Wikimania 2011 - Opening ceremony: Prof. Yochai Benkler
Channel: Wikimedia Israel ויקימדיה ישראל
Date: 2011-08-09

Prof. Yochai Benkler, Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org


From networked cooperation to human sociality: Wikipedia as the model for a new view of social relations
A decade ago Wikipedia burst into a world not ready to comprehend it. Thousands of people cooperating effectively, without price signals to offer "incentives" or managerial hierarchy to direct efforts was an impossibility. And yet, it moves. And as it moved it combined with a deep shift across many disciplines, from biology and neuroscience to organizational sociology, experimental economics, and social psychology to paint a very different view of who we are, as human beings, and what we are capable of when we build and inhabit systems that rely on our better selves rather than on the cramped, pessimistic view of traditional economic modeling. A decade ago our explanations of Wikipedia depended on the uniqueness of the Net. Today, we are ready to learn the deeper lessons: that we are more cooperative than we came to believe in the last half century, and that our challenges lie in learning how to build a new field of cooperative human systems design not only online, but for our lives more generally as the kind of social human beings we really are.