The Skype effect
When trying to explain what we are trying to achieve with Talis Source, I keep coming back to the phenomenon that is, Skype. For those who are not familiar with the extraordinary emergence of Skype in the telecommunications industry, let me elaborate.
Skype offers free calls over the internet. Which means that by registering with Skype on your PC, and equipping yourself with a handset, you can start to make calls anywhere in the world free-of-charge. It has managed to do this by creating an infrastructure that is self-supporting. It is the users that sustain the infrastructure, not Skype.
When you power up Skype on your PC you are allowing Skype to have access to your spare processing power and net connections to provide a collective resource that routes yours and others' calls. As a result, Skype can sustain a massive network of users without any centralised infrastructure or more to the point, cost base. And the result is that, they can afford to pour back the benefits of this cooperative effort to the users themselves, in the shape of free calls, anywhere in the world, the only thing you have to do is register. Oh, and you can only make free calls to another user of Skype. So, naturally the first thing you do is get all your best friends and family - particularly those living overseas - to register as well, spreading Skype like a virus and making it almost overnight one of the most successful telecommunications companies in the world. Skype is one of the most astonishing examples of how the web has enabled collaborative sharing – in this case of computing power and connections – to be utilised to benefit its community of users in a very real sense.
So, how does this equate with what we are trying to achieve with Talis Source? Well, rather than asking libraries to share processing power, we're asking them to share their data, by contributing it to the Talis Platform. And in return, we too are pouring back the benefit by giving libraries access to search and view this enormous resource of bibliographic and holdings data (47.2 million holdings records at last time of counting) free-of-charge.
I don't want to overplay the comparison, but I think its important to see that there are different companies out there in different industries that are pursuing this model in order to harness the support and participation of users. And where it's happening there are real win-wins being achieved.
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