In production and development, open source is a philosophy,^{[not in citation given][not in citation given]} or pragmatic methodology^{[not in citation given]} that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product's design and implementation details. Before the phrase open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive retooling of the computing source code.^{[citation needed]} Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. The open-source software movement was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.^{[citation needed]}

The open-source model includes the concept of concurrent yet different agendas and differing approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial software companies. A main principle and practice of open-source software development is peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product, source-material, "blueprints", and documentation available at no cost to the public. This is increasingly being applied in other fields of endeavor, such as biotechnology.

Clay Shirky (born 1964) is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He has a joint appointment at New York University (NYU) as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Assistant Arts Professor in the New Media focused graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa.

He has written and been interviewed extensively about the Internet since 1996. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.

Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client–server infrastructure that characterizes the World Wide Web. He is a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Advisory Board.

Richard G. Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University.

Dr. Baraniuk received a B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba in 1987 and a M.Sc. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992 under the supervision of Douglas L. Jones. After spending 1992-1993 at École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, he joined Rice University.

Baraniuk has been active in the development of digital signal processing and image processing systems, with numerous contributions to the theory of wavelets and compressive sensing. His work with Kevin Kelly on the Rice "single-pixel camera" applied the ideas of compressive sensing to design a novel imaging system that was selected by Technology Review Magazine as a TR10 Top 10 Emerging Technology in 2007.

Baraniuk is a founder and leader of the open education movement, which aims to share knowledge and teaching materials freely over the internet. In 1999, Baraniuk launched Connexions, one of the first initiatives to offer free, open source textbooks via the web. Connexions continues to be one of the largest and most used open education platforms worldwide.

Wai Chee Dimock is William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. Originally from Hong Kong, she received her B.A. from Harvard University and Ph.D. from Yale University. She argues for a broad conception of American literature, including materials both high and low, and horizons both local and global.

Three concepts are important to Dimock: deep time; kinship among genres and media; and close reading. See reviews by Michael Davidson, Robert Kern, and Robert Gravil.

Dimock's lecture course, "Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald," is available through Open Yale Courses.

Dimock has collaborated on many projects: with Michael Gilmore at Brandeis University, on Rethinking Class; Priscilla Wald at Duke University, on Literature and Science, a special issue of American Literature; Lawrence Buell at Harvard University, on Shades of the Planet; and Bruce Robbins at Columbia University, on a special issue of PMLA, Remapping Genre (Oct 2007). See also an exchange between Dimock ("Genre as World System") and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ("World Systems & the Creole"),Narrative 14 (January 2006).