If you think peer-to-peer collaboration is the exclusive province of 21st-century computer nerds, this hefty anthology will open your eyes to its precedents among indigenous cultures and its growing offshoots in pursuits as lofty as genomics and as mundane as proofreading.
Readers accustomed to open software manifestos by programmers like Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond will find much of this volume phrased in the academic lingo of economics or political science rather than geekspeak; the writing in the first section, mostly by anthropologists, can be turgid. But don't let that deter you, for the book's first section contains some of the most nuanced perspectives on the concept of the cultural and economic "commons"--in particular, on how its European variant is only a simplistic reflection of its older and more complicated origin among native peoples.
From anthropology the book winds its way through economics, public policy, and the life sciences, ranging from flights of theory to examples grounded in local cultures. (Did you know that copyright is stifling folk singers in Irish pubs, or that the Aboriginal word for "property" is the same as their word for "relative"?)
A particular eye-opener is Yochai Benkler's "Coase's Penguin," which traces commons-based collaboration in such diverse fields as NASA crater identification, encyclopedia writing, and proofreading--noting that the quality of anonymous contributions of online volunteers to such cultural and scientific production is often indistinguishable from that of paid professionals. John Clippinger and David Bollier's "Renaissance of the Commons," on the other hand, is a manifesto for open culture grounded in scientific revelations from recent research in neuroscience and behavioral psychology. It's an essay guaranteed to make copyright maximalists frown and commons advocates jump out of their seat and say, "Yes, I knew it!"
CODE is a circuitous but rewarding examination of open collaboration, a theory and practice poised to revolutionize the fields represented in this book and beyond.