Against Repositories

Generally speaking I think it holds true that organisations need repositories for sharing and reuse more than individuals do. After all, they spend oodles and oodles of money funding projects and activities for their staff and students – either directly via programs and grants or indirectly through facilities and infrastructure. So perhaps not surprisingly organisations want to maximise the return on these investments by reducing the amount of replication that occurs during these processes and increasing the reuse.

The issue is that the needs of organisations are very different to the needs of the individuals within them. The latter tend to be specific, unique and dependent on context.

Herein is why the idea of centralised repositories don’t make any sense. They matter to organisations far more than they do individuals. So time and time again, when repositories are created they aren’t used because there is a fundamental disconnect in the equation:

The people who need the repositories are not the ones who are expected to use them.

So whenever I hear about central repositories claiming to have unlocked the mystery of motivating sharing and identified the missing link in the equation I’m highly skeptical, because in experience and observation this has rarely proven the case.

Yet sharing does occur, and it is occurring. The process is taking place anywhere and everywhere online, whether people call it sharing or not. This is the key.

When people are engaging in collaboration or communication in a context they have a personal relevance in, they share freely and openly – because it is in their best interests to do so. Sharing here becomes just one element or factor within a broader sphere of participation, rather than a convaluted, context-less container like we see in centralised repositories – spaces, I might add, which require additional work to use.

So it is here, in the distributed spaces where individuals and groups interact, where the conversation needs to focus. This is why Creative Commons has been so incredibly effective. It doesn’t require a resource be stored in a specific location, only that it be tagged with basic information that makes it visible to the indexing system. Once it’s visible to the system, it’s searchable.

So ultimately people can go about their lives in their own contexts doing whatever they choose to, and the rest of us can still leverage the creations they have made avalable. The only requirement to share is that they leave a small marker so we can find them.

So please, enough with the central repositories. There are better ways of doing it.

Posted via email from Mike Bogle