Knowledge Commons

Discussion

Paul B. Hartzog

"Human knowledge is stored in the distributed network of individual human minds, and a repository of human knowledge needs to be stored in a distributed fashion as well, a "knowledge commons," if you will.

What would the Knowledge Commons look like? Fairly simple, as it turns out. Imagine a peer-to-peer network in which everyone could contribute pieces of knowledge, and those pieces would be immediately spliced into bits and replicated throughout the system. Like SETI@home and other distributed computing initiatives, everyone would share the load, so to speak, for the Knowledge Commons.

Importantly, such a system would be open on two fronts:

1. Open access: the system would be open to both input and output. In other words, anyone could put information into the system, and anyone could obtain information out of the system.

2. Open development: since the core protocol would be open, changes to it would be community-driven. Furthermore, anyone could develop a client application (or a web application) that would connect to the Knowledge Commons." (http://onthecommons.org/node/979)