Martin Terre Blanche alerted me to this article by Derek Keats on collaborative development of open content materials in Africa. He makes a compelling case for African universities to share content when creating educational materials. I don't see why most of his logic couldn't be applied to the rest of the world.
Open Content in Africa (and elsewhere)
Submitted by wordmunger on March 15, 2003 - 11:10.
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open content and commontext
In thinking about commontext in light of this article, one thing that occurred to me is how does one make the best of using both a more traditional peer review model and implementing a community of construction?
As collaboration is one of the strengths of the open content model, seems that involving the user community in the construction of a text is an important part of the process. Would it be that having a text peer reviewed for publication acceptance be a first step, then have a "community review" as a second step of text construction before formal acceptance as a "1.0" version, where the community is involved in giving feedback and working with the author? And how does one create such a model of interaction?
One important note here is that Keats suggests the importance of text production software with a versioning system (much like cvs as I suggested in a comment here). I'm not sure what is available in this regard, but since the software itself would affect how the community interacts (think about the differences between a weblog community, a discussion board site, and a MOO), seems as if it would be very important to consider the functionality of such software. For example, what would be the difference between hosting a text on a wiki as opposed to merely posting different versions of a text to a discussion board and then using word processing compare functions?