“Can History Be Open Source?”
This is slightly off topic, but we thought some of you would be interested in an article that CHNM Director Roy Rosenzweig just published in the Journal of American History. Entitled “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” the article attempts to ascertain both the usefulness of Wikipedia as an historical resource in particular and the potential of peer-produced history in general. In many ways, the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank is CHNM’s attempt to prove that potential as we hope to build a permanent archive of Mozilla history mainly through voluntary contributions from members of Mozilla community itself. As Olivia mentioned in the previous post, we will be conducting a set of traditional oral histories to supplement and provide context for the collections, but our real hope is that your contributions of email, chat transcripts, blog posts, digital photographs, and documents will form the core of those collections.
Good luck to Olivia and Ken, who will be spending the week in the Bay Area interviewing community members, and thanks to all of you who are taking time out to help us.
-Tom
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