Whenever I think about the OER movement and principles that could be important to it, I keep coming back to how open source might inform our understanding of OER development.

In fact, I believe it’s possible to see two different approaches to OER commons growth underlying most OER initiatives (although, sometimes there is a mixture of both):

1. Emergence. When teachers are encouraged to simply release the materials that they produce into the commons under CC licenses, whether through posting their materials online themselves or in some institutional repository, this seems to depend more on an organic evolutionary development model for expanding the OER commons. The principle seems to be that when content is released into the commons, new variations will emerge that improve upon the original, either through increased content development or improved adaptability, modularity, or usability. Plant enough seeds, and mutations will enventually occur in subsequent generations. 
2. Community-Based Development. When groups of people come together with common interest to form communities for building OER, then I believe we start to see stronger commons-based-peer-production benefits, such as exemplified in the success of large open source projects (e.g., Linux, Firefox, Drupal) and the Wikipedia community. 

While I don’t disagree with teachers releasing curricular resources they create as OER, I do question whether or not it’s a good use of resources to fund and develop opencourseware initiatives where educators are often working alone to create OER. Based on what open source development has demonstrated, we might better grow the commons if we prioritize community-based development. Here are some lessons we might take from open source:

• We can generally create better resources collaboratively than we can individually.
• People like to “belong” and are more likely to engage in creating resources and/or put in more effort by joining with others than when working alone.
• The synergy we gain through collaboration will not only influence the creation of resources, but the synergy will also help us to feel more strongly a part of a community with similar ideals.
• Educators can learn more about specific disciplinary knowledge and/or pedagogy from collaborating with each other.
• We can learn more from each other about useful resources that can aid in the creation of resources; we might avoid duplication of effort.
• People new to creating resources can learn strategies for the effective creation of resources from more experienced members of the open education community.
• Through collaboration, we are more likely to create resources that suit a wider context beyond our individual needs or resources that are more adaptable. Better usability will result.
• When we collaborate to produce resources, we have more people aware of what was created and promoting its use.