PROJECT: Tennis forum collaboration

I chose this online community to help bridge the gap in my understanding of both the Open Source movement and the public domain. Like software developers, the members of the community have virtually no interaction beyond their participation on the message board (which is built on open source software). There are mainstream alternatives to this community in the form of tennis blogs and magazines that provide the equivalent of “firm produced software” because they have intellectual property rights on their products. In contrast, this tennis community is based around members’ discussing/debating various issues surrounding the sport and intellectual property rights aren’t asserted over its contents. Finally, this community deals almost exclusively in text, images, and video/audio files related to the sport. These are all units of creation that the public domain is concerned about.

Members of this online community collaborated to  created this image and text to represent their interest in the sport and to represent the community itself.  Like Open Source developers, they critiqued each others’ works and reached consensus on the final image.