What have The Romans IS academics ever done for us? The Lessons of Open-Source

This paper seeks to develop the motivations and aspirations underlying the primary theme for ICIS 2006 – ‘IT for Underserved Communities’. In so doing the case is made that those keen to mobilize and harness the emancipatory and empowering potential of Information & Communications Technology for community-based projects should consider that the very existence of this technology opens up alternative models of co-operation and collaboration. These models themselves provide the basis for breaking away from ‘traditional’ command-and-control models of management and co-ordination; allowing participants, or potential participants, to coordinate their efforts along the lines exemplified by the open-source software movement and the contributors to Wikipedia: Models of co-ordination that ought not to work, but appear to do so.