like howard, think the world is waking up to the realization that we can create more value for more people by giving and working together (to whatever limited degree) rather than purely competing.

but i think we need to be careful about some of the examples that are cited. the ultimatum dilemma applies to a lot of online collaboration, i think. would wikipedia (or librivox for that matter) have been as successful (that is, built such a large community of volunteers) if the sites had an explicit profit motive for the founders? i imagine people would have been less inclined to give freely of their time if they knew they were putting money in someone else’s pocket, and getting for themselves only the ambiguous “improvement of the whole” type of benefit.

i think the future lies is this kind of collaborative model, but where greater reward flows (i mean financial) come to the contributors. a “new economy” if you will, though the terms comes with so much baggage it pains me to use it.

giving stuff away ties into the above. an ecosystem of tangible rewards i think will have to materialize to incent the community’s continued participation in such projects, especially as they see “open source” companies like mysql cash out for $1B

with regards to free access to information, that already is (essentially) a reality… the future lies in putting filters on the information to make it more useful to people in their day to day lives (like everyblock.com)

so if there is a tie that binds the future of these movements together, i think it’s that the loop needs to be closed back in on the contributors for this movement to become sustainable.