Open Content Communities
Authors: Jr. Joseph Reagle 
Published: October 2020

In this brief essay I sketch the characteristics
of an open content community by considering a number of prominent examples,
reviewing sociological literature, teasing apart the concepts of open and
voluntary implicit in most usages of the term, and I offer a definition in which
the much maligned possibility of 'forking' is actually an integral aspect of
openness.
Introduction
What is often meant by the term 'open' is a
generalization from the Free Software, Open Source and open standards movements.
Communities marshaling themselves under these banners cooperatively produce, in
public view, software, technical standards, or other content that is intended to
be widely shared.
Free Software and Open Source
The Free Software movement was begun by Richard
Stallman at MIT in the 1980s. Previously, computer science operated within the
scientific norm of collaboration and information sharing. When Stallman found it
difficult to obtain the source code of a troublesome Xerox printer, he feared
that the norms of freedom and openness were being challenged by a different,
proprietary, conceptualization of information. To challenge this shift he
created the GNU Project in 1984 (Stallman 1998), the Free Software Foundation
(FSF) in 1985 (Stallman 1996), and the authored the GNU General Public License
in 1989.
The goal of the GNU Project was to create a free
version of the UNIX computing environment with which many computer practitioners
were familiar with, and even contributed to, but was increasingly being
encumbered with proprietary claims. GNU is playful form of a recursive acronym:
GNU is Not Unix. The computing environment was supposed to be similar to but
independent of UNIX and include everything a user needed including an operating
system kernel (e.g., Hurd) and common applications such as small utilities, text
editors (e.g., EMACS) and software compilers (e.g,. GCC).
The FSF is now the principle sponsor of the GNU
Project and focuses on administrative issues such as copyright licenses, policy,
and funding issues; software development and maintenance is still an activity of
GNU. The GPL is the FSF's famous copyright license for 'free software'; it
ensures that the 'freedom' associated with being able to access and modify
software is maintained with the original software and its derivations. It has
important safeguards, including its famous 'viral' provision: if you modify and
distribute software obtained under the GPL license, your derivation also must be
publicly accessible and licensed under the GPL.
In 1991, Linus Torvalds started development of
Linux: a UNIX like operating system kernel, the core computer program that
mediates between applications and the underlying hardware. While it was not part
of the GNU Project, and differed in design philosophy and aspiration from the
GNU's kernel (Hurd), it was released under the GPL. While Stallman's stance on
'freedom' is more ideological, Torvalds approach is more pragmatic. Furthermore,
other projects, such as the Apache web server, and eventually Netscape's Mozilla
web browser, were being developed in open communities and under similar licenses
except that, unlike the GPL, they often permit proprietary derivations. With
such a license, a company may take open source software, change it, and include
it in their product without releasing their changes back to the community.
The tension between the ideology of free software
and its other, additional, benefits led to the concept of Open Source in 1998.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded when, "We realized it was time to
dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with 'free software'
in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case
grounds that motivated Netscape" (OSI 2003). Since the open source label is
intended to cover open communities and licenses beyond the GPL, they have
developed a meta (more abstract) Open Source Definition (OSI 1997) which defines
openness as:

Free redistribution

Accessible source code Permits derived works

Ensures the integrity of the author's source code

Prohibits discrimination against persons or groups

Prohibits discrimination against fields of endeavor

Prohibits NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) entanglements

Ensures the license must not be specific to a product

Ensures the license must not restrict other software

Ensures the license must be technology-neutral

A copyright license which is found by OSI to
satisfy these requirements will be listed as a OSI certified/approved license,
including the GPL of course.
Substantively, Free Software and Open Source are
not that different: the differences are of motivation, personality, and
strategy. The FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) survey of 2,784
Free/Open Source (F/OS) developers found that 18% of those that identified with
the Free Software community and 9% of those that identified with the Open Source
community considered the distinction to be 'fundamental' (Ghosh et al. 2002:55).
Given the freedom of these communities, forking (a split of the community where
work is taken in a different direction) is common to the development of the
software and its communities. One can conceive of Open Source movement as having
forked from Free Software movement.
The benefits of openness are not limited to the
development of software. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) host the authoring of technical specifications that
are publicly available and implemented by applications that must interoperably
communicate over the Internet. For example, different Web servers and browsers
should be able to work together using the technical specifications of HTML,
which structures a Web page, and HTTP, which is used to request and send Web
pages. The approach of these organizations is markedly different from the 'big
S' (e.g., ISO) standards organizations which typically predicate membership on
nationality and often only provide specifications for a fee. This model of
openness has extended even to forms of cultural production beyond technical
content. For example, the Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia and the
Creative Commons provides licenses and community for supporting the sharing of
texts, photos, and music.
Openness and Voluntariness
Organization can be characterized along
numerous criteria including size; public versus private ownership; criterion for
membership; beneficiaries (cui bono); Hughes's voluntary, military,
philanthropic, corporate, and family types; Parsons's social pattern variables;
and Thompson and Tuden's decision making strategies, among others (Blau and
Scott 1962:40). I posit that within the contemporary usage of the term 'open,'
one can identify a number of defining characteristics as well as an implicit
connotation of voluntariness.
Openness
The definition of an 'open' community in the
previous section is extensional: describing the characteristics of Free/Open
Software (F/OS), and open standards and content. While useful, this approach is
incomplete because such a description is of products, not of the social
organization of producers. For example, private firms do release F/OS software
but this tells us little about how work is done 'in the open.'
The approach of Tzouris was to borrow from the
literature of 'epistemic' communities so as to provide four characteristics of
'free/open' communities:

Shared normative and principled beliefs: refers to the shared understanding
of the value-based rationale for contributing to the software.
Shared causal beliefs: refers to the shared causal understanding or the
reward structures. Therefore, shared causal beliefs have a coordinating effect
on the development process.
Shared notions of validity: refers to contributors' consensus that the
adopted solution is a valid solution for the problem at hand.
Common policy enterprise: refers to a common goal that can be achieved
through contributing code to the software. In simple words, there is a mutual
understanding, a common frame of reference of what to develop and how to do
it. (Tzouris 2002:21)

However, these criteria seem over-determined: it
is difficult to imagine a coherent community ('open' or otherwise) that does not
satisfy these requirements.
Consequently, I provide an alternative set of
criteria that also resists myopic notions of perfect 'openness' or 'democracy.'
Very few organizations have completely homogeneous social structures. As argued
in Why the Internet is Good: Community Governance That Works Well (Reagle 1999),
even an organization like the IETF with the credo of, "We reject kings,
presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code," has
explicit authority roles and informal elders. Consequently, in the following
definition of open communities there is some room for contention.
An open community delivers or demonstrates:

Open products: provides products which are available under licenses like
those that satisfy the Open Source Definition.

Transparency: makes its processes, rules, determinations, and their
rationales available.

Integrity: ensures the integrity of the processes and the participants'
contributions.

Non-discrimination: prohibits arbitrary discrimination against persons,
groups, or characteristics not relevant to the community's scope of activity.
Persons and proposals should be judged on their merits. Leadership should be
based on meritocratic or representative processes.

Non-interference: the linchpin of openness, if a constituency disagrees
with the implementation of the previous three criteria, the first criteria
permits them to take the products and commence work on them under their own
conceptualization without interference. While 'forking' is often complained
about in open communities -- it can create some redundancy/inefficiency -- it is
an essential characteristic and major benefit of open communities as well.

Voluntariness
In addition to the models of organization
referenced by Blau and Scott (1962), Amitai Etzioni describes three types of
organizations: 'coercive' organizations that use physical means (or threats
thereof), 'utilitarian' organizations that use material incentives, and
'normative' organizations that use symbolic awards and status. He also describes
three types of membership: 'alienative members' feel negatively towards the
organization and wish to leave, 'calculative members' weigh benefits and
limitations of belonging, and 'moral members' feel positively towards the
organization and may even sublimate their own needs in order to participate
(Etzioni 1961).
As noted by Jennifer Lois (1999:118) normative
organizations are the most underrepresented type of organization discussed in
the sociological literature. Even so, Etzioni's model is sufficient such that I
define a -- voluntary -- community as a 'normative' organization of 'moral'
members. I adopt this synonymous definition not only because it allows me to
integrate the character of the members into the character of the organization,
but to echo the importance of the sense of the collaborative 'gift' in
discussions among members of the community. Yet, obviously, not all voluntary
organizations are necessarily open according to the definition above. A
voluntary community can produce proprietary products and have opaque processes --
collegiate secret societies are a silly but demonstrative example.
However, like with openness, it is difficult to
draw a clear line: one cannot exclusively locate open communities and their
members strictly within the 'normative' and 'moral' categories, though they are
dominant in the open communities I introduced. Many members of those open
communities are volunteers, either because of a 'moral' inclination and/or
informal 'calculative' concern with a sense of satisfaction and reputation.
While the FLOSS survey concluded, "that this activity still resembles rather a
hobby than salaried work" (Ghosh et al. 2002:67), 15.7% of their sample declared
they do receive some renumeration for developing F/OS. Even at the IETF and W3C,
where many engineers are paid to participate, it is not uncommon for some to
endeavor to maintain their membership even when not employed or their employers
change.
The openness of these communities is perhaps
dominant in describing the character of the organization, though the
voluntariness is critical to understanding the moral/ideological light in which
many of the members view their participation.
Conclusion
I've attempted to provide a definition for
openness that reflects an understanding of contemporary usage. The popular
connotation, and consequently the definition put forth in this essay, arises
from well known examples that include -- at least in part -- a notion of voluntary
effort. On further consideration, I believe we can identity a loose
conceptualization of shared products, and a process of transparency, integrity,
and non-discrimination. Brevity prevents me from considering variations of these
characteristics and consequent claims of 'openness' in different communities.
And such an exercise isn't necessary for my argument. A common behavior of an
open community is the self-reflexive discourse of what it means to be open on
difficult boundary cases; the test of an open community is if a constituency
that is dissatisfied with the results of such a discussion can can fork
(relocate) the work elsewhere.

Works Cited

Blau, Peter and W. Richard Scott. Formal organizations: a comparative
approach. New York, NY: John Wiley, 1962.
Etzioni, Amitai. Modern organizations. New York, NY: Free Press of
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Ghosh, Rishab, Ruediger Glott, Bernhard Krieger, and Gregorio Robles.
Free/Libre and open source software: survey and study. 2002. http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/

Lois, Jennifer. "Socialization to heroism: individualism and collectivism in
a voluntary search and rescue group." Social Psychology Quarterly 62
(1999): 117-135.
Nardi, Bonnie and Steve Whittaker. "The place of face-to-face communication
in distributed work." Distributed Work. Ed. Pamela Hinds and Sara
Kiesler. Boston, Ma: MIT Press., 2002. chapter 4.
Reagle, Joseph. Why the Internet is good community governance that works
well. 1999.http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html

Stallman, Richard. Free Software Foundation. 1996. http://www.gnu.org/fsf/fsf.html
Stallman, Richard. Linux and the GNU project. 1997. http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

Stallman, Richard. The GNU project. 1998. http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

Tzouris, Menelaos. Software freedom, open software and the participant's
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Citation reference for this article
MLA Style

Reagle Jr., Joseph. "Open Content Communities." M/C Journal 7.3 (2004).
<http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/06_Reagle.rft.php>.

APA Style

Reagle Jr., J. (2004, Jul.) Open Content Communities, M/C Journal, 7(3),
<http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/06_Reagle.rft.php>.