This year seems to be about open source software development, access, courseware, repositories, content, with all of it being open to interpretation and re-interpretation at all times. What does the concept of “open” mean as more and more organizations move towards collaborative rather than a competitive models?

This week’s NSDL Whiteboard Report Talkback reports on a new NSDL collection of materials from MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative. MIT’s OCW makes faculty teaching materials available to educators, enrolled students, and self-learners everywhere in the interest of “Advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.”

Many organizations like MIT have learned that no matter how many or how few resources they have to develop products or ideas, tackling big issues like advancing STEM scholarship globally are most efficiently accomplished in partnership with other stakeholders.

This “new” business idea is discussed in WIKINOMICS: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. Collaboration is based on timeless ideas about how simple human connection works. Reaching out to friends when circumstances seem overwhelming and too difficult to solve alone is a benefit of being a member of a family or group of friends. This effect was recently tested in the heroic and widely distributed search organized by friends and colleagues for Turing Award winner Jim Gray who was lost at sea in January.

“Open everything” is one version of a share-and-share alike interpersonal model that at it’s core is about letting go of the idea that one person or one organization can manage to accomplish vast and complex objectives. The path to wide success in almost any endeavor might have more to do with acknowledging this truth in order to create the kind of openess in ourselves that leads to new and sometimes unexpected collaborations that “float all boats.”