CALIOPOLIS

Professor Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School has a new book out that promises to be stimulating and revelatory. I have ordered my copy from Amazon and have also started to read the free PDF version he provides under Creative Commons license from his website.

I expect this to expand on thinking that was first excellently illustrated in Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Amazon link, Free Online Link), Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation (Amazon, Free Online) and Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source.

The theme of the 2005 Conference for Law School Computing was Open Source, Open Law, Open Education, which was intended to explore the expansion of the open source ideals to education and especially legal education.

The 2006 CALI Conference theme is Rip, Mix, Learn extends these ideas to what faculty and students actually do when they create education environments.

Professor Benkler has setup a wiki where readers can interact with him and each other as they react to his ideas.

I will be posting more as I read.