I have long been concerned over our store of collective human knowledge, and recent events seem to be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. Nevertheless, I believe there is a solution....
Human knowledge is stored in the distributed network of individual human minds, and a repository of human knowledge needs to be stored in a distributed fashion as well, a "knowledge commons," if you will.
What would the Knowledge Commons look like? Fairly simple, as it turns out. Imagine a peer-to-peer network in which everyone could contribute pieces of knowledge, and those pieces would be immediately spliced into bits and replicated throughout the system. Like SETI@home and other distributed computing initiatives, everyone would share the load, so to speak, for the Knowledge Commons.
Importantly, such a system would be open on two fronts:
Open access: the system would be open to both input and output. In other words, anyone could put information into the system, and anyone could obtain information out of the system.
Open development: since the core protocol would be open, changes to it would be community-driven. Furthermore, anyone could develop a client application (or a web application) that would connect to the Knowledge Commons.
What this means is that instead of one wikipedia site, we could have many sites. Instead of one way to access the Knowledge Commons, we could have many. And politically, instead of one person controlling our collective knowledge, we could have many.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
