Page - (000054) - in Knowledge and Networks

44 priate solvers (Feller et al., 2012 ), and effective communication among all actors orchestrating the different components of the project. The dynamics of the mediated crowdsourced project work I envision entail something akin to the Agile Web, except that the solvers are talented people, not fi rms, who are identifi ed at the outset and continually across a metropolitan region. In an era of increasingly customized demand, wide-ranging problems (from mechanical to electronic) that emerge are crowdsourced. In the scenario laid out in this chapter, crowdsourcing targets networks of diverse solvers (people) who would earn a living wage by collaborating in problem solving and the development of innovations demanded by seekers (private as well as public, organizations). Networks, coordinated by mediators between seekers and solvers, form around par- ticular problems, dissolve, and form again with different membership relative to the expertise required for new problems. As networks form and reconfi gure relative to the constitution of membership, each solver interacts with an increasingly wide array of people while developing social knowledges in the course of each collabora- tion. The point is to construct social knowledges to erode ignorance in the course of fl uid, living-wage, collaborative work, supported by public and private institutions that serves both the economy and its people. The process renders economic space social and vice versa. Conclusion: A Matter of Values The agenda of this chapter is to conceptualize how to work towards social ends by recognizing and acting on the role of meaningful social knowledges in the pursuit of knowledges for economic gain. The context is the emergence of new production dynamics and labor recruitment strategies amid dramatically increasing socioeco- nomic polarization and exclusion. To date, crowdsourcing associated with open innovation has proven to be lucrative for fi rms but also highly exploitative and exclusive. Recognizing insidious dimensions of the market, the underlying sugges- tion here is to make use of the market, not to work against it, with public and private support for social as well as economic objectives. If the social and the economic as well as the cultural and political are mutually constituted, then it is sensible to refuse the conventional privileging of one dimension, the economic, at the expense of another, commonly the social. I have privileged social over economic goals to encompass strategies that might otherwise be jettisoned, but economic goals remain nested in the broader project. At this critical juncture in the global economy, the agenda I have in mind entails nothing less than reconfi guring the values that govern our lives. Acknowledgments I thank Johannes Glückler and his team at the University of Heidelberg for organizing and graciously hosting the symposium on “Topographies and Topologies of Knowledge,” and their invitation to me to participate. I also thank Johannes as well as Alistair Fraser and Kath Gibson for their thoughtful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. N. Ettlinger