open source

There are 2 posts tagged open source (this is page 1 of 1).

Reading – Open Source Culture

 

Copyrights and patents have always been an important part of the information market, especially in terms of content generation within the creative industry. Especially with the advent of the Internet and social media, the producing and sharing of content has been getting increasingly easy to reshare and harder and harder to track down.

However, in the desire to protect the content we generate, a lot of the time, we end up setting limits on ourselves as to what we can achieve or do so as firstly, not to breach someone else’s copyright, and secondly, set up our own as well. I had a lecturer that used to say “there’s nothing new under the sun”. If you have an idea, someone else has had it before, in some way shape or form. So how is innovation and improvement possible? It happens when we take someone’s idea, perhaps combine it with another idea, or tweak it on our own to form a “new” idea. So why are we so desperate to protect what we can earn from our monetised ideas and not more desperate to find out the limits of what we can achieve by combining ideas together? By monetizing ideas with copyrights and patents, we have limited ourselves and human innovation.

That I believe is where the brilliance of open source culture and crowd-sourcing programmes come in. Most of the time, copyrights operate on the belief that people will not innovate and do work on a project for free. However that is an assumption that has been disproven time and again by the various crowdsourcing projects that have sprung up, as well as people who constantly work on open source software to improve it.

Now thanks to the advent of the internet and technology, its easy for almost anybody to contribute and to generate content. With the combined knowledge and free time people spend on projects, the possibilities in open source culture is truly very exciting. That is what I believe the article is pointing out as well.

 

DIWO – Maker Culture

Source: http://archive.furtherfield.org/sites/furtherfield.org/files/imagecache/content_width_598px/main_8.jpg Accessed: 20 March 2018

Do It With Others (DIWO) is a distributed campaign for emancipatory, networked art practices instigated by Furtherfield in 2006.

It is an extension of Do It Yourself (DIY) ethos of early net, art punk and Situationism, evolving it into a more collaborative approach, that focuses less on the ownership of the art and more on the possibilities of the use of the Internet as an experimental artistic medium.

This movement bypasses the curative restrictions within the traditional art world allowing artists to interact with their audience on their own terms.

Personally, I believe DIWO is an apt reflection of the monumental effect the Internet has on the world. Within a short span of time, walls such as countries, language, religion, distance, time have all suddenly been removed and everyone has been thrown into the infinite space that is the Internet. The possibilities behind this situation are endless.

With the crowdsourcing model in which DIWO operates, things such as copyrights for one’s part in a project is relegated to the backseat. Instead what we have is a pooling of specialist knowledge on a vast range of subjects but without the barriers of physical positions or power. This is also further enhanced by the economic nature of knowledge as a non-rivalrous good.

While copyrights and patents are key supports for information markets, both introduce extra costs to those buying the information, they do impose a significant brake on innovation by raising the cost of inputs to new ventures  beyond the minimum required to produce that information. However, it does make one question, how long is one willing to “Do it with Others” without monetary recompense?

From the lecture and reading up more on Furtherfield projects, most of which are all voluntary based and done for free, I realised that this line of thinking is based off the assumption that people will be unwilling to do things for free. Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks suggests that people do not require monetary recompense for their help online. He theorizes that perhaps due to the accessibility of the Internet, and thanks to the plummeting cost of computer networking technology that allows for easy access to the Internet for free, the lack of physical capital required for production of information transforms network users from market actors acting through the price system to social beings.

Source: http://i.imgur.com/3bfSwzF.jpg Accessed: 20 March 2018

This format of decentralised, collaborative, non proprietary production that operates without a chain of command means that people contribute to the work in their own free time. That means that 1 billion people will have 2 to 6 billion hours of free time each day to “work” and contribute. That’s the equivalent of 340,000 people working full-time with no vacation for 3 to 8.5 years.

I think it is this no holds barred generation of information and creative ideas that draws from this infinitesimal well of knowledge that is the Internet that drives DIWO and brings like-minded people together to make great things, just because they desire to make great things. Call me idealistic, but I believe it is with this manner of thinking and collaboration, that we can unlock the true potential of humanity.

 

References:

http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf

http://archive.furtherfield.org/projects/diwo-do-it-others-resource

https://vimeo.com/255880481