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 phenomenon is converting consumers to producers and supporting a huge outpouring of creativity in user-generated content. “Collective intelligence” is helping us organize huge masses of information through, for example, “folksonomies.” Amateurs are doing the work of professionals, or amateurs and professionals are working together through “crowdsourcing.” The “long tail” is providing consumers much wider distributions of choices, be they books, rare ceramics, or courseware on obscure topics. How can all of this and more be applied to learning in an OER world as participatory architectures become more pervasive and powerful?

Open code and content are part of a larger openness movement that may be relevant to the future of OER and beyond. “Openness” has become a subject of substantial interdisciplinary academic study with growing expertise that could be called upon by the Hewlett Foundation. Openness includes development and adoption of open standards and open innovation in the world of the firm. Open innovation involves limited open sharing between firms for some collective good (cooperate to compete) but not necessarily for the public good. We also note that openness of product and/or process leads to enhanced opportunities for openness in monitoring evolution and impact as well as more openness in understanding impact. This is a very important attribute of openness to which we will return in Section 4.

The rapid emergence of the World Wide Web, layered on the Internet and distributed computing architecture, is the mainstay for provisioning and using open educational resources. In its first phase, the web has been used largely to distribute information. It has now emerged as a platform for collaboration and participation in a wide variety of collective activities. It has been used as a platform for what is often generically call social software. It has entered the “web 2.0” phase—a shift from information to participation. This creates a platform for the OPLI Initiative we are advocating.

What we are calling participatory systems architecture underlies the TIME Person of the Year being You. Quoting from the TIME story,