Hi everyone. I've decided to pop back on the list to follow up on my message that Jim forwarded. I actually have a great deal of interest in this question and I'm hoping some others here might find themselves in the same boat as me and therefore also be interested.
My question was a bit open-ended because I was figuring that I'd have to adapt my efforts to what's actually out there or what other people are interested in rather than magically discovering that other people were thinking precisely what I was or have identical interests. My own interest stems from really two things: (1) My students get ripped off for text books. This has always been a gripe, but it seems to me in the last ten years, with text book prices rising faster than inflation (perhaps companies can get away with this because tuition has risen faster than inflation) it's taken on new dimensions. I teach some fairly standard courses and the ideas in those courses are not novel to whoever writes a textbook. Really all the person writing the textbook is providing is a new phrasing of existing ideas (usually even the organization of those ideas is not new) plus the paper and glue. My students often have to pay $120 for a very unoriginal text. I suspect that like many on pen-l I largely teach not-terribly-wealthy people though of course some of my students are terribly wealthy. (2) I've done a lot of work writing both open-source software and documentation for open source software. Mostly this has been in the form of small contributions to large projects (e.g., Samba; the Linux Network File System) though I'm also committed to helping develop the next version of a stats package called Gretl (I'm way behind on this work at the moment). I'm also a co-maintainer of the Linux NFS HOW-TO. This experience has shown that it's quite possible for several people to collaborate on a body of work and post it on the web for free, and that several people making small contributions can end up producing something quite substantial and sophisticated. And now that the internet has gotten rid of paper-and-glue costs, it's possible to create a drop-in replacement for commercial products. So, for example, I have homework assignments, practice exams, and lecture slides posted on my web site. I expect others do as well. (Mine are not exemplary; especially for my micro courses I'm somewhat constrained to teach a fairly neoclassical course, though for stats, which is less political, I feel a bit more ostentatious.) These are things that texbook publishers try to push on you to get you hooked into using their particular book. I expect that there could be great returns to coordination -- that is, there is probably a lot of duplication of effort among us when we write our homework assignments, lecture slides, etc. Moreover, someone might be able to do something like take some lecture slides that I've posted, add real improvements to them, and send them back. To address Doyle Saylor's point: Open-source publications can be malleable. For example, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) (www.linuxdoc.org) is a series of documents -- of highly variable quality -- that help users negotiate the Linux operating system and related software. They are published under either the Open Publication License or the Gnu GPL (there is a variant that applies to written text rather than software). What these licenses essentially say is that you can use and modify and re-publish the document as long as you leave the original copyrights and acknowledgements to the authors and license in the text. In practice, this works in the following way: Documents are submitted to the LDP in a format called SGML. It's a highly abstract markup language that allows a document to be exported into HTML, plain text, PDF, PS, etc. according to a template. (Different templates can be applied to the same SGML document to give different looks.) Later authors can then download the SGML version of the document and update it. For example, some guy in Norway (whom I've never met) wrote the original version of the Linux NFS HOWTO. It got outdated, as these things do, and he didn't want to update it. (No fault of his own, he was just doing other things in life.) So I and two other people (whom I've never met either) did a massive re-write of the document and then re-submitted it and it's now published online. In practice I think there's both a case for a fairly standard set of books (that is, something more like the Linux HOWTOs but much longer), and for something that's more unstructured like a wiki or a big site with lots of links. I think that on the one hand professors will have some use for a work that's just handed to them because it's easy to see the overall structure and presentation and then modify it to suit your needs. An open publication license would allow people to modify the text to suit their students or views, but it would create much less confusion and more clarity if there were a "standard" version that people could make variations on. (And possibly publish those variations in an accessible way.) On the other hand, people may be looking to submit or use very specific things (e.g., "I have this great lecture on Taylorism") and it would be good to provide space for that, too. I suspect that many people on Pen-l would be willing to do something like write or review a chapter of a textbook. What is more challenging is to provide all of the annoying and tedious coordination work and maintain the website. Also, this has a much bigger potential than the pen-l crowd. I'm raising it here because I know folks here have a strong commitment to collective action and this is a project that demonstrates the rewards to cooperative, non-hierarchical, and uncompensated production, as well as the importance of public goods and for that matter total and utter market failure. It's not even specific to economics but I certainly don't have the energy to pursue this across disciplines. Just to start locally, see what resources there are, and how we might improve them. If people are interested, such a project could go in many different directions, but I'll just raise as an example the possibility of having 15 people each volunteer to write a chapter of a stats book in the next year. Or another example where we create a website of "resources for teaching xxxx" and people just submit materials. What does anyone think? Sorry for the length of this post, I'd better stop.... Best, Tavis
