Magnus Cedergren's "Open Content and Value Creation," published in the online journal First Monday, should be interesting to those interested in the motivations for working on open content projects. In the abstract, the author asks:

"Which are the driving forces for the cooperation between players that work with open content? This knowledge could be essential in order to understand the dynamics of business development, technical design and legal aspects in this field. In this paper I focus on these driving forces and the relationships between these players."

The author looks at three major examples of open content on the web: www.archive.org (digital movies), Wikipedia, and the Open Directory Project. From these, he extrapolates different models of value creation and a list of motivations for contributiong to open content projects. It did make we wonder about how we "Sell" the value of opencontent to the general popualce, as well as to our students. Most of the motivations the author identifies are humanistic, or at least non-commercial. No mention of uses in education, but perhaps this is just proof that education needs to step up its support for open content initiatives.