Understanding Open Source Design: A White Paper In the Beginning Was the Noösphere: Community and Collaboration in Open Source Evolution of Technology

This paper seeks to codify what we know about open (source) design with a view to using this knowledge to develop and evolve new courses and projects with these methods.We take open source to be a transparent, collaborative process for developing public knowledge that is free at the source, whether for a design or otherwise.The most well known examples are Linux and Wikipedia, but there are many enterprises that qualify such as the Open Source Initiative, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, YouTube, Scribd, Creative Commons and Firefox.Here we will tell the story around the case of Linux. 1The paper maps the philosophy and concepts of Open Design, 2 linked historically to a distinct social philosophy frequently dubbed libertarian in the United States but which has equal ties to anarchist practices such as Autonomia in Italy and green anarchism in general.The state in these traditions is often viewed as an obstacle to innovation, posing interesting questions for fields such as nanotechnology that are heavily reliant on grant funding from government agencies.The history of science and technology has long been implicitly open source, with explicit value placed on the free exchange of knowledge and information even while some discoveries, of course, remained closely held secrets.As Robert K Merton famously argued, scientists are bound by "the common ownership of scientific discoveries, according to which scientists give up intellectual property in exchange for recognition and esteem." 3 Notions of the common good are as frequently found in Open Design as in Utilitarian 4 thinking, but we are also very interested in the degree to which Open Design creates particularly robust systems, has very productive social relations, and is more likely to meet human needs directly than, say, free market or state capitalism (communism) which rely on surrogate mechanisms rather than participatory design.