Open Sources 2.0

Chapter 22. Patterns of Governance in Open Source

Steven Weber

The hardest problem facing a political community is how to increase the probability that the whole will be greater than, not less than, the sum of its parts. People join together voluntarily to solve problems because they believe that the group can do things that an individual cannot. They also believe (in some abstract sense and often implicitly) that the costs of organizing the group and holding it together will be smaller than the benefits the group gains. If you put aside for the moment the affective and emotional needs that individuals satisfy in groups and focus instead on the part of politics that is about problem solving, the bet that people make when they enter a political community is simply that “none of us is as smart as all of us”—maybe not on any particular issue or at any particular moment, but on the vast set of problems that human beings confront and try to manage over time.

It doesn’t have to work out that way. Everyone has been part of a community or a company where the whole is less smart than the individuals who comprise it. Political systems often seem to suffocate under their own organizational costs—not just national governments, but smaller systems like city councils and co-op boards. And even if a community does create net benefits for at least some segment of the group, the distribution of those benefits can be so grossly unequal that most of the community members would be better off on their ...