Hi John The wording you quote is mine  the article as I found it back in July  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 wasnt 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 s  early s 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 its a different topic from open systems as covered on this page