Video of Richard Esplin’s presentation on “Technology Cooperatives” is now available on YouTube at the following URL: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNjSbvBgV70>.
Richard Esplin at UTOSC 2009
Traditional technology businesses do not achieve optimal alignment between the interests of the developer, the business investor, the consumer, and the global community. Open source businesses attempt to improve on this situation, but unfortunately, most business models do not foster open source solutions. Technical expertise is expensive and awareness of the benefits of collaborative solutions is often lacking. Companies with significant technical know-how have many incentives to guard that know-how behind proprietary licenses. Companies who should be focused on their core competencies often have to build significant technical know-how to employ open source solutions.
There is a way that non-technical businesses can take advantage of the services of technical professionals without needing to worry about maximizing capital returns. This problem is similar to how a community can pool resources in a common investment fund and take advantage of banking experience (think credit unions), how a bunch of mountain climbers can take advantage of bulk procurement expertise to lower costs (think REI), and how a collection of rural municipalities can provide shared electricity and communications infrastructure (think rural utility providers). For the last two hundred years cooperative businesses have been refining a collection of operating models which encourage collaboration and sharing of resources. These principles apply to information technology solutions. In this presentation, I’ll share my research into cooperative business models, and my experience trying to catalyze a technology cooperative for educational institutions.
Since being indoctrinated in the philosophy of free software as a CS undergraduate, Richard has been a vocal free software evangelist. After trying a variety of open source business models, Richard thinks he has found an innovative solution to many of the common problems involved with making money building open solutions. By spreading the meme, he hopes to find the right partners for this endeavor.
Richard’s website is at <http://richard.esplins.org/>.
