PROJECT: Public Domain/Open Source movement

First off, apologies for inadvertently missing the last class. Final exams had me confused about our schedule. I would’ve really enjoyed hearing about how everyone’s projects culminated and I am sad that I missed it.

Here is a brief overview of my project in its three parts. Please feel free to offer any feedback/critique, I would really appreciate it.

Overall, this class has offered a great opportunity for me to understand my research in law and cultural anthropology in the context of other experimental communities. The public domain’s standard bearer of success during this age of increasing intellectual property protection has been the Open Source movement. An experimental community (albeit now a mainstream one) of software professionals looking for an alternative to the firm model of software production, I felt that in order to write about this movement in my research, I needed to understand how different experimental communities have been written about and contextualized in the past. Our various group presentations on everything from the CAE to the various cults have proved invaluable because they’ve increased my theoretical understanding of the community I’m studying.

I also wanted to understand the process of collobaration. The community garden and the day of silence both stood out for me as ways in which people have collobarated for a cause. One was an example of labor sharing and working towards a common goal, without a stake of ownership. The other was people connected across physical boundaries only through a common practice. Finally, the act of critiquing each other’s work was also an important insight into the Open Source movement which incorporates all these elements into its essence.

Project 1: Foundations of the Open Source movement. My first project was a paper that explored the knowledge creation model that Linux (and the Open Source movement) was based on i.e. repeated peer review and a credit economy.

Project 2:  My second project was an attempt at recreating some of the tenets of the Open Source movement amongst a smaller online tennis fan community. Participants chose images and text that they collobarated on to produce a collage that represented their interests in the sport and their notions about their own community. This project was an important bridge in understanding how the Open Source movement can have important lessons for the public domain that is mostly a collection of images, text and video based intellectual property units. The project and the subsequent questions in class after my presentation were key to my understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Open Source movement when applied to the world of images and text.

Project 3: Ultimately, the end of my project will be my Master’s thesis for my joint degree. This would be the scope of the project at its most ambitious. For now, I will add to my paper on Linux (and a paper I had written earlier on the Public Domain) to synthesize my thoughts on how this experimental community of software programmers will impact our understanding of the commons and what lessons we can take away to create a more robust public domain.