Strategies and technologies of sharing in contributor-run archives

Library Trends, Spring, 2005 by Paul Jones

ABSTRACT

While we argue about and discuss the plusses and minuses of contributor-run archives, groups formed by people of shared interests and of varied technical competencies have been creating, maintaining, sustaining, and growing their archives for over a decade in several cases. These contributor-run archives make use of powerful open technologies to facilitate their projects. In this article I will focus on three different volunteer-run projects that involve worldwide cooperation using advanced technologies to further their ends. The Linux Documentation Project, the Degree Confluence Project, and Etree.org are all large projects that involve many contributors with technical teams of various sizes using a variety of technologies. Each project will be described in terms of its aims; its history; its rules, or lack thereof, for contribution; its technologies; and its current state of practice. From these examples we can draw some lessons as well as some enhanced awareness of technologies of cooperation. Among the technologies used by the projects are wiki, mailman, Shorten (SHN), FLAC, PHP, mySQL, PHPbb, Postnuke, BitTorrent, rsync, XML, and CVS. All of these technologies are "open" and available for installation, customization, and further sharing of their code.

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Over my dozen years as director of ibiblio.org and its predecessors, sunsite.unc.edu and metalab.unc.edu, I have seen many projects flourish and many projects stagnate and more than a few projects die completely. At the time of this writing, ibiblio.org hosts and facilitates over 1,500 projects in addition to our extensive software collections. In May of 2001 I published a brief article describing how open-source tools might be used in contributor-run libraries (Jones, 2001, pp. 45-46). For this article I aim to describe some successful examples of open-source contributor-run collections. I have selected three projects with worldwide contributor bases, innovative technology use, open management, and volunteer staff for consideration. All three projects solicit participation from their users, and amazingly they have consistently received reliable and enthusiastic contributions. As a result, each is--thin its particular area--a must-visit resource.

Briefly, the Linux Documentation Project aims to provide reliable, accurate, and helpful documentation to Linux users from beginners to advanced systems administrators in every language in the world. The Degree Confluence Project aims to document the world by visiting every degree confluence on the earth. A degree confluence is defined as "the exact spot where an integer degree of latitude and an integer degree of longitude meet." Confluence.org volunteers participate in creating a database of photographs and narrative descriptions of their visits to each degree confluence on, or near, dry land on the entire earth. Etree.org aims to provide a forum for the exchange of very high-quality concert recordings of"tape friendly" bands (Etree.org, 2004e).

Each of these projects has an education component as part of its mission-that is to say, guidelines and FAQs for new contributors and new users. These educational components also serve to advance the ideology of sharing the information, skills, and experience that is a part of each project.

THE LINUX DOCUMENTATION PROJECT

The Linux Documentation Project (2004), begun by Matt Welsh in 1992 not long after the first wide release of Linux itself, predates the World Wide Web (Garrels, 2004; M. Garrels, personal communication, May 14, 2004). The goal of the project, as described by volunteer David Lawyer in the Linux Documentation Manifesto, is "to create the canonical set of free Linux documentation. While online (and downloadable) documentation can be frequently updated in order to stay on top of the many changes in the Linux world, we also like to see the same docs included on CDs and printed in books" (Lawyer, 2000). Thus, while the Linux Documentation Project can be seen as a long-lived online community project, its goals are not limited to cyberspace; the project aims for world conquest--or at least to conquer the world of Linux Documentation. To a large extent, TLDP--as it is now known--has succeeded. Andy Oram of O'Reilly and Associates, a leading technology publishing company that might be considered to be the competitor of TLDP, has written that TLDP "is an impressive organization that has editors, guidelines for reviewers, procedures for updating documents, translators--in short, it's an organization that has tried to reproduce everything about conventional publishers, but in an open and volunteer manner" (Oram, 2004). Oram also praises TLDP as "a phenomenon we should all be following as a model for documentation in an open source community" (Oram, 2004). I would note that an organization of a dozen years is no longer a phenomenon but is, in the world of cyberspace, an institution.

Those wishing to contribute documents to TLDP are pointed to a detailed yet straightforward Author's Guide that describes what and how to participate. The process goes as one might expect from any publishing company: