So here are the two pillars of the model, as I see it emerging: You build your business based on sharing scarce resources in a time when your customers have less money, and you dedicate your business to serve a movement where sharing comes easily.

Then you build your revenue model to reduce financial and environmental costs for your customers (individual and collectively) while increasing your margins as a provider. The more you focus on your mission, the truer you are to your community’s mission, and the higher your margins. That’s the model that makes sense to me these days.

This is the Dreamfish model.  We add a little more to it; by helping people share while they work, we help them be more effective and more happy as they work, as well.

The punch line of course is that networked computers enable peer production; he goes further and says we’ll have greater individual human agency, and that social sharing and exchange give us the opportunity to re-shape and improve our economies and more importantly, our democracies, over the next 30 to 50 years.

In the Q&A afterwards, we had the beginning of an interesting debate. Jason Calacanis asked Benkler about the Calacanis-Benkler disagreement. I’m not sure they’re disagreeing as much as talking about different things. The moderator, Andrew Lih, cut short the discussion to make sure we could get to the next speaker on time, but it was the beginning of an interesting electric moment; it would be great if someone could get Jason and Yochai together to debate and discuss at length in some other venue. They’re both bright, and at the core, good-hearted, and because they see the world from different points of view they’ve got good productive friction.