Hi John The wording you quote is mine the article as I found it back in July 2006 did indeed only talk about open systems as an interoperability phenomenon with the exception of one line It can also be defined as a system that allows access by other systems hence open system So the article really wasn t talking about social synergy even before then but I changed the wording precisely because I thought that aspect although not in the scope of this article in my opinion was still worth discussing What I had been thinking about when I did my edit was the MIT AI Lab systems that were available for open access via the ARPANET back in the late 70s early 80s I think it would be great if you could create an article to discuss the social aspect maybe using your article as the foundation for it and it could be linked to from this article and others But I still do think it s a different topic from open systems as covered on this page