First boom and now bust for Science 2.0?
Joerg Heber
Wednesday, 22 October 2008 15:41 UTC
I came across this blog by Andrew Keen (also covered on Slashdot )
Essentially, he is advocating that the present recession and credit crisis may ring in the end of free Web 2.0 tools such as Wikipedia etc. as the free economics simply won’t work anymore. Ad revenues for example are expected to drop, and public budgets might be rather strained by all these economy rescue packages.
I am not a friend of overly pessimistic assessments such as the one by Andrew Keen, and I don’t want to go too much into the open source software issues debated already at Slashdot. I also think that the declaration that open source initiatives are coming to an end is nonsense, as they are based on free contributions by users, which even in a tighter economic climate I cannot foresee to change much.
But I wonder whether there will be an impact for some web 2.0 initiatives in science, where funding might become more difficult in the near future. For example, should we worry about long-term funding for initiatives such as open notebook science, where data volumes might be rather high? Or is there no reason for concern at all?
Updated 22 October 2008 15:57 UTC
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Replies
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Keen’s conclusion hinges on the idea that people will only contribute to projects when there is economic gain, and he discounts the idea that people are motivated to contribute for other rewards (such as increased reputation, etc). Wikipedia works as a gift economy while Google’s Knol is based on traditional economics. It seems to me that Keen is suggesting that rewards in a gift economy are substitutes for rewards in a traditional economy (e.g. dollars). Sometimes this is the case, but sometimes it isn’t. I have no idea how hard times in the traditional economy affect gift economies, and it may be the case that people who are very hard up in a traditional economy will prefer traditional reimbursement for their labor (e.g. cold hard cash). Keen mentions that it’s possible 8% of the able-to-work population may be unemployed in the future. But he then appears to conclude that this means the remaining 92% will radically change their activities and those that were contributing to Wikipedia will stop contributing entirely.
I also think Keen’s argument undervalues downstream rewards. He says, "the hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue." But if I’ve just founded a consulting company, I might need to provide free consulting initially, as this might be the only way to get companies to become paying clients. As an unemployed programmer, I might contribute to an open source project just so I can keep my skills up to date and/or network. We all do things, constantly, that don’t have immediate cash rewards, and it’s surely somewhat ridiculous to claim that if something doesn’t pay now then it’s not worth anything.
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I can’t see that the recession will hit Web 2.0 initiatives in science, partly because we’re buffered (to some extent) against the “real” economy, but also because we’re generally not using Web 2.0 to make money, our motivation is to improve the way we do science.
As Hilary has already pointed out, Web 2.0 largely didn’t develop because people wanted to make money, so we may see a few bits disappear, but I think a lot will survive.
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I think you all make good points. One aspect of this question, perhaps relevant to Nature Network;-), are web 2.0 resources either developed by companies or commercialized by their developers. These may feel the cold winds more rapidly against a global depression or recession backdrop (same holds for dot coms of course). I think you are all right that the open-source, “donated” type of web 2.0 product will not be affected: the whole internet is built that way by people who don’t care (or don’t need to care) about money for one reason or another.
So I wonder whether the debate is really about whether web 2.0 will be hampered from scaling-up by the fact that companies or other investors might have less for these products?
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