TS: The model of the artist as 19th century individual genius is still alive and well. Equally alive are models like the exemplary sufferer, the self-absorbed individualist, and the innovator and visionary misfit. Yet there is the overwhelming trend towards collaboration society-wide. How do you view this development?

AB: I agree completely, there really is a wide societal trend moving toward a more collaborative mode, using the Internet and cooperative social software tools to enable that. Broadly, I see two competing approaches at this point, which map very well onto the difference between closed and open source approaches:

The locked-down institutional approach is characterized by this motto: hang on to everything, keep it close to your chest until it is finally ready to be exposed to a wider audience.

And then there is the commons approach with its motto: share, share widely, in the belief that this approach will attract the best contributors and collaborators to the project.

This latter approach is also crucially driven and supported by a need for better communication, and it is no accident that since the advent of the Internet we have seen a range of communication technologies emerge, from email and newsgroups now all the way through to blogs, content management systems and wikis. There appears to be an acutely felt need for better communication which has driven such projects, and it is a matter of breaking out of some of the more locked-down institutional envi­ronments, or of changing these envi­ronments, to enable such collabora­tive approaches more fully.

TS: What could lead to such radical institutional change?

AB: The software industry is a useful example here - we are now grad­ually seeing companies realizing that there is value in contributing to open source, even if their main business is still in selling software packages. This is a long slow change which will continue for some time to come until it is fully accepted - and it may nev­er be fully accepted. In an academ­ic sense there are similar problems - perhaps not so much related to questions of commercialization but certainly concerns of competition between different institutions or in­dividual academics.

If you take an example of an open educational archive such as MITO­penCourseWare this becomes obvi­ous. It is easy to be open and sup­portive of sharing all your materials if you are the market leader. The use of these materials only furthers and re-enforces your leadership. MIT ben­efits tremendously, of course. It is a bit different with other institutions - they may not benefit in the same way at all from openly sharing their con­tent, if these materials are seen as second-rate in comparison to what MIT and others offer.
ocw.mit.edu

And the fact that a particular univer­sity is known as having originated an important idea is of course helpful in the recruitment of, especially, inter­national students and staff.

TS: What would motivate univer­sities to engage in open collabora­tion?

AB: Even though faculty are often eager to collaborate, the adminis­tration may remain far more hesitant about that prospect and still have to work out for themselves what it is that would drive them towards col­laboration.

TS: Foucault asserted that knowl­edge is not something that is called up or recalled from an originat­ing source to be then transferred down from one person to another. He argued that this reproduction of knowledge can only reaffirm the ex­isting social constructions. Coop­erative technologies like blogs or wikis allow for network knowledge structures that are based on an En­gaged collective working through knowledge. Australia seems to pio­neer much of the uses of social soft­ware in education. Do you know of reasons for this eagerness of peo­ple to contribute to the public? Do you think it is related to people’s de­sire to contribute to something larg­er than themselves?

AB: Definitely - take Wikipedia for example, which today is a fantastic resource and builds on the fact that anyone is an expert on something, even if it is only baseball. This ena­bles them to contribute at least on that obscure bit of knowledge that they are most expert on, and if you put all of these contributors together then you do get a vast resource larg­er than themselves.
wikipedia.org

There is a real question of scale here, of course - Wikipedia works in this way because it has a massive number of contributors, and is there­fore able to cover truly encyclopedic territory; in smaller teams this is not necessarily the case. So, if you have a much smaller collaborative project of whatever form, it may take signifi­cantly longer to come to fruition. The project in this case may not be larger than yourself, but simply help in sharing the work load amongst that group - and perhaps you contribute to this project only as a stepping stone to more lucrative commercial work, us­ing it to show your skills and knowl­edge and your ability to work effec­tively as part of a team.

Why Australia is so prominent in this field, I am not entirely sure - perhaps this has something to do with our re­moteness, and therefore our greater reliance on communication technolo­gies in the first place. There certain­ly has been a great level of involve­ment in collaborative systems for a long time. Matthew Arnison from Ac­tive Sydney still is one of the key ad­vocates of open publishing, for ex­ample, and he and the Cat@lyst team also developed the first open publishing system for Indymedia, just before the Seattle protests. Austral­ians have always had a healthy skep­ticism towards authority, and promoted the idea of ‘fair go’ for everyone - perhaps that has something to do with it…
journal.media-culture.org.au/0304/02-feature.php
www.cat.org.au
active.org.au

But as far as open source, open publishing, and open collaboration goes, we must ask: will it work everywhere, or only in specific fields - are there areas which are particularly suited or unsuited to open source-style approaches? I do not think this has been fully answered yet - in open source, for example, I am sure you can find some very success­ful projects which were driven by a great need for them, while there are also many others which never quite got off the ground because of a lack of contributors. In areas like open publishing, which I have researched in detail recently, there are some projects like Slashdot which have proven massively successful - Slash­dot has some 600,000 registered us­ers - while others in a similar vein are far less successful, perhaps because their topic area was simply less in­teresting to a large number of users. Even open news sites that were in­spired by Slashdot, such as Kuro5hin or Plastic were less successful.

Plastic is a good example as it ‘only’ has some 30,000 registered users: it is a site that has only just managed to establish itself and survive, but has less of a topical focus. The common good or common interest in contributing to the site perhaps wasn’t seen as clearly by its visitors as this has been the case in Slashdot.
slashdot.org
kuro5hin.org
www.plastic.com

There needs to be a clearly felt common need or common interest in such projects; in addition, there are also obvious technical issues about the ease of use, the ease of contributing, the ease of interaction. The Wikipedia is an interesting example in this case - Jim Wales’s first venture, the Nupedia, largely failed, of course, because it made it far too difficult for users to contribute content to the encyclopedia. The team then developed the Wikipedia as a fully open-access site where anyone can contribute, anyone can edit, and it took off.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia

Pages: 1 2 3

This entry was posted by PixelACHE on Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 at 4:21 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.