[FM Discuss] the nature of authorship

[adam hyde]

hi,

I just was asked to discuss a possible panel for wikimania 09 about the
romantic notion of authorship. The panel will possibly reflect on what
authorship is and how it is, or is not, effected by licensing. 

i find this very interesting. It seems to me that the FSF Sprint and the
Mozilla Firefox sprint reflect on this issue in different ways and I
wanted to put some thoughts down here for comment.

In the Command Line Book Sprint, most contributions were done remotely
and there was a real swarm of participants that tag-teamed the writing.
It was a 'traditional' open source development. As I saw it only 1
person asked about copyright/attribution (although others may have asked
Andy), and it very much felt to me that everyone pitched in with minimal
direction or encouragement needed beyond what Andy had outlined in the
outline for the manual. the license was GPL

the second sprint was with technical writers, and we wrote a manual
about firefox. in this authorship was a much bigger issue. There was
really a lot of questions about the process - 'can i use other people
material', 'is it ok to edit someone elses content', 'what is the
atttribution policy' etc. the license was CC

Just a quick note - there is a question here about the role of structure
in each of the events, and how that effected the participation of those
involved but thats not exactly the question I want to ask. I'm more
interested in what role licenses themselves play in fostering a culture
of collaboration. This in turn is related to the question "do CC
licenses challenge traditional notions of romantic authorship".

now...i would say, even though the licenses used in these sprints
appeared to reflect a one to one relationship of :
* collaborative production (Command Line Manual) - gpl
* romantic authorship culture (Firefox manual) - cc

...the license does not hugely impact how people approach the idea of
authorship. While contributors might have a formal understanding of a
license, and agree to it, that does not mean they can 'act' in a new
mode and accept all of its consequences. 

My conclusion from the Firefox vs Command Line sprints, is that the
license does not dramatically effect how people approach a collaborative
process. Rather, the main factor at work here is each individual
contributors previous production experience.

How quickly the full spectrum of collaboration comes into play, and how
quickly romantic notions of authorship are dropped, is mostly determined
by :
* the previous production experiences of those involved
* the effectiveness of the project lead to manage the break down of
these ideas of romantic authorship, and facilitate the ongoing process
of collaborative production

any comments?

adam





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Adam Hyde
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Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
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