Tom Graves / Tetradian

This one’s for Oscar Berg, who this morning sent out the following Tweet:

My best ideas that I use at work are born outside of office hours. Who owns these ideas?

I commented on my reTweet that this was a “key fail of possession-economy”. It’s actually much more serious than a mere ‘fail’, but we’ll come back to that in a moment. First, some more follow-on Tweets from Oscar as he mused further on his experiences:

With social media people have tools that can serve as evidence that they got an idea outside of work before they used it at work

Here’s my idea: if my ideas are free & available for anyone to use, noone can own them -> I can use them as well for whatever purpose

Organizations are obsessed with owning ideas & knowledge

Enterprises should focus on becoming the best environments for ideas to be born, grow and successfully be brought to the market

RT @tdebaillon: “Claiming to own an idea is a political matter, a will to stay in control-and-command logic”

RT @EskoKilpi: “attribution is the new ownership” #ideas

This is indeed a question of ownership – and a highly political one at that, as Thierry de Baillon explains above. Perhaps the key point here is that there are two fundamentally different concepts of ownership: possession, and stewardship (the latter sometimes referred to, perhaps more usefully, as responsibility-based ownership).

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Another of those first-thing-in-the-morning ideas, which arose in part from a conversation on social-architectures that I’ve been having with gift-economy maven Alpha Lo.

Our whole economy is built around the idea of possession, and exchange of possessions; yet what do we really possess?

Things? Not really – a point made all too evident by the phrase “you can’t take it with you”…

Ideas? We don’t even know where they come from, so the whole concept of ‘intellectual property’ is a bit moot anyway.

Relationships? They only exist when maintained by both parties, and they usually fail if anyone tries to possess them, so that option doesn’t work either.

Faith? Hope? Belief? A more likely kind of ‘possession’, though it tends to break down for the same reasons as for relationships.

What else?

The only themes I could find were time and responsibility.

We each have a certain amount of time. We have no idea how long that might be, or what will happen in that time, but it belongs to us alone. We can give our use of that time to someone else – hence all the mess of ‘employment’ and ‘compensation’ and ‘familial duties’ and the rest – but we can’t give the time itself to anyone else. It’s our possession alone: our responsibility as to what we do with it.

And we do each have our own responsibility, as ‘response-ability’ – our ability to choose appropriate responses within and to the context. Through responsibility, and through our responsibilities, we express who we are in what we do, how we think, how we relate, what we choose.

We possess our time, and our responsibility. They possess us. Everything else seems to be an option.

Comments/opinions, anyone?