What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.

The loss of control you fear is already in the past.

[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.

Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity

The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.