Citizendium Blog

So asks Danielle Sacks. She thinks that the advent of the Citizendium says something interesting about open source generally:

This of course raises the central debate of the entire open-source movement: does the revival of the expert mean we’re already over the whole utopian idea of a democratic, user-generated world? Have we realized that it just doesn’t work?

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Danielle takes hold of the less-hip horn of a false dilemma that a lot of OSS advocates have purveying: either you’re a top-down elitist who rejects the benefits of open source and open content, or you’re a bottom-up amateurist who embraces the free stuff movement. Right now I seem to be a voice in the wilderness, advocating that experts and the general public can come together on roughly equal terms, as part of a bottom-up collaboration, with experts making final decisions as necessary, and the work of everyone being released under a free license. In fact, there’s no reason we can’t view open source itself as involving experts, in a way; it’s just that experts outside of the field of software development need to learn from the “bazaar” model of production.