infobong.com

It ran on Wednesday, but I didn't see this NYTimes story about online collaboration until this morning. The article promotes collaboration tools like Wikis as a means to improve communication within businesses, particularly distributed organizations. Much of this was familiar to me from Don's "Knowledge Management Systems" course, but I thought it was interesting the way that it applied the "open-source" label so easily to things that don't seem easily categorized as "open source".

I'm a little tired of seeing "open source" being applied to things that have little to do with compilers, but I've accepted that it's become a metaphor for particular types of information sharing and participation. This article seems pretty sloppy in general (I don't see how blogs are collaborative tools), but I do wish that authors would draw a distinction between "open source" as mode of production and "open source" as metaphor.