The Dark Side of Open Source: Parenting Edition
29 January 2007 at 9:29 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment
| Peter Klein |
The open-source model works well when producers want to encourage collaboration. A potential downside is too much collaboration — sometimes project leaders just want to be left alone.
Who knows this better than parents of small children?
With all due respect to Ward Cunningham, I’d like to take issue, for a moment, with the claim that he is the originator of the wiki. Because anyone who’s had a child can assure you that collective public authorship, collaborative editing, and anonymous generative correction — those wiki hallmarks — have been around since Mrs. Cain first brought Baby Cain over to Uncle Abel’s house dressed only in a too-thin fig-leaf onesie.
That’s Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick reminding us that “babies invented community-based collaborative authorship.” When your kid is sick, all your friends and relatives try to re-write the owner’s manual, whether you want them to or not.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Institutions, Management Theory.
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