Why we do not have "non-commercial" in our license

For reasons that you will understand after reading this article, I dearly wanted to call it "The era of the Silos is fading, long live the Ants!". But you would need to read the article for that title to make sense, and with a title like that, it's doubtful the article would get read. So with that as a preface, here's the story behind the "real" title.

When Silos ruled the world

For nearly 3 centuries and with increasing force in recent years, the default ministry model has been one that can best be described as the "silo model". In this model, each organization or entity is a Silo. The basic approach to the creation and use of discipleship resources (Intellectual Property) in the Silo model is:

What I create is mine, and you cannot use my stuff without my express written permission.

This statement is backed up by Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) that are enforced by International Copyright Law. So Silos (ministry organizations) create their own "all rights reserved" discipleship resources which get put in their own Silo, and, over time, the ministry landscape is comprised of hundreds of Silos of varying sizes.

Using the resources of another Silo

But what if another person/organization/entity wants to use the resources that are in a Silo? They must do one of two things:

1. They need to be big enough to have sufficient financial resources, time and a legal team to hammer out an agreement between the two organizations so that their Silo is granted access to the other Silo's content.

   Or

2. They must abide by the general "Terms of Use" that govern how the content can be used.

"Terms of Use"

Most "Terms of Use" in the Silo world are very similar, in fact they tend to be more similar than they are different. Here are some of those terms:

• You can't change anything (no "derivative works")
• You can only use our stuff in the way we specify (no "re-purposing")
• You can't make more than x number of copies without permission (we want to know what you are doing and how this might affect our sales)
• You can't post our stuff on your website (link to our website instead)
• Any use of the content must be strictly non-commercial (and that includes no ads, so we can protect our revenue stream) - even the most "open" Terms of Use in the Silo model include the "non-commercial" condition.

So the basic "workflow" goes like this: massive amounts of money get put into the top of the Silo which fuels the creation of resources that stay in the Silo and are only let out of the Silo under very strict terms of use, critically limiting how those who are not part of that Silo can use the resources. Because the Silo controls everything, and all access to the content is via the Silo's website or through Silo members, they can tally the numbers (analytics) that donors want to see. This, in turn, results in more money going into the Silo, which grows larger and expands its ministry.

This is not a criticism!

Please understand: this is an excellent approach from a business standpoint and, more importantly, it is a Biblically sanctioned approach to ministry (1 Corinthians 9). Any ministry, anywhere, has the right to place restrictions on the content they create so that they can recover their expenses and "make their living by the Word" (1 Corinthians 9:14).

But, there is a problem

This model works well in a business context, but it is woefully inadequate and falls far short in the monumental task of "making disciples of all nations", including the linguistically "least of these".

Some numbers:

• If your Silo has discipleship resources in 500 languages, that is tremendous! But you have only "reached" 7% of the world's languages. In the Silo model, it takes decades to get to 500 languages. How (and when) will this model reach the remaining 93% of the world's languages, most of whom are in language groups of less than 10,000 speakers and are so small that they will not show good "business analytics" numbers (and so not generate as much funding)?
• Large, well-known ministry organizations are not hiding the fact that they have no plan for dealing with the smallest 1/4th of the world's languages. To their credit, they are honestly stating that "the way we've always done it" is not going to cut it for the linguistically "least of these".

There are other problems too. What if the Silo doesn't want to allow another entity to use their stuff, or only with so many restrictions in place that it cannot be used as needed? What if an entity that wants to gain access to the Silo's stuff is from another language and cannot communicate with the Silo to ask permission? What if they do not have a legal team or know the legal language? What if they do not know how to comply with the multi-page "Terms of Use" that governs their use of the content? What if they need to translate the content and adapt it ("make a derivative work") for effective use in their own language and culture? And on and on...

In short, the Silo model, while Biblically sound, is inherently limited in its reach and is unable to go the distance and equip the global church in every language.

The rise of the Ants

For the first time ever, in all of history, all the pieces are in place for the rise of a new model for ministry: the Ants.

Have you ever watched a colony of ants and how they work together toward their common goal of meeting the needs of every member of the colony? They go out foraging for food, scattering in all directions. When one ant finds some food, he does not immediately go and put it in his own silo, hire some ants to manage it, open a restaurant and use the proceeds from selling the food he found to fund the procurement of more food. He could generate some good numbers for sales and build his silo bigger as more revenue comes in. But that is not the way of the Ant.

The Ant realizes that he is part of a much bigger Team with a much more important purpose than the survival of his own "brand". So when an Ant finds some food, he does two things: he takes it back to the colony where it can be consumed by anyone in the colony who needs it and he immediately tells everyone else with whom he comes in contact where to find the free food. And they all work together to bring the food back to their One Colony so that everyone's needs are met.

This approach to ministry bears striking resemblance to "the way things used to be" about 2,000 years ago:

"Now all the believers were together and had everything in common. So they sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as anyone had a need. " --Acts 2:44-45 HCSB

"Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common." --Acts 4:32 HCSB

"...there was not a needy person among them..." --Acts 4:34 HCSB

The Ant's approach to life and ministry goes like this:

What I create is ours, and you can use it without restriction as though it were yours.

Or, in the words of Paul in the same context as the declaration of the right to "make their living by the Word":

"Nevertheless, we have not made use of this right, but we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ." --1 Corinthians 9:12 ESV (emphasis mine)

A unique opportunity

Never before have all the pieces been in place to make this kind of ministry model possible on a global scale. But today they are, due largely to these factors:

• Mobile & Internet Technology - There are well over 4 billion mobile phones in the world at the time of writing and experts predict that 100% of people all over the world will own or have access to an Internet-capable mobile phone within 3-5 years. This means nearly instantaneous access to mobile-ready discipleship resources on the web by virtually everyone, in every language, on the devices they carry with them all the time.
• Globalization - Massive increases in the ease of travel, communication and international business (think: instant international money transfers, credit cards that work anywhere in the world, etc.) continue to "shrink" the world and make it easier to reach the global church and help them help themselves get access to the discipleship resources they need.
• Cognitive Surplus - Instead of "checking out" each evening, what if Christians gave one hour a week to the creation and translation of discipleship resources? Creating the 3+ million pages in the English version of Wikipedia is estimated to have taken 100 million man-hours of work. But Americans alone spend 200 billion hours watching TV each year. More believers are waking up to what can be done with their "cognitive surplus" and are starting to look for ways to use it for Kingdom purposes. This is where the manpower will come from for the equipping of the global church, even in the smallest of languages.

From "Scarcity" to "Abundance"

When Silos ruled the world, resources were scarce and their creation was very costly. For instance, think of how difficult it is to make a correction to a published book. The correction needs to be made in the manuscript, which gets sent to the editor for review, passed off to the typesetters, printed, bound, shipped, stocked, and finally sold. The time investment is massive and the financial cost prohibitively high.

This was the only reality in the Silo era and gave rise to what we call "Scarcity Thinking". In the Silo's world, you must avoid these kinds of costly errors and so the Silo maintains total control over every aspect of the content creation, translation, and distribution, with the intent of minimizing the possibility of this kind of costly error occurring. This requires significant financial resources and so it is expected that the book (or other product) would be sold (and its use by other entities strictly controlled by the "Terms of Use") so that the organization could recover those expenses and stay functioning.

Now contrast the book example above with how easy it is to make a correction to a published page on a wiki (like Wikipedia or Door43). You click "Edit", make the correction, click "Save" and you're done: you've fixed the error for the entire world in a matter of seconds and at zero financial cost. This is the world governed by "Abundance Thinking". In this world, resources are so plentiful as to be virtually infinite and their creation and distribution is often so cheap as to be virtually free.

The future of the global church is Open

"Abundance Thinking" is the foundation on which the world of the Ants is built. It makes it possible to collaborate together openly as a global church ("One Colony") to create unrestricted discipleship resources that belong collectively to every Ant in the Colony, rather than a single organization.

The "Abundance Thinking" approach embraces the fact that every single computer and mobile phone is a digital copy machine that makes identical copies of a discipleship resource instantly and for free. In the world of Silos, this is often seen as a threat (because the Silo could lose control over the resource and the revenue stream). But in the world of the Ants, this ability to make infinite verbatim copies of a resource for free is the best thing ever! Free & Open discipleship resources can be copied by anyone and given to anyone, anywhere, anytime!

However, we live in a world of copyright restrictions and lawsuits and just wanting things to be "free & open" does not make it so. It is imperative that the terms of the freedom and openness under which a discipleship resource is released be clearly defined and protected. We believe the best license that ensures the continued freedom of discipleship resources that are intended to "go the distance", even to the linguistically "least of these", is the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. This license gives anyone permission to do pretty much anything with the content (even sell it!) as long as you "give credit where credit is due" and release what you create from it under the same license. The license itself is available in 37 languages at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ and is described in more detail at http://door43.org/copyrights.

A horizontal economic model

Life is not a free utopia where money is not needed. Money is a crucial tool that God uses to advance His Kingdom. Which is precisely the reason that we are not using a "non-commercial" condition with the discipleship resources in Door43. We do not want to limit the global church and prevent them from "making their living by the Word".

The reality is that most of our brothers and sisters in Christ do not have the socioeconomic advantages that many in the Western world enjoy. Many are in situations where they can either grow their garden and sell vegetables to meet their family's needs, or they can translate and distribute discipleship resources - they do not have the luxury of doing both. So to legally prevent them from selling their translations of discipleship resources will severely limit how far those resources can go. (And it could also have disturbing overtones of selfishness and greed, as in "only we get to sell these to recover our expenses, but not you".)

So instead of including "non-commercial use only" in the license, we specifically are making the commercial use of the content a guaranteed right for anyone, anywhere. This takes the vertical "top-down" economic model of the Silo era (where the Silo controls every aspect of the resources and revenue stream) and turns it into a horizontal economic model where there is no single node that receives and controls the revenue stream. Instead, any Ant in the Colony who needs to sell the resources to recover their expenses has every right to do so. Because if they could not, their ministry would be hindered, and maybe stifled.

By enabling any node in the horizontal network to recover their expenses by selling the resources, those resources will be able to go farther than any one organization could take them. The horizontal network of the global church will always have a vastly greater reach than the confines of a single Silo or even a partnership of Silos, no matter how big they might become.

Conclusion

The global church has an incredible opportunity before it, one that has never been possible in all of history. We have the means and the tools to equip believers in every single language of the world with indigenous discipleship resources that are accessible and effective. But the only way we will be able to take advantage of this opportunity is by openly collaborating as a global church to create discipleship resources that are not encumbered by "non-commercial" conditions. In this way, the horizontal network of believers can do whatever is needed to get the resources to even the linguistically "least of these".

Other articles you may be interested in

• Reaching the linguistically "least of these"
• Aren't You Promoting Christian Socialism?
• Toward a Common Discipleship Content License
• Frequently Asked Questions

Photo credits: Nicholas T, dusk-photograph