I am a firm believer that the way to make a mark in today’s culture is to collaborate on projects within a community and offer up your product free of charge. Instead of charging for your services or products, make them available for wider use. This will invite others to improve the product, recommend it to others, and spread it quickly. If your goal is to offer something that will be the best of its kind and will help as many people as possible, sharing is the way to go. One area of the non-profit world where this is very true is in churches.
Read what Bob has to say:
“One of the beautiful things about the age we’re living in is the unlimited potential to share. Where sermons and art and music used to take years to circumnavigate the globe, now, they take less than seconds. We have the ability to share what we create in our local Christian communities with the larger Christian community and with the world. But not many of us do it.”
I think that he goes on to highlight a fine line between what should be expected personally and what should be given away by a community:
“Do I think it’s wrong to sell creative works? Not at all. If a musician or a video artist takes his or her time to create something that he or she feels would be helpful to a church community, I think they have the right to sell that work to others.
It’s the selling of things created on “community time” for a specific community’s use that I disagree with. It’s the selling of that which would otherwise sit on a shelf… and it’s the selling of things created for the worship of God that bothers me.”
Technorati Tags: open source, creative commons
Ed Cyzewski: Author // Contemplative 