Moody: the works

A list of links to all my non-tech writings:

Essays

Glanglish - with audio versions - new post

Travel writings

Moody's Black Notebook Travels - new post

Walks with Lorenzetti

A Partial India

Novels

Doing the Business

Egyptian Romance

Open Science vs. Closed Companies

Here are some interesting thoughts on open science and how it relates to those working within companies:

Just as secrecy in academia only makes sense within the existing reward structure, secrecy in industry could be at least partly offset by policy decisions that recognize the gains in efficiency that collaboration can bring. I've heard multiple times from multiple sources that industry may close itself off from the rest of the world, but within a company, the teamwork ethic is amazing. Clearly, the value of co-operation is recognized. Why shouldn't that also work for (larger and larger) groups of companies? What you lose by not being the only company to know something from which profit can be made (call it X) is offset by the fact that you might never have learned X without the collaboration -- and in the meantime, the world gets X that much faster.

It seems clear, though, that such top-down decisions are more likely to be made in academia, and perhaps the nonprofit sector, than in profit-driven industry -- at least until there are enough concrete examples of success to tip the perceived balance of risk. If I'm -- if we Open Foo types are -- right, it's actually riskier to compete than to cooperate in the long term. Better to own a share of X sooner than to delay any return on your investment in the hope of owning X outright later. This is especially true when the resources required to try to own X could be used to get you shares in multiple other projects at the same time.

Sharing should not be seen as a problem but as a solution.

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Haque on Hacking Economics

And yes, it's all about openness, collaboration and respect:

companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.

Second Life Business Communicators Wiki

There's a lot of froth flying around about the business use of Second Life, but not many facts. Here's a good resource in the making: a wiki that aims to pull together concrete information about such activity. There's not much there are the moment, but you know what you can do about that....

50 Bits and Bobs about Open Source

Well, that's what I'd call it: the blog prefers "50 Open Source success stories in Business, Education, and Government". It's a bit of a ragbag, but an interesting one in places, and useful for giving to people who seem to think that Apache is open source's only success. (Via Digg.)