Open publishing systems tomorrow

November 4, 2009
By chiarabolognini

Open pub­lish­ing sys­tems such as Wikipedia and Indy­media state the suc­cess of het­er­ar­chy which is termed by Axel Bruns in Gate­watch­ing as “Rule by a diverse group, pre­vent­ing the emer­gence of a sin­gle per­son, group in con­trol or every­body (a hier­ar­chy, a monar­chy or a panarchy).

One of the aspects which I am ques­tion­ing is the tech­ni­cal open side, which means that the open source pub­lish­ing sys­tem is con­tin­u­ously revis­ited and read­justed by users, who can hope­fully fix bugs and evolve the sys­tem.
Well, all of that is great and it would be great if applic­a­ble to all soft­ware, social media, news web­sites etc.
Actu­ally, this is the sort of mat­ter I would argue about.
To what extent could we allow the changes to be done by users in all this software?

The web tools are in gen­eral the foun­da­tion of new ways for peo­ple to aggre­gate and share knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion. In other words struc­tured and def­i­nite tools enable peo­ple of any sort to inter­act het­er­ar­chi­cally. So the tools should be cre­ated wisely accord­ing to cri­te­ria related to the goal the whole sys­tem has been built to pur­sue.
This would pre­pare the ground for poten­tial business.

Besides, tools should be pro­vided in a shape which makes the users’ inter­ac­tion much eas­ier accord­ing to the well known usabil­ity prin­ci­ples which involve the easy to cus­tomise prin­ci­ple. This would pro­vide all sorts of users with a demo­c­ra­tic usage of the web tools and as a con­se­quence an equal oppor­tu­nity to share and interact.

All of the above is related to the fact that we should start think­ing to the future, which is not today, obvi­ously.
A future when peo­ple will need to get money by these open source sys­tems in a more struc­tured way, beyond adver­tis­ing.
Actu­ally this is a dan­ger­ous tran­si­tion which all open sys­tem devel­op­ers and pub­lish­ers will be involved in.
On the other hand it would reduce the noise, canalise the viral spread of infor­ma­tion and pro­duce revenue.

How­ever, imag­ine if one day we had to pay to use Wikipedia. What would hap­pen?
It is a sort of sce­nario which could com­pletely change the cur­rent roles of users and mem­bers and the entire open source folk them­selves.
Let me know what you think about it.

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Posted via email from chiarabolognini’s pos­ter­ous

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