Principles of Open Source and Social Media Align
One of the newest major paths of technology, social media, owes much to a well-established model, open source. Giovanni Rodriguez draws many similarities between the two technologies (and ways of thinking) in his article for Forbes, “What Social Media (And the World) Owes to Open Source.”
Rodriguez finds some application:
“First, the principles of open source are not just restricted to technology projects; they can be applied — and have been applied, even before the OS movement got its name — to almost any market that depends on an ecosystem of different players. Second — and this is something that so many tech-marketers and non-tech social media marketers ignore, forget, or never quite got: the principles don’t just apply to online engagement, but offline as well.”
At the beginning of the article, the author states he was inspired to write the piece after attending a conference. The event that the author references is Lucene Revolution hosted by LucidWorks. LucidWorks is a great example of how these two worlds collide. Their value-added software is based on open source Apache Lucene/Solr, and their devoted developers and users form a strong social community. These types of value-added solutions are strongest when reinforced by the principles of both social networks and open source innovation.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 13, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Phi Beta Iota: Open Source systems succeed where closed systems fail, precisely because living things are ecologies, and only open systems can attract and maintain the elements of balance. An open system is a moral equitable system — a closed system is a communist, controlled, micro-managed system where the weak link is both the distance of the minds at the top from the events at the bottom, and the narrow bandwidth at the tip.
See Also:
