Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information:
Economic, Legal, and Social Perspectives

To Be Decided

Students are required to purchase:

• The course reader, (which will be available at Copy Central (Bancroft) starting 27 August 2005) and;
• Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. (ISBN: 0-201-83595-9) [bookfinder]

Students must be signed up to the class mailing list in order to receive important administrative updates and course news. Please send email to Joe Hall (joehall at berkeley dot edu) and he will sign you up to the list.

The principal assignments for this class are reading articles assigned in the syllabus, participation in discussion on the blog and listserv as well as in class, 3 short memos, and an oral presentation on a team project.

We have pared down the reading requirements for this class to a very small number of pages per week. Our goal here was to be very selective in our required readings and to expect, in response, that students will read and think about this material with real care. The tone and content of class discussions will reflect that expectation. Be prepared for highly interactive, lively discussion and argument.

In addition, each week we will ask a few students to do one or more of the recommended readings and be prepared to discuss them in class and write short memos about them on the class blog (http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/osdddi/). We hope that the blog will become a resource for all of us. There is a huge amount of material being written in many fora about the subjects we will discuss. Some of it is very good and some not so good. No one of us can possibly read or even know of all of it. But with enough eyes...

Due: Sept. 12, 2005

As you know, we will have a two week break between our first class and our second class due to Labor Day holiday. In the interim, wed like students to get a feeling for how one major open source style project works in action, by contributing to it. The Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org), as many of you know, is a free, online encyclopedia entirely edited by its users. The English-language Wikipedia has about 700,000 articles. If you are not familiar with the wikipedia, take some time to search it both on subjects you know well and ones you don't.

And then we'd like you to make some contribution to the project. It need not be large or highly original. It could simply be fixing up something you see which can use a little improvement. The material you contribute could be relevant to this course but it doesn't have to be. Pick something of interest to you.

We'd like you then to reflect on the experience in a short (1 page) memo to the class. Include the name of the article(s) edited, a description of the change you made, and your wikipedia user id or the IP address you used to contribute from if you chose to contribute anonymously. The write-up should talk about what the process was like for you (what was easy, what was hard, any surprises, what new questions or issues it raised for you about the process or the product itself).

If you are not already familiar with contributing to the Wikipedia, you might want to consult the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold_in_updating_pages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_write_a_great_article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Picture_tutorial

Due: October 17, 2005

Write a short essay (1-3 pages) about whether open source and proprietary software are in irreconcilable conflict, as Eben Moglen contends in his Anarchism Triumphant article. If you think open source and proprietary software are complementary, please explain your reasons for this belief.

Team Presentation Due: November 28, 2005
Short Paper Due: December 5, 2005

The final project for the class will be an examination of one of the many "open source style" projects, in areas other than software, that are springing up on the web and elsewhere.

We will divide the class into small groups (probably 3 or 4 students per group) each of which will pick, with the instructors' approval, a project to research. To get a flavor of the range of potential projects that you might examine, look at "open cola" (http://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html) and power.org (http://www.power.org/about/mission/)

Over the course of the semester, we will together develop the set of questions that students will use to interrogate these projects. In fact, improving those questions is one of the major intellectual objectives of the class.

On Nov. 28, the groups will present their work to the class, and a week later submit a short (5-10 page) summary of the groups' main findings and arguments.

Prof. Samuelson will hold office hours from 2:30-4 on Tuesdays at 434 North Addition at the law school. She will also be available by appointment at SIMS in Rm. 305B. She can be reached at 642-6775 and by email at pam@sims.berkeley.edu.

Prof. Weber can be reached at 642-8739, and by email at steve_weber@berkeley.edu. He has an office at 224 Moses Hall. His office hours will be posted on the course website.

Prof. Kapor will hold office hours in room 314 South Hall from 2:45-3:30 on Mondays or by appointment. He can be reached at mkapor@mac.com.

Joe Hall is the TA for this class. His office hours will be Tuesdays 1-2pm in Rm. 6 of South Hall. He can be reached at joehall@berkeley.edu.