most important change FOSS brings about is that these tools are being used by media makers and thus becomes important to a conception of authorship. Because Free and Open Source software play a role in a making a democratic media, it is important to discuss this intersection with independent, activist media. Specifically, it is useful to look at the "Open-Publishing" environment of independent media sites as well as the "wiki" as a collaborative documenting tool.

Independent media in general, and specifically Indymedia has tried to change the terrain of cultural production to create a non-capitalist, non-hierarchical system of cultural diffusion that can be used by all. Regardless of geography, technical know-how and (in most cases) political orientation, everyone can publish, comment and participate. Activist media, with the Independent Media Center (IMC) network as its model, is arguably the most politically active realm of journalistic production on the Internet. The IMC network was born out of the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. It has exploded from one center to 153 centers in just five years. One recent estimate of network-wide traffic was between 500,000 and 2 million page views a day. In a way, it mirrors the "network" structure of the Direct Action Network that played an important part in the non-hierarchic organization of the Seattle protests. The IMC has no "center," it has no central office, no small group of people to whom you can refer yourself. It is an international network of many small volunteer groups, often overworked and under-funded, working with the common idea that media should be written, distributed, and read by anyone. It is much like the "illicit discussion" or "gossip [that] was essential to the emergence of the EnlightenmentÉuncensored, unmediated, unfiltered, peer-to-peer communicationÉ. outside of hierarchies and beyond the reach of the state" (Vaidhyanathan 1). It is further premised on the idea that a distributed, non-hierarchical, and responsive organization best promotes a truly independent media. "Independent," as Bialla Coleman notes, is twofold. It is both "independence from external influence," meaning IMC is not the mouthpiece of governments, political parties, or large donors. This independence also includes "a commitment to guard[ing] the local autonomy of IMC centers," Coleman says.

"Independence," in these two examples is preference for local and autonomous organization. The event that highlighted these principles was the opportunity of the Urbana-Champaign IMC to receive a $50,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in 2002 for regional conferences that affected multiple IMCs. The grant was "no strings attached," and there were many IMCs that wanted the funding to support the (much needed) regional gatherings. The IMC network finally rescinded the grant to respect the "block" coming from a small number of local IMCs (lead by Argentina) who wanted nothing to do with Ford, no matter how much money was offered. It is this kind of preference for the local centers and their evasion of corporate or government sponsorship that makes Indymedia an independent network. For better or for worse, it also makes it a financially strenuous project. IMCs officially adopt consensus decision-making, a method of radical democracy that sees decision by simple majority a form of oppression. It is another hallmark of anarchist thought that stresses a personÕs freedom to engage with others without coercion. In a decision by majority, the minority either adjusts itself to the decision of the majority or quits. In a decision by consensus, a decision is made or not after significant and sometimes long discussion and only when everyone is satisfied enough to move on or not. The possibility to block the decision is given to anyone during the decision process. The only things (in theory) that condition the decision are the meta-goals that everyone in the group agrees upon a priori. IMC groups implement consensus in different and uneven ways, which reflects on IMCs preference for local organization, free from global orders. Other activist media organizations have found this independence of the IMC project a source of inspiration and model to follow. There has been an increased interest in consensus decision-making since 1999 and collective, community organizing has grown along with peopleÕs interaction with Indymedia.

The independent media movement and the Free Software/Open Source Software (FOSS) movement are related in that makers of independent media (IMC tech groups in particular) have been involved in the construction and implementation of FOSS. As Coleman says, in the beginning "[a]ctivists exploited existing Free Software technologies, such as content management systems and servers, to enact web-based technologies of news dissemination that eventually would be a template for others to follow." Recently, IMCs have officially adopted FOSS as their technical method of cultural transmission. This means either IMC tech volunteers create the software themselves (such as the Active, Mir, and Dada platforms), or they use outside FOSS developed by other software communities (such as Post-Nuke, Drupal, Mambo, and Geeklog). Another trait that the independent media and FOSS movements share is their belief in the power of a community. Both are largely volunteer projects, sustained by the motivation of the people involved. It is this shared vision of "collective autonomy" that Coleman explains is

One of the most significant political elements shared by both social movementsÉ Participants in each movement have successfully built large-scale volunteer endeavors based on the right to associate and produce under legal and social terms of their own making. Free Software developers extend engineering traditions of building on the work of peers without the incentive-reward mandates of intellectual property and capitalist profit. Indymedia activists draw upon and extend the technologies and methodologies of Free Software to affirm the principles of open publishing in the hope of helping to build a more just society.

Open software developers are unlikely anarchists, yet they stand as a good example of "practical anarchy." They are what Svia Vaidhyanathan calls "the ideologically uninitiated who have trafficked in the habits of anarchism" (13). Beyond their political beliefs there is an understanding that collaborative work, open access, DIY ingenuity, and contributing to a community are valuable. The non-proprietary nature of these projects is less a political statement or strategy and more a nurturing of global volunteerism with its varying levels of participation. Like independent media, compensation comes in the form of access to new developments and the sense of working in community toward a common goal. The projects attract an already existing international community, and there are few barriers outside of one's own (technical or economic) capabilities to contribute.

This is not to say that proprietary schemes have not accompanied open source projects, or that large corporate interests are not at stake. Mambo developers can make money through custom development or template design. The RedHat Collective has taken Linux and produced a well-sold, open-source product, Fedora. Mozilla is primarily developed by AOLÕs Netscape and interacts with a paid support system by telephone ($39.95 per incident) and by e-mail ($4.99 per incident). These examples are probably the most innocuous forms of "creeping capitalism" within the FOSS movement. IBM has been one of the major proponents of FOSS within corporate culture and consciously uses its comfort with "openness" as a selling point. IBM has authored "open" licenses (as has Microsoft, Netscape, AT&T, Apple, Sun Microsystems, and Mozilla), although the freedom granted by these licenses is limited. Companies pay lip service to free software while their licenses speak with clauses constraining the freedom of users. Indeed, the term "open source" was initially created to make "free software" more attractive to the business community. Free Software allows people to sell products ("distributing free software for a fee"), but it does not allow them to limit the uses of that software or prevent others from distributing copies. That many now believe what constitutes "open" or "free" software is oneÕs ability to view its underlying code is a testament to a certain level of crisis within FOSS. In Richard StallmanÕs opinion, in terms licensing, Open Source and Free Software are virtually the same. The only difference between the two is in their philosophic approach. Open Source is founded less on the ability to rework or distribute and more on a "technically superior development model". Stallman says that in Free Software the "goal is to be free to share and cooperate. We say that non-free software is antisocial because it tramples the users' freedom, and we develop free software to escape from that." The ironies abound in FOSSÕs interaction with corporate capitalism and an anti-capitalist, activist media. According to Benjamin "Mako" Hill,

FOSS has become the corporate poster child for capitalist technology giants like IBM, the technological and philosophical weapon of anti-corporate activists, and a practical template for a nascent movement to create an intellectual "Commons" to balance the power of capital.

Interestingly, a few have been calling the Open Source movement "dead or dying" due to these internal contradictions and due to the disappointment many people in the business community met with after trying to implement collaborative forms of production and "open" licenses in a proprietary context. However, Hill is hopeful that while the term "Open Source" will eventually outlive "Free Software," the ideas and philosophy of Free Software (freedom to do what you like with the code) eventually will be applied to Open Source, more so than ideas of a new development model.

One of the most important similarities between Free Software and independent media is that IMCs and other independent, activist media projects have now began implementing various forms of open licensing for their content. On the Barcelona Indymedia site for instance, it is now possible for the newsmaker to choose from different licenses that will regulate the re-distribution of their article (copyright, public domain, and five different open licenses). Some IMCs have chosen that all the articles on the site will be in the public domain, free for all to copy, modify, or distribute at will. Infoshop.org, another activist/anarchist news service, has taken a fully anti-copyright stance regarding its publication of articles. One of the biggest advocates of new and innovative "open" licenses is creativecommons.org, co-founded by Lawrence Lessig. This move toward free sharing is a significant because the principles of Free and Open Software are now moving rapidly into the field of content; bringing art, writing, and music back to its origins of community-owned cultural property. It is also restoring the rights of writers, artists and musicians to create derivative works with impunity.

Another outgrowth of both FOSS and Independent media is the widespread use of the wiki. A wiki ("quick" in Hawaiian) is Open Source Software, a new method of cultural transmission that gives a community the possibility to create and work with documents within an unmediated or slightly mediated public space. Indymedia uses it for its global documentation site (docs.indymedia.org). Infoshop.org has recently adopted wiki technology (to produce its InfoshopOpenWiki), as has infoanarchy.org and a host of others. A major wiki application is Wikipedia, an expansive, open, peer-edited encyclopedia that is the most cited example of this technology. Anyone visiting the site has the opportunity to change the content on nearly all the pages of this encyclopedia. To be a content user in a wiki implies that you are a content manager, just as being a content manager requires one to take some part in software development (working with code). It is this fluidity between different aspects of the creation of authorship that makes free software and wikis in particular significantly different than traditional publishing.

The potential of certain technologies like the wiki to transform the notion of authorship is great. A commensurate experience to working on a wiki would be to read a book with the ability to re-arrange and add to the text as you see fit. It is a cultural space

that seems to enact the theory of Foucault and Barthes that authorship will be constructed by language, not by an individual author. It is also an example of a transparent social nexus that is consciously producing collaborative texts not attributable to an original author. The popularity of the personal weblog, or "blog," with its focus on the individual authorship highlights the collaborative nature ingrained in wiki technology. Although there are "wikipedians" and they may receive some minor fame, wikipedia entries are greater than any individual input. Plus, Wikipedia is not the only wiki in the universe. If Free Software is (at least in some part) anti-capitalist, that spirit is mirrored in uses of free software like the wiki. Wikis disturb fundamental notions of individual authorship, that a "unique individual [is] uniquely responsible for a unique product." We seem to have come full circle, in that global actors are connecting and re-discovering the importance of a shared, non-proprietary culture.

Difficulties in Open Cultures and Social Software

Open, collaborative projects are not without their faults or inherent difficulties. In seeking to eliminate hierarchy and top-down regulation a host of problems become evident. In the wiki, there is no guarantee that what a personÕs edit will remain for long, or that the text wonÕt revert to the previous state. This is one of the difficulties in hosting public social space with high traffic. Imagine a cultural text that has thousands reading, watching, or listening along with you, all with the potential to quickly re-create your experience. How can one protect the project from vandalism? What should be done if too many hands slow progress? What are the protections for people invested in the success of a project?

The problems of high-profile wikis and specifically Wikipedia, with its policy of anonymous editing, are part of a larger question of social software and open communities. Clay Shirky's keynote speech to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in 2003, titled "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy," discussed the questions of large-volume, open communities and the social software used in them. He points to certain, repeated cycles that online communities have been going through since the Communitree Bulletin Board System (BBS) of 1978. Shirky describes the lessons that are constantly forgotten and re-learned, as people continue constructing open communities and social software. He says that size is one issue, because "the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is differentÑsmall groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups canÕt." He also suggests that attention to core members is fundamental, as they are the people that make the project work:

Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."

Many responsible and respectful people get involved in a new project, sometimes very deeply. Because it is an open community, it attracts "bad elements" yet the idea of installing measures of censorship or barriers to contribution is avoided. There is a consequent "mental flight," as those deeply connected people exit in droves, leaving a mass of "trolls" (people interested in sowing discontent for its own sake) and a "flame wars" (meta-discussion or outright name-calling) behind. In IndymediaÕs case, quality journalists eventually left because of the level of spam and racism on the newswire. Co-founder Larry Sanger and other subject experts are now leaving Wikipedia after having to constantly defend their content from overwriting and flame-wars on the article discussion pages. It is their opinion that WikipediaÕs anti-elitist stance does not honor expertise. Indymedia now requests all IMCs to form editorial guidelines and engage in the practice of "hiding" posts while still making them accessible. Wikipedia is now working on a system of article rating, that will both set a course for stable versions of the content (the Wikipedia 1.0 project) as well as provide a sense of editorial oversight. Wikipedia is currently reaching the point of popularity and there are many articles being published attacking its lack of barriers to participation. The tension between keeping near-zero hierarchy and keeping core members is seen in both the wiki and the independent media experience. While non-hierarchical open spaces have their difficulties, the software has tried to account for some of the abuses within them and they are representative of young forms of social organization (Indymedia turned five this year and Wikipedia is even younger) that is finding new ways to challenge traditional notions of authorship. In the next section, I will attempt to explain, by way of a concrete example, the ways in which I have used and engaged in the implications of the new technologies presented here. It will also be an exploration of a different type of social nexus, one connected to past conceptions of authorship while trying to mitigate the problems and highlighting the opportunities presented in these technologies.