keep the site going. Fast forward to today: Ternovskiy is ensconced in Silicon Valley, where eager venture capitalists and seasoned entrepreneurs are advising him on “the business model.” I expect the next incarnation of Chatroulette will be as a channel for social marketing. I can just imagine clicking the “next” button and seeing a ruggedly handsome 20-something proclaiming the wonders of Absolut Vodka or modeling designer jeans.

After all such has been the path of many geeks who started out with the promise of creating communities and connecting people for noble purposes but quickly turned communities they enabled into markets for selling products, services, and data. This is the path of PatientsLikeMe–a site inspired by one the founder’s brothers who developed Lou Gehrig’s disease. The goal was to build a community for people with similar conditions to share treatment information and get knowledge and support from peers. The platform has been extremely successful, with close to 70,000 members to date sharing information on many conditions and treatment regiments. But as the community grew and the scale of operations increased, the opportunity and the promise of turning the community into a business, i.e. to monetize the community, became increasingly apparent. Today, the site sells health data, gathered from member profiles, to drug makers and others for scientific and marketing research. While such data may be beneficial to both patients and pharmaceutical companies trying to develop more effective treatments, the data is also being used to create more effective drug marketing campaigns, something that may actually be harmful to community members.

Patientslikeme, Facebook, Twitter, and, I expect, shortly, Chatroulette exemplify a growing clash between the promise of commons-based platforms and the relentless drive to convert them into profit-driven businesses. The clash is likely to grow simply because the number of such endeavors is growing exponentially. What this clash brings into focus is that while we have invented a generation of transformative technologies, we remain stuck in economic and organizational models of the past. (more…)

Can you envision a society without money? Can you conceive of a functioning economic system without corporations or in which corporations as we have come to know them play a much-diminished role? Can you imagine a truly participatory governance system beyond Congress, Parliament, or Duma? The mere prospects seem jarring, if not subversive. And yet, I would argue, if you are not thinking these thoughts, you are not paying attention. Because looking across the landscape of deep global recession, environmental crisis, and ongoing technological transformation, it is clear that we are at the beginning of a large-scale organizational transformation that will impact everything we do—from how we organize production to how we grow our food to how we govern ourselves.

It is hard to imagine this today, but people have been conducting economic activities for millennia outside of formal organizational frameworks. In such “traditional” or “peasant economies,” humans were engaged in production of a variety of goods and services in which they sold or traded with others in their geographic proximity. You knew who was a good baker, a good shoemaker, who repaid debts on time, and who was a cheat. However, such transactions were limited in scale. The genius of the types of organizations we’ve perfected in the 20th century is that they allowed us to massively increase the range and scale of these interactions by aggregating resources among strangers and by becoming institutional proxies for the kind of trust we previously reserved for our neighbors and family. We needed large hierarchical organizations in order to find, aggregate, and allocate resources efficiently at massive scales.

What happens, however, if we can increasingly find, aggregate, and allocate resources without the organizational infrastructure we’ve created? What if we do not need organizational proxies, or at least, the kind of proxies we’ve come to rely on, for most things we do? In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky, professor of new media at NYU, writes, “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.” Today, we are indeed changing the communications infrastructure and are just beginning to feel the reverberations of this transformation in our economic life. Publisher Tim O’Reilly calls the infrastructure we are building the “architecture of participation,” and its existence will lead us to re-invent ourselves as a society and as individuals.

After all, organizations we have built are not pre-ordained, inevitable, or immutable creations—they are products of particular times, outgrowths of existing technological, social, and demographic forces. Or as Doug Ruskoff, writer and media expert, puts it, “Economics is not a natural science.”

The new architecture of participation will cause us to reweave the social fabric that links the individual to others and to the larger whole in entirely new ways. It will enable people to find each other, to connect and trade with each other in efficient and productive new ways that are outside of established organizational structures.

So pay attention to new organizational forms that are beginning to dot our landscape. From Kickstarter and LendingClub (new platforms for giving, raising capital, and lending); to Patientslikeme and Curetogether (grassroots platforms for sharing detailed health and treatment data); to numerous mission-oriented project organization platforms like Groundcrew; these are all harbingers of things to come. What is important to study is not whether these particular organizations will survive but the larger shifts they represent. Their design usually does not emerge as a whole from the outset. Rather, we see new structures emerge little by little from the contribution of many. In this, they resemble biological structures in which complexity emerges without a grand central design.

The emergence of new organizational forms coincides with discoveries in neuroscience, biology, quantum physics, and increased ability to model and understand interactions in complex systems. This latest scientific knowledge will usher in new frameworks for how to organize people to get things done.

Scientific management of the 20th century was a brainchild of Frederick Taylor, mechanical engineer and efficiency expert. New gurus of organizational management and design may well be people like Frans De Waal, a primatologist studying empathy and cooperative behavior in groups.