In the wake of the Wikimania Festival at Harvard Law School in early August, everyone became obcessed with all things Wiki. Then after a few too many diet cokes, and cheesecake brownies all compliments of Wikimania, we started to get silly. Cold pizza stashed in the kitchen fridge had several tags and a note that its Creative Commons license permitted toasting as a derivative work.
We started thinking about all the collaborative culture and open source works that have been around long before the Internet and Wikipedia. We came up with a short list
- quilting bees
- barn raisings
- Family recipies
- Audience participation at the Rocky Horror Picture Show
- The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (“take a sad song and make it better.”)
But right now, this very minute, the most interesting experiment in collaborative culture is all about Free Beer.
Free Beer is a Danish brewery that offers free beer to any and all comers. Not free as in you don’t have to pay for it, but free as in freedom. Freedom to take their recipe and make it your own.
The project, originally conceived by Copenhagen-based artist collective Superflex and students at the Copenhagen IT University, applies modern free software / open source methods to a traditional real-world product (beer).Here’s the fun part: The recipe and branding elements of Free Beer is published under a Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5) license, which means that anyone can use the recipe to brew their own Free Beer or create their own version of the recipe. Brewers of the new beer can make money from selling their beer, too. All they have to do is publish the recipe under the same Commons License and give credit where it’s due — to the original Free Beer folk. Not creative enough to come up with a label design or brand element for your beverage? No problem. Modify Free Beer’s logos and remember to honor that Commons license.
Can’t wait to get started? The recipe is right here.
And don’t forget to upload your new brew to the Flickr pool of international Free Beer makers.
Now compare this to Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, which has had its formula locked up in a vault somewhere since it was first concocted by John Pemberton in 1886. In her article “Have a Cloak and a Smile” Barbara Mikkelson maintains that the urban legend surrounding the top secret formula is just that — a shrewd marketing idea to add a little mystique and allure to the brand. As the article points out, even if you wanted to make your own coke, you couldn’t market it as coke, and you probably couldn’t import many of the ingredience Coke uses.
What would happen if Coke loosened its grip on its forumla. What if it allowed fans and chemists alike to concoct a derivitive version of the soda pop, credit Coke and keep the train moving by using a Commons License to pass the recipe on and on and on. Certainly it couldn’t be any worse than Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke or any of Cokes in-house deriviative works. We think not. And both Free Beer and Coke have arrived at the same ends — a certain brand cache and mystique that makes consumers want to consume and in the case of Free Beer tinker with it, if they so choose.
But the “large red cola concern” (as it’s sometimes referred to in Atlatna) literally has its soda down to a science and unlike Free Beer, the ordinary consumer doesn’t have the money, the products or the machinery to manufacture Coca-Cola.
Enter Open Cola. Well, actually, it entered about five years ago, as a way to explain free culture and open source software. A noble experiment that wound up selling 150,000 cans and making the Toronto based OpenCola more famous than the software it was designed to promote. Like Free Beer, the recipe and the instructions for making OpenCola are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, license their recipe under a GNU General Public License.
OpenCola said its success was due to a “widespread mistrust of big corporations and the proprietary nature of almost everything.”
If you have the time and th inclination, you, too can make your own cola. Kate and Kayle took a shot at it in England,(see their step by step process on The Guardian Web site.) And remember, this isn’t really a new idea. After all, John Pemberton was making his own cola in 1886.