There are two major comments I have have on all these contributions.

First, how it is important to recognise that nothing is really new about publishing on the web in terms of it being a transaction whereby somebody publishes content that is hopefully their’s to publish but because transactions are so open and visible around much of the web it is easier to implicitly or explicitly codify that transaction in a way that a conversation in the street or distributing a few notes to a few other people is more difficult to do. This immediately entails issues of economics and issues of rights.

I won’t say more about the legal issues now as my second comment is around economics. Much of the discourse that Alan Patrick and Chris Anderson are involved in is a free market/capitalist market one. But just as recent events in financial and now other markets are showing us, there are at least two other ‘markets’ to consider – public markets or a public economy where it is taxpayers money that supports quite a bit of certain human activities (education is one) and social markets or the gift economy whereby individuals freely give of their time for a variety of reasons (including deferred or displaced rewards).

What we need to fully consider in freeconomics is the changing dynamics and interplay between these three ‘economies’ and where notions of free are only involved in certain types of transactions and yet there can still be production and consumption costs.

There is no free lunch since someone had to find/grow the food and prepare and somone has to clear up and clean up afterwards. It is just free to some people at some times for some contexts. The rest can be thought of as externalities but it depends upon how you draw your boundary.

Of course the tough part is turning the ideas that can flow from this broad system description to specific organisational practices and propositions to the ‘markets’ out there that generates the money that oils the wheels of the whole infrastructure.

I (might) let you know when I have cracked it for the Open University but it has to noted that we need to draw upon all three ‘economies’ in a focussed and coherent manner if we are to continue to share some of our content and knowledge riches to everyone else.