[FM Discuss] motivations

[adam hyde]

On Mon, 2009-04-13 at 14:57 -0400, Andy Oram wrote:


> But indulging in writers' egos (whether a romantic attachment or other)
>  introduces extra messiness into a collaborative process that is
>  already complicated and requires delicacy. Here's one example that you
>  might not have thought about where ego attachment can complicate
>  things: at O'Reilly, we routinely ask an author to update his book.
>  The author is too busy to do the job but won't admit it. He doesn't
>  want to share his book with anyone--so he strings us along for several
>  months without accomplishing anything.
> 

this is interesting! I noticed this I think in the presentation John
Broughton did at the OReilly Tools of Change conference. He had written
a book about wikipedia, published by OReilly (Wikipedia : the missing
manual). The source was also in wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual)

However, John stated he would not integrate edits (made by others) to
the wikipedia source into future editions of _his_ book. To me John
Broughton seems to be exactly at this uncomfortable meeting point of
collaborative knowledge production vs authorship.

I find it fascinating that John will allow his authored material to go
into wikipedia (authored material within a collaborative production
environment), but not enable the flow in the other direction
(collaboratively produced material within an 'author environment').

adam



> Andy
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