Building Large Scale Open Communities

Conference
http://creativecommons.org.tw/static/conference2007/sessions/abstract/english#abstract07

Title
The Open Content Library: Building Large Scale "Open" Communities around Multiple Media

Author
Jon Phillips

Abstract
The Open Content Library is understood multiple ways. It is a social and technical strategy for building large scale "Open Content" licensed communities around specific media. Secondly, it is a superset around existing projects such as the Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org) for public domain 2D clip art images and the Open Font Library (www.openfontlibrary.org) for public domain fonts. The Open Content Library is now also a project, www.opencontentlibrary.org, where these specific communities are loosely collected under one umbrella, in true Wikimedia-learned-fashion.

This presentation first looks at the current landscape of projects that exist with similar scope such as Wikipedia.org and Archive.org, and also contrasts differences with some sites such as ccMixter.org where the focus is on remix, rather than on growing the collection of content with further bite-sized samples, necessary for remix as is the case with all Open Content Library projects. This section also discusses why this type of library is necessary in the world in order to support Open Content that is either released into the Public Domain, uses a Creative Commons license, or another Open Content license.

Secondly, this presentation discusses the aforementioned three key ways to view the Open Content Library, as a strategy, as a superset of pre-existing real projects, and as an umbrella for these specific projects.

And finally, the presentation will hover on HOWTO develop more large scale "Open Content" communities using the learned strategy. The social and the technical approaches are intermingled in order to show how to properly channel contributor energy using a broad scope of means, from "low-tech" to "high-tech." One key point is discussing the Creative Commons project, ccHost, an Open Source web-based media sharing application, and how it enables current Open Content Library projects to thrive because of how ccHost empowers groups socially and helps to lower impediments ("barriers") to contribution.