# OpenEd: Week 10


I’m posting this weeks contribution early, since I am going away to
Quebec for the weekend. I chanced upon a few posts that seem to be
saying similar things.

Both
[Catia](http://catiaharriman.blogspot.com/2007/10/week-9-elective-reading-synopses.html)
and
[Antonio](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/fininformatica/VQIO/~3/176719511/)
have read Coase’s Penguin or the Nature of the Firm. Catia discusses the
different non-monetary incentives that can induce people to contribute
to common projects, and how this can possibly be distorted by
“unilateral appropriation of the content”, ie. some company making money
out of adding value, without returning their additions to the community.
In this case, a share-alike license would perhaps be very useful
(although the problem it introduces with incompatibility with other open
licenses has previously been discussed).

Antonio makes an interesting point, in that volunteers are great at
dissecting, editing and recombining existing materials, which is a good
argument for making as much material as possible available under open
licenses - even if it is not yet in perfect pedagogical shape. Much has
been argued about the granularity of different projects, and how that
contributes to the ease of peer-collaboration. Perhaps it is true that a
math textbook is better written by a few tight-knit collaborators, but
their job would be immensely much easier, if there was a large selection
of math problems, graphs, illustrations and photos, etc, that they could
choose from, under an open and permissive license. (After they had
produced a first draft, a community process could also be used to
peer-review and improve the book).

[Andreas](http://iamarf.blogspot.com/2007/10/opened-week-9_29.html), who
read the same book as I did, Wikinomics, takes this one step further and
states that many cases of peer-collaboration have been essentially
unplanned, more process-driven than planned. Even IBM states that they
did not know exactly where they were going with participating in the
open source process, but wanted to be part of the movement. Andreas
therefore argues that we cannot blueprint a peer-created commons
process, but we can perhaps “prepare the ground”, as farmers do - in
this case it might mean creating the right tools for the job (Wikimedia,
Commentpress, Drupal, synchronous collaborative editing etc), providing
enough raw material (resources under open and permissive licenses,
texts, illustrations, videos, sound, etc), providing the license
infrastructure needed for interaction between different projects
(Creative Commons BY, GFDL), and then see what the community comes up
with.

In this sense, Wikipedia is an incredible OER, not just as a finished
product, but as a repository of information, illustrations, charts, etc.
that are easy to find and all licensed under the GFDL.

Stian