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Is there a value to giving away some of your knowledge for free? That has been an active discussion on the Make And Meaning blog since late December, when Paul Overton -- who blogs as DudeCraft -- wrote Free -- A Case Study. Are there benefits for creatives in giving away a pattern, a technique, a design, or a concept? A benefit that in the long run will be far more beneficial to the community and the individual than holding these ideas back until an opportunity arises to make money from then?
Overton believes there is. To support his stance, he wrote a quick case study about a printing technique he was developing. After he posted his first attempts at the printing process on his blog, several of his readers requested a tutorial. Overton writes:
At this point, things could have gone one of two ways. I could have said: "I'm sorry, but I'm planning to include this project in a craft book that I'm writing so I can not share the process with you at this time, but if you give me your email address, I'd be happy to send you a link in the future as to where you might be able to purchase my book."
Or I could have said: "Sure, I'll get it done this weekend and let you
know when it's up." I chose the latter.
Over that weekend, he turned out a video demonstrating his technique, posted it to his blog, and let those who were interested know. The video was picked up and shared through a number of blogs (including CRAFT), his blog viewership grew (earning him money through page views), and he received compliments, photographs and stories about how others were using his tutorial to make gifts.
Overton concluded:
There are different kinds of currency. I may have lost a few dollars by not charging for this project, or not. Who knows? What I do know, is that I gained valuable information, trust, a small bit of notoriety, some revenue, some new readers, and a good feeling ... all because I spent a day recording a video and then gave it away instead of playing keep away with it.
Before continuing this idea, let's define several terms. The item given away is referred to as either a "bit" or an "atom." A bit is a piece of information: a skill described, a process detailed. An atom is a tangible good: a product sample. Within the crafting community, the most frequent type of shared information is a bit -- the tutorial. It takes just a little additional time to share the steps you take to create something. Entire websites, such as Instructables and the community at Thread Bangers, exist simply for this reason.
Atoms are trickier to determine and to distribute. These items can involve significant expenditure of time and raw materials; distributing the items adds a level of complexity and expense. Marie the Bee saw this challenge several years ago, when she developed The Sampler, which became a great distribution system for atoms by crafters.
The Sampler, however, is a marketing effort -- and as Diane Gilleland, also of Make And Meaning, argues, Free (as she and Overton define it, which I'll capitalize for clarity) is not primarily about marketing. Free is community building; it is given without expectation. Gilliland says:
In the creative community, because information is abundantly shared, we all learn more. We grow in skill, yes, but we also grow in interconnection to each other. Because of Free, we know more about each other, and this knowledge helps us to respect and help each other -– despite geography or personal differences.
That interconnection has way more value (and future potential) than mere money transactions. In the podcast, in fact, we talk about the idea of there being different kinds of currencies in the online community. Web traffic is a currency. Goodwill is a currency. Connection is a currency.
Another way of explaining the currency involved in the sharing of bits -- and the power and motion created by this sharing -- is with a Seth Godin quote that Overton shared during a LiveBlog discussion of the concept of Free:
When done properly, gifts work like nothing else. A gift gladly accepted changes everything. The imbalance creates motion, motion that pushes us to a new equilibrium, motion that creates connection. The key is that the gift must be freely and
