Strategies and technologies of sharing in contributor-run archives

摘要

While we argue about and discuss the plusses and minuses of contributor-run archives, groups formed by people of shared interests and of varied technical competencies have been creating, maintaining, sustaining, and growing their archives for over a decade in several cases. These contributor-run archives make use of powerful open technologies to facilitate their projects. In this article I will focus on three different volunteer-run projects that involve worldwide cooperation using advanced technologies to further their ends. The Linux Documentation Project, the Degree Confluence Project, and Etree.org are all large projects that involve many contributors with technical teams of various sizes using a variety of technologies. Each project will be described in terms of its aims; its history; its rules, or lack thereof, for contribution; its technologies; and its current state of practice. From these examples we can draw some lessons as well as some enhanced awareness of technologies of cooperation. Among the technologies used by the projects are wiki, mailman, Shorten (SHN), FLAC, PHP, mySQL, PHPbb, Postnuke, BitTorrent, rsync, XML, and CVS. All of these technologies are "open" and available for installation, customization, and further sharing of their code.