Architecture of Participation

Discussion

Tim O’Reilly, June 2004:

“I’ve come to use the term “the architecture of participation” to describe the nature of systems that are designed for user contribution. Larry Lessig’s book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which he characterizes as an extended meditation on Mitch Kapor’s maxim, “architecture is politics”, made the case that we need to pay attention to the architecture of systems if we want to understand their effects.

I immediately thought of Kernighan and Pike’s description of the Unix software tools philosophy referred to above. I also recalled an unpublished portion of the interview we did with Linus Torvalds to create his essay for the 1998 book, Open Sources. Linus too expressed a sense that architecture may be more important than source code. “I couldn’t do what I did with Linux for Windows, even if I had the source code. The architecture just wouldn’t support it.” Too much of the windows source code consists of interdependent, tightly coupled layers for a single developer to drop in a replacement module.

And of course, the Internet and the World Wide Web have this participatory architecture in spades. As outlined above in the section on software commoditization, any system designed around communications protocols is intrinsically designed for participation. Anyone can create a participating, first-class component.”

Source?