Did the next wave crest yet?

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on



I knew that I had read an article a few years ago in The Chronicle that used the term "open everything." Thank goodness for Net search. I found it online and it turned out to be from 2004. It was "The Next Wave: Liberation Technology" written by John Unsworth. He was saying that colleges were being faced with choices for things like CMS and enterprise systems between "monopolies and the open approach."

I reread the piece and it feels a few years old, though many of the choices are still there. It's easy to look at articles that talk about the next wave a few years on and see in retrospect that the wave never did crest. I did some surfing in my youth and you often saw a swell behind you and started to paddle to catch the wave only to find it gently roll under you. No crest; no curl; breaking on the beach like all the others.

What has changed, for me, the most since that article was written is open source thinking moving beyond software. I have been writing the past half year about open everything here on the blog, and it continues to be of interest to me. Unsworth addressed that idea briefly at the end of his article:

Open-source methodology has already spread well beyond software development: In the world at large, the Human Genome Project is a famous example. Over the coming decade we're certain to see this new mode of production locked in mortal combat with older methods and the legal and ideological commitments that they entail. It will be interesting to see whether, at this critical juncture, the university comes down on the side of freely shared ideas.

The online resources included with the article in 2004 were given the headline "open everything" and the list has some waves that are still big, but some have already hit the beach.

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
BBCode format allowed
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.
To leave a comment you must approve it via e-mail, which will be sent to your address after submission.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA