Open Community Approach/PROs and CONs

Open Community Approach: Learner Page

On this page learners are encourage to write down PROs and CONs or questions that, want they see as benefit of an Open Community Approach.

• Please apply a neutral point of view.
• When you are regarding open infrastructures in general positive (PRO), try to find evidence and arguments that can be regarded as negative using an Open Community Approach and vice versa.
• The learning environment should support the objective, that the learners are able to make their own decisions.
• Analyze the resource of Wikipedia:Crowd funding first and help to improve it. Write a short summary for yourself, why a neutral point of view is important for Learning Resources!

Remark about the Learning Resource

• If you apply a Open Community Approach the concept based, you cannot charge money
  • for the Wikiversity Learning Resources,
  • the charges for licensing the Open Source software or
  • for open data
• The CONs contain e.g. example arguments that appeared during a discussion about Open Source, Open Content or the Open Community Approach. The PROs and CONs are prepopulated with example content, that should be revised and discussed transparently.

CONs

• If everything is free and open, so it cannot be applied in a commercial setting and a business model for companies that wants to sell a product which is based on open resources!
  • If someone wants to create a commercial benefit with a OCA service, software or content, this CANNOT be called an Open Community Approach (OCA), even if the licensing model allows the commercial use. Nevertheless licensing models can allow commercial use of open source and open content.
  • If the licensing model does not allow commercial use, this argument is true and companies and private individuals must accept the license under which th e software and content was published.
  • If licensing model allows the use in an commercial setting and selling a derived product, the development costs can be reduced (e.g. the apple operating system MacOSX is based on Linux but the Operating System can be legally sold by the Company Apple.
  • Even if the licensing model does not allow commercial use in the term of selling the derived product, the company can use e.g. Open Source software to provide their service (e.g. buy a webspace from a internet service provider, you pay for the hardware, maintainance for the webserver and the used Webserver Apache is Open Source Software - nevertheless the commercial use of OpenSource software even if not compulsory should lead to donation to the Open Source developing team, so that their work can be continued).
• With Open Source Software or Open Content licensing (e.g. Creative Commons the quality assurance is difficult, if the content or the software is applied in a productive commercial setting or standardized learning and assessment infrastructures of educational institutions.
  • Even if the community roles back alterations of disruptive forces in open repositories, the quality cannot be assured for the lastest versions of content and software.
  • apply a conservative release management (e.g. prefer a tested and patched older release of the software instead of the "bleeding edge" of the development)
  • user permanent links to a specific quality assured learning resource or
  • Public-Private-Versioning to the learning resources.

PROs

• If someone needs a special feature of the OpenSource Software or another use-case in a learning resource, then the authors could add this missing feature with their own labor force. Is is especially developing countries with financial constraints.
  • If someone does not have the expertise as software developer, then they have to pay for a developer, that has the expertise. So there might be a commercial obstacle for having this feature implemented. For humanitarian work crowd founding could be an option
• The concept of sharing is valuable for non-commercial settings
• The community can identify error, violations of Open Community Rules and licenses and perform a community control task for quality assurance.
• Licensing model allows a build on exisiting development and create a rapid solution especially in humanitarian settings, where funding and resource are limited.