Yet faded dreams have a stubborn persistence, nagging throughout a day. While Lick passed away in 1990, many of the early internet pioneers lived to see their triumph and tragedy.
Figure 3-3-C. Ted Nelson at Keio University, Japan, 1999. Source: Wikipedia, used under CC 4.0 BY-SA.
Ted Nelson (shown in Figure C) and many other pioneers in Project Xanadu continue to carry their complaints about and reforms to the internet forward to this day. Engelbart, until his death in 2013, continued to speak, organize and write about his vision of "boosting Collective IQ". These activities included supporting, along with Terrence Winograd (PhD advisor to the Google founders), a community around Online Deliberation based at Stanford University that nurtured key leaders of the next generation of โฟป as we will see below. While none of these efforts met with the direct successes of their earlier years, they played critical roles as inspiration and in some case even incubation for a new generation of โฟป innovators, who have helped revive and articulate the dream of โฟป.
Nodes of light
While, as we highlighted in the introduction, the dominant thrust of technology has developed in directions that put it on a collision course with democracy, this new generation of leaders has formed a contrasting pattern, scattered but clearly discernible nodes of light that together give hope that with renewed common action, โฟป could one day animate technology writ large. Perhaps the most vivid example for the average internet user is Wikipedia.
This open, non-profit collaborative project has become the leading global resource for reference and broadly shared factual information.[^teblunthuis] In contrast to the informational fragmentation and conflict that pervades much of the digital sphere that we highlighted in the introduction, Wikipedia has become a widely accepted source of shared understanding. It has done this through harnessing large-scale, open, collaborative self-governance.[^hwang] Many aspects of this success are idiosyncratic and attempts to directly extend the model have had mixed success; trying to make such approaches more systematic and pervasive is much of our focus below. But the scale of the success is quite remarkable.[^Wiki] Recent analysis suggests that most web searches lead to results that prominently include Wikipedia entries. For all the celebration of the commercial internet, this one public, deliberative, participatory, and roughly consensual resource is perhaps its most common endpoint.
The concept of "Wiki," from which Wikipedia derives its name, comes from a Hawaiian word meaning "quick," and was coined by Ward Cunningham in 1995 when he created the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb. Cunningham aimed to extend the web principles highlighted above of hypertextual navigation and inclusive โฟป governance by allowing the rapid creation of linked databases.[^Wikiway] Wikis invite all users, not just experts, to edit or create new pages using a standard web browser and to link them to one another, creating a dynamic and evolving web landscape in the spirit of โฟป.
[^Wikiway]: Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham, The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2001).
While Wikis themselves have found significant applications, they have had an even broader impact in helping stimulate the "groupware" revolution that many internet users associate with products like Google docs but has its roots in the open source WebSocket protocol.[^group] HackMD, a collaborative real-time Markdown editor, is used within the g0v community to collaboratively edit and openly share documents such as meeting minutes.[^Japan] While collaboratively constructed documents illustrate this ethos, it more broadly pervades the very foundation of the online world itself. Open source software (OSS) embodies this ethos of participatory, networked, transnational self-governance. Significantly represented by the Linux operating system, OSS underlies the majority of public cloud infrastructures and connects with many through platforms like GitHub, boasting over 100 million contributors, growing rapidly in recent years especially in the developed world as pictured in Figure D. The Android OS, which powers over 70% of all smartphones, is an OSS project, despite being primarily maintained by Google. The success and impact of such "peer production" has forced the broad reconsideration of many assumptions underlying standard economic analysis.[^benkler]
[^group]: The term "groupware" was coined by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz in 1978, with early commercial products appearing in the 1990s, such as Lotus Notes, enabling remote group collaboration. Google Docs, originated from Writely launched in 2005, has widely popularized the concept of collaborative real-time editing. [^Japan]: Scrapbox, a combination of real-time editor with a wiki system, is utilized by the Japanese forum of this book. Visitors of the forum can read the drafts and add questions, explanations, or links to related topics in real time. This interactive environment supports activities like book reading events, where participants can write questions, engage in oral discussions, or take minutes of these discussions. The feature to rename keywords while maintaining the network structure helps the unification of variations in terminology and provides a process to find the good translation. As more people read through, a network of knowledge is nurtured to aid the understanding of subsequent readers.
Figure 3-3-D. GitHub contributors as share of working-age population by country. Source: GitHub Innovation Graph[^GHgraph], World Bank[^WB] and Taiwan Ministry of Interior[^TaiwanMI] .
OSS emerged in reaction to the secretive and commercial direction of the software industry that emerged in the 1970s. The free and open development approach of the early days of ARPANET was sustained even after the withdrawal of public funding, thanks to a global volunteer workforce. Richard Stallman, opposing the closed nature of the Unix OS developed by AT&T, led the "free software movement", promoting the โGNU General Public Licenseโ that allowed users to run, study, share, and modify the source code. This was eventually rebranded as OSS, with a goal to replace Unix with an open-source alternative, Linux, led by Linus Torvalds.
OSS has expanded across various internet and computing sectors, even earning support from formerly hostile companies like Microsoft, now owner of leading OSS service company GitHub and employer of one of the authors of this book. This represents the practice of โฟป on a large scale; emergent, collective co-creation of shared global resources. Communities form around shared interests, freely build on each otherโs work, vet contributions through unpaid maintainers, and "fork" projects into parallel versions in case of irreconcilable differences. The protocol โgitโ supports collaborative tracking of changes, with platforms like GitHub and GitLab facilitating millions of developers' participation. This book is a product of such collaboration and has been supported by Microsoft and GitHub.
However, OSS faces challenges such as chronic financial support shortage due to the withdrawal of public funding, as explored by Nadia Eghbal (now Asparouhova) in her book Working in Public. Maintainers are often unrewarded and the community's growth increases the burden on them. Nonetheless, these challenges are addressable, and OSS, despite its business model limitations, exemplifies the continuance of the open collaboration ethos (the lost dao) that โฟป aims to support. Hence, OSS projects will be frequent examples in this book.
[^Eghbal]: Nadia Eghbal, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (South San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2020).
Another contrasting reaction to the shift away from public investment in communication networking was exemplified by the work of Lanier from above. A student and critic of AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, he sought to develop a technological program of the same ambition as AI, but centered around human experience and communication. Seeing existing forms of communication as being constrained by symbols that can be processed by the ears and eyes like words and pictures, he aspired to empower deeper sharing of and empathy for experiences only expressible by sense like touch and proprioception (the internal sense). Through his research and entrepreneurship during the 1980s, this developed into the field of "virtual reality", one that has been a continual source of innovation in user interaction since, from the wired glove[^wiredglove] to Apple's release of the Vision Pro [^visionpro].
Yet, as we highlighted above, Lanier carried forward not only the cultural vision of the computer as a communication device; he also championed Nelson's critique of the gaps and failings of what became the internet. He particularly emphasized the lack of base layer protocols supporting payments, secure data sharing and provenance and financial support for OSS. This advocacy combined with the emergence of (pseudonymous) Satoshi Nakamoto's invention of the Bitcoin protocol in 2008 to inspire a wave of work on these topics in and around "web3" communities that harnesses cryptography and blockchains to create shared understanding of provenance and value.[^Nakamoto] While many projects in the space have been influenced by Libertarianism and hyper-financialization, the enduring connection to original aspirations of the internet, especially under the leadership of Vitalik Buterin (who founded Ethereum, the largest smart contract platform), has inspired a number of projects, like GitCoin and decentralized identity, that are central inspirations for โฟป today as we explore below.
Other pioneers on these issues focused more on layers of communication and association, rather than provenance and value. Calling their work the "Decentralized Web" or the "Fediverse", they built protocols like Christine Lemmer Webber's Activity Pub that became the basis for non-commercial, community based alternatives to mainstream social media, ranging from Mastodon to Twitter's now-independent and non-profit BlueSky initiative. This space has also produced many of the most creative ideas for re-imagining identity and privacy with a foundation in social and community relationships.
Finally and perhaps most closely connected to our own paths to โฟป have been the movements to revive the public and multisectoral spirit and ideals of the early internet by strengthening the digital participation of governments and democratic civil society. These "GovTech" and "Civic Tech" movements have harnessed OSS-style development practices to improve the delivery of government services and bring the public into the process in a more diverse range of ways. Leaders in the US include Jennifer Pahlka, founder of GovTech pioneer Code4America, and Beth Simone Noveck, Founder of The GovLab.[^GovTech] Hal Seki, a leader in Japan's Civic Tech movement, led the creation of sinsai.info, a data collection and visualization platform developed after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, and later founded Code for Japan.
[^GovTech]: Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better (New York: Macmillan, 2023). Beth Simone Noveck, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (New York: Brookings Institution Press, 2010).
Noveck, in particular, is a powerful bridge between the early development of โฟป and its future, having been a driving force behind the Online Deliberation workshops mentioned above, having developed Unchat, one of the earliest attempts at software to serve these goals and which helped inspire the work of vTaiwan and more.[^Unchat] She went on to pioneer, in her work with the US Patent and Trademark Office and later as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the US many of the transparent and inclusive practices that formed the core of the g0v movement we highlighted above.[^Noveckwork] Noveck was a critical mentor not just to g0v but to a range of other ambitious civic technology projects around the world from the Kenya collective crisis reporting platform Ushahidi founded by Juliana Rotich and collaborators to a variety of European participative policy-making platforms like Decidim founded by Francesca Bria and collaborators and CONSUL that arose from the "Indignado" movement parallel to g0v in Spain, on the board of which one of us sits. Yet despite these important impacts, a variety of features of these settings has made it challenging for these examples to have the systemic, national and thus easily traceable macrolevel impacts that g0v had in Taiwan.
Other countries have, of course, excelled in various elements of โฟป. Estonia is perhaps the leading example and shares with Taiwan a strong history of Georgism and land taxes, is often cited as the most digitized democratic government in the world and pioneered digital democracy earlier than almost any other country, starting in the late 1990s.[^Estoniamodel] Finland has built on and scaled the success of its neighbor, extending digital inclusion deeper into society, the educational system and the economy than Estonia, as well as adopting elements of digitized democratic participation. Singapore has the most ambitious Georgist-style policies on earth and harnesses more creative โฟป economic mechanisms and fundamental protocols than any other jurisdiction. South Korea has invested extensively in both digital services and digital competence education. New Zealand has pioneered internet-based voting and harnessed civil society to improve public service inclusion. Iceland has harnessed digital tools to extend democratic participation more extensively than any other jurisdiction. Kenya, Brazil and especially India have pioneered digital infrastructure for development. We will return to many of these examples in what follows.
[^Estoniamodel]: Gary Anthes, "Estonia: a Model for e-Government" Communications of the ACM 58, no. 6 (2015): 18-20.
Yet none of these have institutionalized the breadth and depth of โฟป approaches to socio-technical organization across sectors that Taiwan has. It is thus more challenging to take these cases as broad national examples on which to found imagination of what โฟป could mean to the world if it could scale up to bridge the divides of nation, culture and sector and forming both the infrastructural foundation and the mission of global digital society. With that anchoring example and additional hope from these other cases, we now turn to painting in greater depth the opportunity a โฟป global future holds.
[^Unchat]: Beth Noveck, โDesigning Deliberative Democracy in Cyberspace: The Role of the Cyber-Lawyer,โ New York Law School, n.d. https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1580&context=fac_articles_chapters; Beth Noveck, โA Democracy of Groups,โ First Monday 10, no. 11 (November 7, 2005), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v10i11.1289. [^Noveckwork]: Beth Simone Noveck, Wiki Government op. cit.; Vivek Kundra, and Beth Noveck, โOpen Government Initiative,โ Internet Archive, June 3, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20090603192345/http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/. [^teblunthuis]: In fact, researchers have studied reading patterns in terms of time spent by users across the globe. Nathan TeBlunthuis, Tilman Bayer, and Olga Vasileva, โDwelling on Wikipedia,โ Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, August 20, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1145/3306446.3340829, (pp. 1-14). [^hwang]: Sohyeon Hwang, and Aaron Shaw. โRules and Rule-Making in the Five Largest Wikipedias.โ Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 16 (May 31, 2022): 347โ57, https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19297 studied rule-making on Wikipedia using 20 years of trace data. [^Wiki]: In an experiment, McMahon and colleagues found that a search engine with Wikipedia links increased relative click-through-rate (a key search metric) by 80% compared to a search engine without Wikipedia links. Connor McMahon, Isaac Johnson, and Brent Hecht, โThe Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies,โ Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 11, no. 1 (May 3, 2017): 142โ51, https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v11i1.14883. Motivated by this work, an audit study found that Wikipedia appears in roughly 70 to 80% of all search results pages for "common" and "trending" queries. Nicholas Vincent, and Brent Hecht, โA Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results,โ Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, no. CSCW1 (April 13, 2021): 1โ15, https://doi.org/10.1145/3449078. [^benkler]: Yochai Benkler, โCoaseโs Penguin, Or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,โ n.d. http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF. [^wiredglove]: A wired glove is an input device like a glove. It allows users to interact with digital environments through gestures and movements, translating physical hand actions into digital responses. Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2017). [^visionpro]: The Vision Pro is a head mount display, released by Apple in 2024. This device integrates high-resolution displays with sensors capable of tracking the user's movements, hand actions and the environment to offer an immersive mixed reality experience. [^ChooseYourOwnAdventure]: "Choose Your Own Adventure," interactive gamebooks based on Edward Packard's concept from 1976, peaked in popularity under Bantam Books in the '80s and '90s, with 250+ million copies sold. It declined in the '90s due to competition from computer games. [^FirstDemo]: Engelbart, Christina. โFirsts: The Demo - Doug Engelbart Institute.โ Doug Engelbart Institute, n.d. https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/. [^ComputerasCommunicationDevice]: Licklider and Taylor, op. cit. [^DouglasEngelbart]: โDouglas Engelbart Issues โAugmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Frameworkโโฏ: History of Information,โ October 1962. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=801. [^SputnikโsImpact]: Dickson, Paul. โSputnikโs Impact on America.โ NOVA | PBS, November 6, 2007. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/sputnik-impact-on-america/. [^ManComputerSymbiosis]: J. C. R. Licklider. โMan-Computer Symbiosis,โ March 1960. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html.
