Earlier this year, Lou Rosenfeld, one of the founders of Information Architecture wrote about Developing a Participation Economy. The concept, while it has its share of complexities, addresses a simple question: how can you provide incentive to encourage volunteer participation within a professional community? My stripped down bare bones interpretation of Lou’s proposition is to create a system for quantifying people-hours into a currency of sorts that can later be used to purchase people-hours from others within the community, i.e. a participation economy.

Isn’t this just bartering?

Or so I asked myself. And at first, I thought yeah it is. This is no different than the Baker baking bread and trading his bread for a horse shoe from the Blacksmith.

There is one key difference, though.

The difference is that in the Participation Economy, the workers are contributing towards a common cause. In the case of IA’s, the cause is the further development of information architecture as a profession. In this sense, it is somewhat of a closed economic system whereby the greater the participation, the greater the overall benefit for the economic community as a whole (at least in theory).

It’s an interesting idea that has been put to the test by others such as Evolt, and that also has many applications.

In a previous life, I was a school teacher (or at least on my way to becoming one). School teachers spend countless hours preparing lessons for their students, especially in the earlier years of their teaching careers.

What if there was a central repository for teachers to contribute their lesson materials, where their contributions result in a certain amount of credit, which they can they claim back to use materials contributed by other teachers?

In my life these days, I’m a web coordinator (a “web coordinator”? what’s that?). I work with a group of other like-minded web professionals directly in my office, and also informally gather once every few months with the other web designers and developers across campus. At the best of times, we collaborate to share tips and tricks, give help and advice, and work together when we share common goals. At the worst of times, three or four of us at any given moment are programming the same widget or tackling the same CSS design problem, but doing it in a vacuum not realizing we are all rebuilding the wheel.

What if we had a means to collaborate in a distributed system (one that lets us give and take on our own schedule and availability), and we had a way to create a shared pool of resources, we had a system to provide incentives to participate, and we had a way to track the different projects being developed to spot the opportunities for collaboration?

That, in my mind, is the potential of the participation economy: increased participation, increased sharing of knowledge, increased collaboration. And there are tangential benefits as well: a greater sense of community among like-minded professionals, a means to communicate, an opportunity to help newcomers to the field and for the experienced professional to gain mentoring experience.

Sounds great, hey? What’s the catch?

Well, for starters you’d need a method for deciding how much certain contributions are worth – i.e. the bottom line is you probably have to “monetize” participant contributions, and how do you go about doing that? Who’s to say what your effort is worth?

You also need the infrastructure to support this type of exchange. Of course the possibilities are endless with all the web technologies available today, but another bottom line is that someone at the end of the day will have to be setting this up.

But are those really so tough? I’ll give it some thought and get back to you!

What do you think? Let me know.