I must admit that I’m glad my professor for Media, Politics and Power in the Digital Age, Nicco Mele, assigned us to write a blog on two readings that I had only skimmed through the first time around.  The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond was long and somewhat complicated to follow.  It didn’t grab my attention, even with my undergraduate computer science degree.  There’s a reason why I didn’t stay in the computer programming field.

On my second try, I did much better.  I understood why this essay is so popular after more then 10 years of its original publication.   It is often referenced in current essays and books relating to the Internet, it’s a classic.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar enumerates 19 lessons of why open source and community building has become the preferred model for software programming.  The old school – cathedral style is passe, and will likely not be able to compete much longer with the bazaar model that invites users to debug and improve a program.   The bazaar is similar to crowdsourcing – delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without monetary compensation.  Programmers from around the world are building better software by working in collaboration with each other.

The second assigned reading, What is Web 2.0, Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software by Tim O’Reilly, follows a similar frame of thought as The Cathedral and the Bazaar. However, O’Reilly’s piece focuses on the popular business models being built on the Internet platform. In this reading, the author presents seven principle features of Web 2.0.  Several of the concepts follow the bazaar model: trusting the user as co-developers, promoting self-service and encouraging simpler models.  The essay also discusses the power of the people to decide what are the most important and relevant websites.  There’s the elimination of the traditional judges that used to select our content for us.  Now we are able to select our own content on the Internet.

However, this essay introduces a concept that seems to go in a different direction from The Cathedral and the Bazaar – control over data sources.  It’s understandable that companies need to find ways of making a profit from their Internet business plan.  In an open source environment, the opportunities for profit comes from controlling the users’ data.  A consumer’s book selection should be private information, why does Amazon think it has the right to own this data?  Google’s PageRank algorithm is based on user data, and the company uses user data not only for PageRank but for GoogleAds and who knows what else.

I firmly believe that the next big Internet policy debate will be on privacy issues.  Google and others are making money from collecting users’ data, and that’s OK as long as there is transparency regarding the use of data.  Consumers need to be clearly and regularly informed on how their data is being used.  Fine, small print hidden in a long on-line agreement should not suffice.  There should be a clear opt- in/opt-out choice.  Companies should respect the privacy of its users.  We choose to use their product, but that doesn’t give them the right to keep or sell our data, or does it?