Brief post from the airport…I’ll be away for a bit, spending the next few weeks on a slightly-delayed honeymoon in New Zealand. I might pop in for a post or two, but if at all such posts will be sporadic, as I actually left my laptop at home – a decision that has left my colleagues (and pretty much anyone who knows me) speechless…
The two categories that I’m thinking a lot about are amateur identity and commons-based peer production. Both have enjoyed increasing cultural prominence over the past several years, and their emergence has been very much framed in revolutionary rhetoric.
I’ll begin with a simple declaration: I want to very much separate the categories of “amateur” and “commons-based peer production,” in large part because the two have been so often conflated in both popular and scholarly discourse. This conflation seems to particularly have its roots in examinations of open source communities, a natural consequence of the twin facts that such communities are most often composed of amateurs, and that the entire project of open source has become the canonical example of commons-based peer production. In the rush of exuberance around open source, however, I’d argue that we’ve lost a very key of precision about what exactly we mean when we talk about amateurs and peer production.
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