Felix Stalder on Sat, 16 Aug 2003 12:21:11 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology |
Hi Ben, > I would be hesitant to define the "open source approach" > solely or even primarily in terms of the characteristics you mention. Perhaps I did not put it as clearly as I should have. I did not mean to characterize the "open source approach" in terms of its internal organization. Rather, my focus was on the characteristics of the problems to which it has been so far applied successfully. I totally agree that, from organizational point of view, the points you list such as open participation are very important. Your list is fully consistent with my elaborations. The fact that software, or an encyclopedia, do not come with any product liability *does* facilitates open collaboration. If you could sue, say, the Apache Software Foundation for a server crash, or Wikipedia for erroneous information, I'm sure their development model would look different. > The Open Organizations project (http://www.open-organizations.org) is an > attempt to synthesize these principles, and some others, into a workable, > general-purpose model. I'm skeptical about the possibility of a "workable, general-purpose model". My post was about the fact that the type of problem affects the social organization through which the solution is being developed. Different types of problems demand different types organizations to address them. You cannot organize the development of drugs the same way you organize the development of software. For one, very few people would be willing to be beta-testers. There are certain aspects that will be universal to all "open" development processes, such as common ownership of knowledge. However, the type of social organization in which commonly owned knowledge can be created will be vastly different depending on the type of knowledge. So far, we have learned how to create commonly owned knowledge as long as the type of knowledge exhibits, among others, the six characteristics I listed. The next round of social innovation is about finding ways to create free knowledge / information in other areas as well. ----+-------+---------+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net