So many directions this conversation could go. I am sorry to have dropped out for a day or two. Wayne, thanks also for your support it is of course the contributors to the Series that make it of any value.
It seems to me that we have an “economic” puzzle to solve here. Continuing with the physical infrastructure analogy and the questions about competition, our challenge is to create an environment in which there is more value to institutions and governments (folks who can levy taxes) to invest in a shared, open, and free content infrastructure than to invest in close infrastructure. That is, invest in public libraries rather than bookstores (sorry for mixing analogies). Perhaps the appropriate extension would be investing in public roads rather than private ones, or simply not investing at all. This could be done in a few ways, by either centrally funding the creation of content or creating incentives for distributed creation and contribution. Are there other options???
Simultaneously, the trick will be to encourage volunteerism by reducing barriers to contribute and creating non-financial incentives, perhaps through recognition of some sort. For example, I think that WikiEducator 2 and the OpenOCW initiatives are great steps to reducing some barriers, but there are of course organizational barriers (refer to Cole's comments above) which are both structural (unfriendly licensing requirements, unfriendly organizational policy, unfriendly work flows, use of a lot of 3rd party proprietary stuff, etc.) and cultural/attitudinal (“what is mine is mine and it is so good, you will have to pay for it”, fear, uncertainty, etc.) that exist in universities. Are there others?
In any event, here is the punch-line to this comment. Suppose that we get the “economics” right and we end up with a vibrant community of governments, institutions, NGOs, foundations, individuals, etc. contributing to an open and free content infrastructure, on which terms do we compete (see Wayne's comment above about co-opitition) and how does this impact education? Perhaps the second part of this question is more interesting than the first.
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