Authorship, Copyright, oh my
Official prompt for week 5:
How do issues such as authorship, copyright and open access impact your desire, ability and willingness to engage in produsage, both personally and professionally?
Personally
I have a couple of things that I have created – I refuse to say “prodused” – that I share with the world. The first is my blog. My blog is syndicated, and people quote and point to it all the time. So far no one has started copying it outright. I would be pretty annoyed if someone started copying my posts, and posting them as their own without any acknowledgment that I had authored the post.
I also wrote a couple of Twitter cheat sheets. These have been downloaded many, many times. I originally made the cheat sheets for a group at work that I was helping come up to speed on social media. I attached a Creative Commons license to the cheat sheets, mainly because I didn’t want someone to take the work I had done and start selling it.
Professionally
Engaging in “produsage” in a professional setting is an interesting topic. First of all, I develop training for a company that sells products. So, while there is a part of me that loves to connect and share and engage, my company has to stay profitable for me to have a job. So there is a limit to the types of things that can be shared with the outside world.
I can even take the limits a step further. We can’t even share all of the training we develop with all of our internal audiences. For instance, training on a product that is in development typically is not shared with many people in the field. If we share everything with them, they are bound to share things with the customer before those things are ready. And in the spirit of sharing, that info will get to competitors.
The other danger in crowdsourcing technical training is the issue of correctness. Our products support data center operations. If we were to host user instructions that didn’t work, or that our company didn’t support, we could be liable if another company lost data. So there has to be a way to verify ideas, and to be able to point out when something may work but its still not supported.
Having said that, I wish we did more to encourage people to post their methods of learning the different products for which we develop training. Our industry moves so fast that having different ways of explaining complex technologies can only help learning. Additionally, if someone takes the time to blog or screencast about a particular topic it serves as a form of self-training.
I don’t ever think we’ll get to the point in corporate settings where you can create a product in a “shopwork” space. I do believe we could design a space where people could share the way they learned a certian technical topic. It would have to be a bit less open than what Bruns described. But I think a “commodity space .. of an extrodinary source of energy” could be designed so that people could help each other stay on top of technical education needs.
