Synchronicity

For class, I had my students watch the wonderful documentary, Revolution OS. It features a cast of characters that could people a graphic novel — Richard Stallman the GNUman, Gandolf to Linus Torvalds’ Aragorn. Eric Raymond, a sort of Bilbo Baggins, moving between the Cathedral and Bazaar, Bruce Perens, appearing as an Elrond figure–anyway, the idea is to make the student journalists think about Open Source both as a support system for how they get work done and as a philosophical approach to their work.

As *content creators,* students might sell their work to a publisher, as journalists typically did in the 20th century. Or they might now consider Open Source publishing options and alternatives to traditional copyright. What alternative methods exist for making money as reporter, beyond the present system of working for a corporate news organization?

The synchronicity of Microsoft’s announcement that it would provide some transparency about its code was interesting. Instead of wondering why the heck the teacher was talking about Open Source, Linux, kernels, sharing, responsibility, and democracy, they could see my assignment as newsworthy.