My friend and colleague David Eaves wrote a though provoking post on his perceptions of the open web as a social movement, you can read the entire thing at his website .
Earlier this year I did a fairly extensive study wherein I researched open source organizations as social entrepreneurial movements; a topic that is albeit worded slightly differently is more or less exactly about that which David was writing.
What’s interesting to me, is that David backs away from what is to me, the big questions surrounding the "open web"? What is it? What will it look like in the future? How is that different from the present? What aspects of the open web are NOT technological? That last question, is perhaps the most significant.
There is much discussion around the concept of open web but few people seem to know where it will lead. As a principle to be applied, what is the fallout? What is going to change? What are the consequences?
David observes rightly that the current troops in the open web movement are technologists - consequently that’s exactly the kind of problems they tackle. It is the non-technological problems that are perhaps the most pernicious and complex - and intransigent.
Other questions arise such as how to disentangle the open web movement from the open source movement writ large? What is and is not web related? This would seem a stupid question back in 1997 - but in these days of Web 2.0, with as Tim O’Reilly put it the Web as Operating System it becomes nearly impossible to cleanly partition web systems from local systems.
If the open web movement is a social movement - what are the social problems it’s going to solve? Explain to me my suffering at the hands of the copy right holders? I don’t feel like I’m suffering…do you?