I recently read the book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. The book emphasizes and provides examples of how some segments of the economy have been shifting from traditional models for product and service development to open, collective review and discussion, with users, with field experts, with prosumers and pundits. Learning about the market by learning from the market to discover more faster. Of course the book offers this advice: If you don’t learn to do this, your present model may soon be displaced. I read the book near the end of the writers’ strike. The Writers Guild of America is two labor unions, WGA East and WGA West, of tv and film writers, and employees of television and radio news. Many of these writers are self-employed, contributing value to the projects they work on, and being compensated when and where their unique skills are needed. WGA members argued they deserve earnings from new ways of distributing and airing their projects. I’m an economist by training, and it was this idea of the lasting value of creative content swirling in my mind as I read Wikinomics… Wikipedia is a non-profit organization that employs fewer than 15 full-time employees. The rest of the organization, more than 15,000 content creators, volunteer their experience, expertise and time without any form of monetary compensation. I give Wikipedia something — content and editing — they give me nothing and in return they take my content and editing and give it to the world for free. You have to ask the question, why is this army of volunteers willing to do this, and is it sustainable? And, of course Wikipedia is just one example of hundreds of thousands of sites and sources dependent upon the free development and distribution of terrific content. And some not-so-terrific content, of course, but the good stuff does rise to the top… So, if you extrapolate out a sufficient period of time, is it possible that the tens of thousands of volunteer internet contributors could one day go on strike as the members of the Writers Guilds Of America did? Could walk off the job? Stop populating the worlds’ encyclopedia? Stop posting? It is no coincidence that trends such as open source, social networking and on-line collaboration were initiated in countries with developed economies. Wealth makes open collaboration and free creative output possible. The operating model of Wikipedia and sites like it are based on the assumption that the volunteer contributors are sufficiently wealthy and require no form of compensation for their inputs. Take away the basis of wealth and either the volunteer army would go away or they would start demanding compensation for this work. Developed countries host economies of organizations; small, medium and large but still mostly organizations. These organizations employ individuals and provide stability to their employees in the form of salaries and benefits. This stability allows a huge segment of our population to pursue tangent interests. “Volunteerism” is made possible through this system. And is, arguably, paid for by employers. These volunteer initiatives might make a country more livable and interesting and attractive for an employee base, but you can rarely trace volunteer effects back to a tangible increase in an employer’s business value. It’s hard to imagine a future in which television and film and news writers volunteer their creative product, for no compensation, their standard of living supplied by other organizations with no direct connection to the production industry. While working or during free time the writers would submit, collaborate, refine, and edit work that would then be used by the studios. The writers would expect nothing in return and do this as a labor of love. Is THAT day coming? Not soon. Economics by definition is the study of choices. Volunteer contributors are making choices now, from positions of relative wealth. Will they some day name and receive a higher value for their contributions? It is not conceivable that our economy of organizations or the actual volunteer contributors will indefinitely provide free resources for the development of public sites and resources. Eventually, these public sites will have to begin competing for resources and compensating these resources for their time, talent, and expertise. How will that competition play out, and how will creators fare? It’s going to be interesting. Am looking forward to Long-tail guru Chris Anderson’s point of view, in his new book, Free. He tickles us with it here and, of course, here. I’ll be interested to see if Web 3.0 or 4.0 or 5.o will find a sustainable economic model. I would hate to be around when the Wikipedia writers and bloggers all go on strike.