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The first Rebus Foundation project underway is the Rebus Community for Open Textbook Creation. The design of the Community is an example of Benkler’s commons based system of peer production, whereby a large group of people collaborate to provide “information, knowledge or cultural goods” without relying on traditional market models or hierarchies to coordinate production[1]. The work of these large groups is facilitated by the technical infrastructure of networked digital technologies and the web, and members are generally driven to participate by intrinsic motivations. In the case of the Rebus Community, its platform takes the ease of production offered by digital, web-based technologies and elevates it from an individual pursuit to a collaborative one. Though it is true that an author might now be able to write, produce and publish their work more easily than ever before, there are still significant challenges in doing so which cannot be addressed by basic book production software. To take production to a new level, the Rebus Community has been designed as an online environment that connects a worldwide community of practice that recognises the value of Open content, as well as simple-to-use tools to maximise the benefits of a collaborative, digital-first publishing process. This level of collaborative peer production expands the pool of creators from the limited number that can be employed or commissioned by a traditional publisher to potentially thousands of contributors, allowing the scale of production to increase substantially and create an environment of content abundance.
The focus of the internship I have undertaken with the Rebus Foundation has been working with the other members of the Rebus team on the practical application of these broad concepts, designing and launching the first iteration of the Rebus Community platform. While a sketch of the different “parts” of the platform had been developed by the co-founders prior to securing funding and launching the Rebus Foundation proper, in the past six months the team has worked to flesh out the specifics of those initial ideas, creating detailed product briefs, deciding on priorities and crafting a launch strategy. This section will detail the results of this process to date, from strategic decisions to product design and the first projects to be shepherded through the creation process.
3.1 The Platform
The core offering of the Rebus Community project is a platform that connects people working on Open Textbooks, and that will enable them to develop a set of best practices for Open Textbook publishing in a digital world. Along with the higher level concept of peer production, the specific implementation of a community-based approach to publishing is informed by successful communities of practice in the Open Source world, mirroring the origins of Open Education as a whole. Community strategist Jono Bacon, who has decades of experience working with Open Source software communities, stat