some places we can juxtapose open source history with the history of other networks:

-the making of the oed

-asquith and torvalds- parliamentary tactics for coming toward agreement
the northcliffe press and microsoft- the danger of monopoly

-conferences, universities (“we are collectively, what’s wrong with the university” Innis to the assembled presidents..)

-and interestingly, in the behavior of networks in nature. Microsoft, Bose-Einstein
Opening up information is a political act that resists the formations of monopolies which are threatening to civilization.

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ways we use our website (little features of our ongoing attempt at open-ness):

- we open with a photograph of us- i have some ego-guilt about this, but when i think about it objectively i do think it’s important to open a website with human faces. i think the fundamental fact of the collaboration between art and science, guy and girl, writing and code that this photo represents is pretty key to the way we understand ‘open-ness on our site. In part, we are open sourceing ourselves with all our websites.

-we offer some key use information along the top, (submit, why ads, forum, blogs, about)
- and then show the categories of topics along the side. these are general fields of inquiry and often we’ll post entries in different categories so that you can come across ideas in different contexts.

-below the categories we added our flickr feed- the idea of sharing photos publicly in the flickr way works well for us, and allows us to publish photos by different authors, and to easily update the look of our site.
right now we’re featuring a series of graffiti photographs bc i’m interested in the way that writing on public space reclaims it, makes an argument about who owns property and who is allowed to communicate. In a way, I think open source and graffitti share a politics of access.

-below that you’ll find some of our google ads. and up at the top and in the forums you’ll find explorations of the ethics of including ads. I argue that we are open, in this way, to other ideas of the good, other attempts to be of value, and other interpretations of our audience and their desires, and bc they are chosen by Google’s content algorithms, they also suggest alternate interpretations of our site.
we’re going to need some income to survive, but sometimes they still make me uncomfortable.

-at the bottom you can get our rss feeds, check that our xhtml and css is valid and find out our page rank. elran works on keeping out site valid and optimized.
From the back end of wordpress we add keywords for the search engines, and technorati tags for the bloggers. we are trying to be accessible in different contexts and from different points of access.

- at the top right you’ll find our different css options for viewing. We started this because my gramps mentionned he found the site impossible to read due to his colour-blindness.

-then we have the big css button to participate in the donation forum, and the paypal donate button underneath- started for books to indonesia.

-then we have the forum feeds- we wanted to increase the feeling of interesting things to read changing all the time. the forums are active at different times, but we always use them for ourselves as a way of cataloguing interesting, open-related information.

-and then our google search,

-and then what i think of as our lamp stack buttons- though they also feature open office and firefox.

-Off the front page, in links- our logo and Ecosystem blog network.

-archive: heat map- again, just to offer different ways of moving around the material on our site

Things we’d still like to do (code hacks and life hacks):

-switch to a wordpress template that automatically adjusts the length of the page to the contents.
-add a page featuring our contributing editors.
-systematize what can be done by the editors- be better at delegating in an organized way.
-continue to improve the design. get into 9Rules Network.
-add “most recently edited” and “most recently commented on” feeds to front page.