Axel Bruns
Community Building through Communal Publishing:
The Emergence of Open News

Community Building through Communal Publishing:
1	Introduction
2	The Move towards Open News: An Alternative to Gatekeeping
3	Librarians, Not Gatekeepers?
4	Gatewatchers
5	Collaborative Gatewatching: Open News Production
6	From Publishing to Publicising
7	Developing Open News Sites
8	Open News and the Future
*	References
	Author
	Print

The open source software movement has made some significant gains in recent years – some of the software packages it has produced have become virtual industry standards, in specific fields even gaining an edge over proprietary solutions produced by the likes of Microsoft and other major commercial operators.
Well beyond the field of actual software development, open source ideology itself has also become increasingly recognised as a possible alternative to, or at least alteration of, standard corporate production models, and using open software has become a form of stating one’s resistance to the corporatisation of key electronic services. Open source ideology is now beginning to be translated to activities other than programming, with sometimes surprising results.

One key field where this has led to significant developments is that of online news reporting. Sites such as Slashdot.org (“news for nerds, and stuff that matters”) with its 450,000 registered users publish what might usefully be termed ‘open news’, more or less explicitly adapting existing open source principles of collaborative software development to arrive at a highly successful form of collaborative news coverage. Many other sites, often using the Slash code, Slashdot’s open source Web engine, or similar packages like PhP-Nuke or Postnuke, have copied this model and applied it to a wide variety of new topics. At least one site, Openflows (also running on the Slash code), makes this connection to the open source movement even more explicit, by referring to its activities as ‘Open Source Intelligence (OSI)’: “for us, OSI is the application of collaborative principles developed by the Open Source Software movement to the gathering and analysis of information. These principles include: peer review, reputation- rather than sanctions-based authority, the free sharing of products, and flexible levels of involvement and responsibility” (Stalder & Hirsh 2002, 1).

Indeed, starting from generally accepted definitions of open source software it is not difficult to translate such principles to other forms of engagement with information. Opensource.org states that

the basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the Software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.
We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.
(Opensource.org 2003)

An equivalent statement of principles for open news could read:

the basic idea behind open news is very simple: When news producers and users can read, redistribute, and modify the source information for a piece of news, the understanding of news evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional news reporting, seems astonishing.
We in the open news community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better news than the traditional closed news model, in which only a very few editors can see the source reports and everybody else must blindly use an opaque news story.

Open news systems, therefore, have moved beyond traditional approaches to news gathering and publishing, much like their open source counterparts have developed new models of software development. While in theory certainly not impossible in other media, the open news model is also particularly well suited to operating through Websites, able to take advantage of the Web’s specific features as a media form. (Much like open source software development is significantly aided by key Websites such as Sourceforge.net.)

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