Kim, I have found this to be a very thought provoking and information rich posting. As I read through the questions that you asked and the abbreviated responses that you provided, I kept returning to a number of related questions of my own. The principal question being:
Is there the need to develop curriculum around commons-based peer development?
That is, would treating commons-based peer development through the formal educational curriculum in primary, secondary, and tertiary education across an array of topics and subject areas strike at equity issues associated with access? Would it help to generate a culture that supports and actively promotes peer development, investment in technologies that support collaborative creation, law that favors (reduces barriers and creates incentives) community production, etc?
If so, it would seem natural for FLOSS and OER to be used as practical applications areas within a curriculum and also serve as sources of examples (artifacts) to be studied and refined. If it were possible to integrate commons-based peer development into an action-oriented curriculum, following for example a participatory action research approach to facilitated teaching and learning, a virtuous cycle could develop in which FLOSS and OER production and use impacts education, formal education becomes directly relevant to societal change, and societal change in turn promotes and is fueled by the use of FLOSS and OER in education. Eventually the application of the skills and patterns developed through the active study of commons-based peer development are also applied to the production of other intellectual capacity (work flows, processes, physical artifacts, etc.).
In partial response to your first question, “ Q1. Is the learning from and between FLOSS, OER and other peer production case studies applicable in “developing” economies? “ I believe that a curriculum that includes commons-based peer development principles would be more likely to thrive in “developing” economies than in developed economies that have a whole value system based on deformed information markets (artificial barriers that impede the free flow of information and ideas).
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