CoStory, 1 Million Penguins - Notes on Open Source Storytelling that isn’t quite by risa
I’ve had the Costory site open as a tab for way too many days, even weeks now, trying to figure out what and how to blog about it. Costory is a collaborative story space, a tool for perpetual group authorship of limitless story projects, run on Mediawiki, like the Wikipedia. It’s a conundrum because the project is cool and inspiring, the toolkit sensible, but the compelling content (if it exists) has been impossible for me to find. The stories are endearing, don’t get me wrong, and as an art game it’s great! But I do wish for something more. It feels a bit like one among one million proofs-of-concept that people will indeed work together with no concrete reward insight. Great and good to know, if you didn’t already, but what’s next, you know?
Looking back to the Million Penguins project, which wrapped up in March of last year, puts Costory in some more perspective. Million Penguins was a joint effort between Penguin Books and the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University in Leicester - the students were the Moderators, hmm… The novel was authored by some 1500 collaborators while the process was blogged by Penguins. The process blog is some of the most interesting stuff, to my mind, as you watch these book industry dudes sway from pretentious lit.crit. to Doubting Thomas, to flumoxed, laughing, bewildered, apologetic, honest, happy, over it.
All to the good, but Problem #1: why put an end to the process? Locking down a version for release and sale - hell yes, I’d expect that, though they haven’t announced any kind of publication yet, far as I know. But then I’d have thought they’d re-open a Beta version with a new call for editors and adapters and, why not, keep it evolving. Often community development doesn’t move fast and decisive like inside a strict hierarchy. It takes more mess and longer to get to the goal, but the whole point is that it’s iterative, evolving in response to found bugs, new readers, new contexts over time, gradually becoming stable and flexible enough to hold up the Internet (eg; Apache). So while the Penguin project was much lauded (and lambasted), hyped and misunderstood, it seems to me that 1 year’s worth of work means it was only at best well begun, and then worried by authorial anxiety before being safely sealed up. Sad, sort of.
Plus, Problem # 2: there’s the whole license issue, making it well, not open source at all:
By posting your submission on the Wiki Novel and the Site, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, distribute and display any content you submit to us in any format now known or later developed. If you do not want to grant us these rights, please do not submit your content to us.
As Lise Treutler pointed out a while back on Indyish, Margaret Atwood joined in on the Million Penguins project but called it “Writing without responsibility” - Thing is, this is not a feature of open source, but of the way Penguin organized their experiment. No one is attributed for their work, and Penguin keeps all the content. Kind of the opposite of true open source where names, acknowledgment and reputation are super important BECAUSE public ownership and visibility redefines the context.
Costory is less shiny, branded and publicist-y than Million Penguins, and it’s closer to the core of what the open source license theorists and activists have been thumping about for decades but it’s still limited a bit, in terms of it’s ability to activate exponential effects, by the license chosen. Unlike the Penguin project, everything on the site is licensed NonCommercial Attribution Share Alike.
In neither case is the fiction fantastic, but call me crazy, I have a lot of hope for the next evolution of this experiment with collective authorship. I think when it’s done right this process can provide inspiration and empowerment to distributed artists. A Costroy with an inspiring foundation, a dedicated leader, and licensed so that everyone who participates can sell copies (crazy sounding? but that’s how Linux works, and those are the original Million Penguins =) could become a perpetually refilling and refining resource of art and income. So Indyish is keeping an eye out and fingers crossed, even if it takes another decade.
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