Three special events in the history of technology for creating,  (Page 9/12)

The most important feature of Linux, however, was not technical but sociological. Until the Linux development,everyone believed that any software as complex as an operating system had to be developed in a carefully coordinated way by arelatively small, tightly-knit group of people. … Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it wasrather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained notby rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of userswithin days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the amazement of almosteveryone, this worked quite well. … I expect the open-source movement to have essentially won its point about software withinthree to five years (that is, by 2003-05). … At that point it will become more appropriate to try to leverage open-source insights inwider domains. [Raymond p. 194]

In addition to a common framework for developing the software, what makes open-source software projectswork is a common legal vocabulary for sharing software called an open-source license. The primal example is the General Public License (GPL) developed by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. Without the open-source license enabling anyone to use and modifythe software, it would be impossible to build a community of programmers. For more, see the papers by Stallman, Raymond, Boyle,Lessig, and others.

To power the digital commons, a number of open-content licenses have been developed for informationresources, the most applicable to our needs being the Creative Commons license. An open-licensed digital commons turns the current intellectual property regime of publishing on its head. Now, anauthor can retain their copyright to their work and license it non-exclusively for use in the digital commons via a CreativeCommons license. This allows other authors to adapt, improve, orotherwise contribute to the work (for example, fixing broken hyperlinks that plague the WWW today). This can be carried to theextreme with an open-licensed wiki system. For example, in Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) anyone in the world can contribute and edit encyclopedia entries with a click in their browser.

Connexions: a digital commons for teaching and learning

The real roles of the professor in an information-rich world will be not to provide information but toadvise, guide, and encourage students wading through the deep waters of the information flood. Professors in this environmentwill thrive as mentors, tutors, backseat drivers, and coaches. [O’Donnell, p. 156]

To make things concrete, we now describe one particular experiment in this third wave of information technologytargeted at education. Connexions ( (External Link) ) is so-called because it aims to connect information and ideas withinthe commons (using hypertext) and also to connect the people using the system into communities. Connexions is inter-disciplinary,inter-institutional and involves both professionals and amateurs, as well as professors, teachers, students, and the public.