Since founding the nonprofit UnaMesa Association I’ve struggled to find an easy way to communicate our mission. In this blog posting, I explore a new approach to explaining the mission of UnaMesa by analogy with organizations like POST (Peninsula Open Space Trust) that purchase natural lands on behalf of the community and turn them into parks and preserves.
First, here’s the old approach where I start by describing the big picture.
Usually I start by pointing out that society faces tremendous challenges in providing education, healthcare, and social service in our current political economy. Most people understand and agree. Some even go on to express their unease about living in a society that generously rewards bankers and athletes but pays teachers poorly. Most people also “get” the difference between technology and service when I give the example of cell phones changing every year, but going to see a doctor or sitting in a classroom not changing much in 50 years. They see the improvements brought about in their personal lives by technology, however, going to a doctor seems to become ever more painful.
So far, so good.
People generally understand the problems we’re trying to solve and even understand that you can’t “pay” someone to truly care about serving their students, patients, or clients. Then I say something like “we’re moving from an industrial economy to a service economy.”
At this point, most people nod but you can see their eyes glazing over a bit.
Then I might point out that the current mechanisms for market based pricing don’t actually work for intangibles because there’s an infinite supply of anything digital (information, music, software). [Three problematic concepts -- "market pricing", "intangibles", "infinite" ] Not only that, but the value of a service, such as education and healthcare depends on both the intangible information and the quality of the interaction between the provider and the client. [People may like or dislike their teachers, but they don't explicitly think about quality of interaction or really think through the notion that a student must play an active role in the process. You can't pour knowledge into a student's head the way you pour oil into an engine.] But since the value of an interaction is not visible in the form of cash or other rewards, there’s very little incentive for organizations to really improve the interactions through innovation. In fact, the economics are such that innovative providers who care enough to try to improve the system usually get penalized in the form of fewer billable hours, fewer reimbursements, or more time away from their private lives. [Lot's of poorly understood concepts there: incentives, innovation, economics....]
By now most people have turned away to find a more engaging conversation partner.
Then comes the real kicker, transitioning to an innovative service economy requires a new approach to pricing. A dynamic system that can make visible the value of interactions to both provider and client. Perhaps using the equivalent of complex numbers (AKA imaginary numbers like the square root of -1) where one component represents the tangible good (supply/demand) and the other represents the intangible (information/quality) parts of the exchange. Except for true fellow geeks, that’s pretty much a show stopper for the audience. [And even the geeks are as likely as not to go off on a number theory tangent.]
For the few kind souls that remain, I can finally get to the point – UnaMesa plays the role of a “market maker” for service innovation. We facilitate and promote better services by “buying” and maintaining software, web services, and other intangibles that support 2-way interactions between providers and clients. We aim to help create a robust system for the exchange of intangibles and foster service innovation that truly values and makes visible the value of better experience for both providers and clients.
For example, SharedRecords.org is a free, online service for securely storing and sharing medical records, transcripts, and any other information that a doctor, teacher, or social worker needs in order to care for a client. By making the infrastructure freely available, we ensure that the digital version of the information can be retrieved wherever and whenever needed but it’s always under the control of the client and their providers. Instead of fighting with the bureaucracy of a hospital or school to get access to their records, clients give the equivalent of a receipt to their caregiver who can instantly access the relevant documents. From the SharedRecords point of view, timely access to your medical or educational history should be the equivalent of roads, bridges, and waterways, part of the basic infrastructure that we all take for granted. It should not be a point of competition between service providers.
The alternative approach: UnaMesa as an Open Space for Knowledge
The Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) , and similar conservation organizations, protect natural lands by purchasing private property and converting it into preserves and park lands that benefit the larger community in perpetuity. In Silicon valley and the larger San Francisco Bay Area, these organizations have played a critical role in maintaining the beautiful landscape and large tracts of wild areas despite the tremendous pressures of commercial development. The open space supports a vibrant natural ecology that benefits everyone living in the area.
Similarly, the UnaMesa Association seeks to protect and maintain intangible property that supports a healthy knowledge ecology. We acquire private “intellectual property” on behalf of the community and encourage compatible uses of that knowledge to serve the public interest. Because UnaMesa is a “not for profit” organization, individuals and organizations can trust that their use of the software, services, books, or other intangible properties will not be subject to “monetization” by a private property holder who could deny them access or demand royalty payments.
This trust encourages people to build upon the property held by UnaMesa in order to continually improve and add to the knowledge. Unlike the physical property held by POST, UnaMesa’s goal is not preservation. Rather we seek continual improvement of an ever expanding knowledge space. Whereas access to physical property must be limited to avoid the degradation that comes with usage, intangible property and knowledge benefit from widespread & unlimited use. Fixing a bug in a software program, re-using a lesson plan, or sharing best practices in maintaining medical records benefits all community members. This is just the opposite of real property where consuming an apple or chopping down a tree makes it unavailable for anyone else.
So, UnaMesa acquires intellectual property, maintains it and makes it accessible to the community while promoting compatible uses that increase the pool and value of knowledge.
Similar to POST, we operate as a Trust to hold intellectual property in the public interest and work with the broader community to identify properties of interest and solicit the resources necessary to acquire those properties. In some cases, this might mean getting a compatible license rather than acquiring the copyright directly. These licenses are analogous to “conservation easements” and other arrangements that POST might use to protect natural lands.
The TiddlyWiki community is a good example of this whole process. TiddlyWiki is a piece of wiki software that runs directly in a web browser. It’s a bit like the software behind Wikipedia except it does not require any server side software. This means that any individual or organization can create their own wiki and have complete control over how that wiki operates. They can share the wiki with others by simply sending them an HTML file. No Internet connection is required to view or to add to the information. UnaMesa acquired the TiddlyWiki core software in 2007 from Osmosoft, a small software development group. This ensured that the TiddlyWiki software remained accessible and supported by the community even after Osmosoft was purchased by British Telecom later in the year. Over time, the number and types of uses has continued to grow and evolve. TiddlyWiki is now used in a wide variety of settings, including by students and teachers sharing class notes, doctors maintaining medical notes, and as a tracking tool for engineering project managers – in addition to the core function of being a personal notebook. UnaMesa supports this community by hosting a software and knowledge repository at TiddlyWiki.org, paying for maintenance and improvement to the core code, and responding to requests for help on the newsgroups. In return, community members contribute “plugin” software that improves the function of TiddlyWiki, templates and example documents for others to use, and plenty of support to each other through the online forums.
Just as POST is not the only conservation group, UnaMesa is not alone in trying to create an open space for knowledge. Creative Commons has done a tremendous job in drafting and promoting copyright licenses (e.g. “easements”) that encourage reuse and distribution. The Free Software Foundation, the Apache Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation are the better known examples of groups that promote the development and distribution of open source software. I liken these groups to agricultural or land use coops where a group of farmers might come together to protect their access to water or build a shared processing plant.
The primary focus of the software foundations lies in developing specific pieces of sofware. They’re generally run by and for the developers to spell out the rules of how software updates are contributed, who gets to decide what code goes in the “official” release, etc. To my knowledge, however, these organizations do not generally pay developers for their contributions, they do not focus on the needs of service providers (e.g. education, healthcare, social services), and they do not seek to acquire other types of intangible property that would serve the larger community.
UnaMesa is still a very young organization and very much an experiment in ways to improve service innovation. We believe that there’s a tremendous and productive middle ground for innovation and knowledge that lies between the extremes of private “free” property. The conservation model of POST provides some interesting analogues for us to follow.
In the end, UnaMesa wants to do two things:
- Make sure that the developers, writers, teachers, and other creative folk can earn a decent living, while
- Encouraging and promoting widespread access to knowledge that’s necessary for delivering the best possible education, healthcare and social services
In other words, we want to help create the foundation for a healthy service economy where we, as a society, can see and make decisions based more on the quality of interactions and rely less on the industrial notions of supply and demand.
Well, I’m still not sure if the POST analogy works better. Will have to try it out at the next dinner party and see how many people fall asleep. Sure can’t be worse than the old approach!
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