Mitch Kapor was the guest speaker in the Info 290 seminar "Commons-Based Peer Production" on Friday; Kapor is the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation, and a member of the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The course, taught by School of Information professor Brian Carver, discusses the rise of "peer production", a development based on the collaborative efforts of autonomous individuals interacting online. Examples of peer production include open-source software, such as the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser, open-content projects like Wikipedia, and crowd-sourced news aggregation sites.
Students explore the peer production model through first-hand research, analyzing legal, policy, social, and managerial issues, evaluating user interfaces, or otherwise engaging directly with a peer production process.
Kapor spoke about the challenges and benefits of peer production, including challenges and successes from the story of Wikipedia and other open-source and open-content projects.
