Free the Supply Chain!

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) is announcing his "problem list" for the new century at the Wikipedia conference (by analogy with Hilbert's problems -- a list of very influential math problems that opened the 20th century). It's his view of the key content areas that demand a "wiki" approach -- the collective creation of a knowledge base under an open use license. Ross Mayfield (of SocialText) gives a preview of this list.

Wikipedia has always been an important model for 2People, and I added a comment to Jimmy's blog, under the banner:

Free the Supply Chain!

Transparency and community sharing of knowledge must be brought to bear on the hidden consequences of our daily economic transactions. Exactly what are you supporting when you buy a shirt sewn in Malaysia or conventionally-grown bananas from Honduras? This is arguably the most important freedom of all, since without it we will not succeed in making the transition to sustainability.

But since I never quite put it that way before, I wanted to elaborate a little on that here. The wiki model applies to 2People in an obvious way: community content making is a way to create and maintain a vast, up-to-date, localized encyclopedia of sustainability info.

But the wiki model also applies in a less obvious but more important sense: wiki is about freeing knowledge and empowering the commons. The knowledge embodied in a sustainability encyclopedia is not just any knowledge -- it is the information we need in order to make life-or-death choices for our future. 2People is not just a handy guide to lower energy bills; it's about creating transparency all the way through the supply chain, so that we as a community can really understand the consequences of our actions.

Or, in open source terms, the first model is free-as-in-beer, the second is free-as-in-liberty. It's that second kind of freedom that will transform our economy.