Free Software in the Knowledge Society

This speech will concentrate on an often neglected aspect that the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community introduced to society: A new organizational form of knowledge work in networks of excellence. Due to the fact that FOSS developers and projects act in distributed and heterogenous knowledge networks and furthermore collaborate in self-organised groups, they serve as the prototype elements of the emerging Knowledge Society. In this respect, the FOSS community does not only provide a public domain software infrastructure for the Semantic Web, it also provides a management approach for how various social actors (companies, universities, schools, governments, etc.) can act in a society highly dependent on expertise.

In fact, the Semantic Web is not only about the right software architecture, implementation, and choice. It's also about understanding and learning from the FOSS community. This way, society can profit from basic ideas and good practice of FOSS projects; whereby the broad acceptance and understanding of FOSS can be improved. Likewise, local, regional, national and supranational social actors may utilize the Semantic Web to involve affected and interested groups. The FOSS community stands at the gates of the Knowledge Society and enters it with the good prospect that it has all expertise and tools at hand, to create a Semantic Web which not only lives from _what_ FOSS projects do (writing software), but also breathes the spirit of _how_ FOSS projects work (decentral and self-organised networks of excellence). Such insights help FOSS developers to invent new Internet, Intranet, Extranet software for collaborative content and metadata creation.

Sandro Zic is CEO of ZZ/OSS Information Networking. He is actively engaged in the international FOSS community, especially the PEAR group, the OpenISIS database for digital libraries, and Bitfluxeditor, a WISIWYG XML editor. Sandro has been invited to speak at several conferences, e.g. the International PHP Conference 2001. For Wrox Press, he writes and reviews texts for software programmers.