Stephen De Gabrielle wrote at 03/06/2011 06:19 AM:
Am I right in assuming that no-one has yet thought of a way to introduce a 'social contract' and appropriate govenrance? even in small organisation that are (just) large enough to see some benefit.
People thought about social contracts and such for human network media long before MySpace/Facebook/Twitter. At the moment, the most popular network media is so crude, and yet so commercially exploitable, that we have spawned thousands of posturing pundits with designer eyeglasses, clouding the space of thinking. :) Plus, I expect that most people are biased by the status quo to keep regurgitating the same buzzwords, rather than taking a step back and looking forward as people did *before* everyone was on the Web. We are rediscovering, but slowly.
Yes, there's application here for social contracts, mitigating mechanisms, etc., and we do have them. I look at originating these intelligently as a system design and management problem, in which you have these partially-specifiable computational elements with strengths and weaknesses, and social and technological mechanisms for coordinating them, leveraging their strengths, mitigating their weaknesses, and seeing what desirable emergent behavior/effects you can get out of all that.
By all means, go forth and execute on ambitious projects. A percentage of efforts will stick, by virtue of merit, appeal, machination, and happenstance. But don't assume that ideas have not been thought of before, since there are few ideas not already conceived. Often, ideas were thought of by people smarter and more prescient than ourselves, long before we were even born. :)
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