Submitted. --jcorneli Fri Apr 29 23:34:07 2005 UTC
Primary Author: Joseph A. Corneli
Commons-based peer production is a term that describes authorship of shared information resources. It is a term that could apply to several people working on a paper together, hundreds of people developing a complicated computer program, thousands of people writing Wikipedia, or millions of people producing and improving complex knowledge systems with impressive names like "modern science" (or even "the state of human knowledge").
Without hoping to explain the complex and varied social phenomena that go on in commons-based peer production, in this paper we pursue the more modest goal of understanding the technical aspects of writing-in-common. We begin with a simple model: that of text and commentary – and commentary on that commentary – and so on. This scholia-based model emphasizes ownership of speech and freedom of speech. We then consider what happens when the freedom to create derivative versions is added to the mix. The resulting model proves to be quite sophisticated, and flexible enough to describe many different commons-based peer production systems.
We provide an overview of our implementation of this model and describe several popular existing systems in terms of the model. We discuss further experiments with the model, and based on these investigations, suggest certain deployment strategies which seem to offer some advantages over other commons-based peer production systems. Finally, we investigate the implications our model has for distributed authorship and writing-partly-in-common.
We describe a contemporary hypertext model, with classical roots, designed to balance the interests of subjectivity and freedom of speech with the interests of intersubjectivity and the growth of human knowledge. This presentation will be of interest to document creators and persons seeking to add value to existing texts.
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