The User Owned Social Network (or Building A Better Social Commons).

People by Mollicles Google the term “user owned social media” and see what pops up. Nothing, nada, zip. Its a #UOsocial ghost town out there, but thats ok because now that we have started to talk about, we can change that. User owned social media platforms presently do not exist because social media platforms are still a relatively new phenomenon and also because we are only just starting to recognize their value as a ‘social commons’. The real value of a social media platform is in its users and their activities, connections, interests, communications and personal data, currently this value is sold for vast profits and is far too valuable to let the users control. Modern social networks trade in our most intimate personal and professional data and massively profit from it, with our consent. The unspoken and undocumented deal we strike when we start to use a social platform us is that we will never be charged for using it and in return they agree buy and sell our social value for obscene amounts of cash. It’s an unfair and lopsided deal, the value of our connections, activities, interests and personal data is worth infinitely more than free membership and access to any of the major social media platforms that exist today. When you also consider that our trust, privacy and freedom of speech has been abused by different social platform owners so many times, we can conclude that the current model upon which social media rests is broken from the perspective of the people who actually use these platforms. At this point, I would like to introduce the idea of a social commons. Commons are historically recognized as the cultural and natural resources that are accessible to and owned by all the members of a society. Music, film, literature and history are property of the cultural commons. Such cultural commons can also be reffered to as common goods and if you want a good example of the production and maintenance of common goods by a user community in a cultural context, go and take a look at Wikipedia. The idea that I want to articulate here is the idea that our social networks and the underlying platforms that pool all of our personal data, activities, connections and interests are by default common goods, created by users. Social networks and their data should be considered a social commons. The true value of a social commons should be controlled by its user base, because a strong social commons is far too valuable to entrust to anyone with a profit motive, an ROI to deliver or corporate agenda to advance. The problem we have is that the most commonly used social platforms were all incubated, nurtured and grown in an investment ecosystem, one that is heavily invested financially in all of the major social platforms since their inception and one that demands subservience to commercial goals. Because our current social networks were born in this ecosystem, there is absolutely no way we will ever be given control over that valuable social commons and so the only alternative is to recreate our current social networks and underpin them with a completely different funding model. Social networks based on investment funding models are producing enormous amounts of wealth from the user generated goods, but this wealth never filters down to the users who actually generate the real value. With a user owned social network, the goods generated from the social commons will not be obscenely monetized, instead any wealth generated will be socially and culturally embedded, managed by those who generate it, with any residual left over wealth fairly distrubuted amongst users. I think at this point it is helpful to remind ourselves what we are moving away from when we collectively make the decision to step away from commercial social networks towards a user owned social networks. The monetization of our social commons. First of all, we will be moving away from a place where our social commons is rented, bought and sold for profit by third parties we have never met or given permission to. We know they will continue to sell our data, our connections, interests, activities and communications, we also know they will not stop selling access to our eyeballs and abusing us with advertising. The systematic privacy abuse of our social commons. We know that we cannot trust social media platform operators not to abuse our privacy. They make a very convincing effort to assure us that our privacy is valued and protected, but they still persist in making it harder for us to retain our privacy and rely on us not reading their terms and conditions, rely on their users not to care much or make a fuss about it. The complete lack of control over our social commons. We know that the current social platform funding model will never allow users to control the social commons, its completely anathemic to their entire funding ecosystem, they will never allow us control or to profit from control. Abuses against freedom of speech. We know that various social media platforms engage in varying levels of censorship, we know that some of suppress different kinds of social content and we know that these abuses against our collective freedom of speech will continue while the major social networks remain within the control of a commercial ecosystem. So whats better about user owned social networks? Collective control over our social commons. For me, this is the most important aspect of the migration away from commercially operated social platforms and towards user owned social platforms, the regaining of control over our social commons. I want a direct say in how our social commons are managed, how they are monetized, how our privacy is protected and I want granular control, the final say over my individual privacy rights when I am active within the social commons and interacting with others in that sphere. I want our social commons to be controlled by democratically elected groups of users, whose only motivations rest in the preservation of the commons for the rest of us. I do not want us to be bought and sold like cattle, I want the abuse of our social commons to stop and only with us controlling it can that happen, direct control over social commons by its users is the goal here. Control over the monetization of our social commons.Modern social networks are hugely capital intensive, they require enormous technical resources and the manpower to manage them, undoubtedly those things need to be paid for and user owned social networks will need to be monetized, if only to pay for themselves and to keep the lights on. We can see from existing social networks that the value of a social commons can generate more money than the network costs to operate, so a balance can be struck between the operational needs of a social platform and the way the platform is monetized for the benefit of its users. In keeping with the notion of a socially accessible commons, access to the resources contained within the social commons must be accessible to all members of society, free memberships can be subsidized by advertising and paid memberships. What advertising we choose to allow on the commons can exist purely to sustain the operation and evolution of the commons. Within the confines of a user controlled social network, such decisions will be made by the users themselves in a democratic and transparent way. Control over the development of our social commons.User owned social networks will technically be based upon open source code projects, driven by teams of volunteer and contract developers. The code base managed and maintained by highly engaged members of its user community and technical roadmaps, feature requests under the democratic control of the user base and subject to our collective needs. We can dictate where we want our social network to go, what we want it to do for us and how it will handle the different ways that we engage with each other socially. We will need it to accomodate our personal lives, but also our professional lives and to strike a balance between the two, this technical development direction is something best decided by the user community. How do we get started? I think that the initial stage of any user owned social network must be financed and launched in the same way most startups are, it will require a talented core team, a clear vision and some finance to get the whole thing moving. Finance must be raised, initally some seed capital, ideally from a benevolent wealthy individual with a strong sense of the commons and I think then the crowdsourcing model is perfect to take it up to launch. Post launch it is perfectly reasonable to charge membership fees to new members joining the network in order to sustain its operation and it is perfectly reasonable to monetize elements of the social commons, but I think financial ownership of a social commons has to go deeper into the user base. We know that the value of a strong social commons far exceeds the overall cost to operate and innovate a social network and we know that a strong social commons can generate a substantial amount of revenue for its owners, so any user owned social commons will have to look and act like a real corporation of come sort if it is to realize any of those benefits. They sometimes call these kinds of user owned corporations co-operatives. A user owned social commons must contain a mechanism for user ownership of the underlying organization and its equity, giving users a real stake in the underlying financial infrastructure of the social commons. Real ownership of the social commons needs to rest in the hands of those who collectively generate its true value, nobody else can be trusted. Somewhere in the middle of these various funding sources is our balance, the balance between a social network that acts in the interests of its users and a commercial one that acts in the interests of its investors/advertisers. Its a balance we need to find, the social commons is far too valuable to let the status quo continue, also like any other resource on this planet, we have an obligation to build a better social commons for our children to inherit. Personally speaking, it makes me sick that our social commons can be bought and sold without ever consulting us, it makes me sick that our personal data, our interests preferences, tastes, likes, dislikes, online activity and connections can be bought and sold without any regard for our privacy and I know it makes a lot of you out there feel sick too. We are helpless in the face of it, all we can really do is delete our profiles. Before we can start building a user owned social commons, we have to start talking about it and building a core group around the idea to move forward. The only way to free ourselves from predatory commercial markets that feed upon our social commons is to work together and assert our ownership. I think a user owned social commons is the answer, what do you think ? #UOsocial #SocialCommons