Introduction

You will find over the next 15 weeks that I tend to fall on the pro open access side of the debate on the merits of web 2.0. I am excited about the possibilities that Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook and blogs present for the dissemination and sharing of information and ideas across previously uncrossable boundaries of class, race, language, technical ability and geography. However, with that being said, I am not quite sure what to do with this…

This guy bought one of these, put it in his basement and programmed it to play pop songs. Now that is a constructive use of bandwidth if I ever heard of one!

Commons (Information and otherwise)

For the two years between the conclusion of my library school education and my coming to Miami, I worked as the library coordinator at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. It was while working there with Charlotte Hess that I became hip to the issues surrounding the commons, information and otherwise. The 2003 paper “Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource,” written by Charlotte with Elinor Ostrom, provides a good overview of how commons research can inform work on the information commons. Using existing constructs developed for the study of natural resource management brings into focus the importance of understanding who actually owns the artifact (I had to stop myself from using “means of production here) and how that affects access and scholarly impact. If scholars would come to realize this fact, they would not be so quick to dismiss the democratization of information production and access that the web has wrought.