http://blog.okfn.org/2006/05/09/the-four-principles-of-open-knowledge-development/

As we wrote there:

“Open knowledge means porting much more of the open source stack than just the idea of open licensing. It is about porting many of the processes and tools that attach to the open development process — the process enabled by the use of an open approach to knowledge production and distribution.”

The Four Principles

Open knowledge allows (and requires for its success) a development process that is:

Incremental
Decentralized (and asyncrhonous)
Collaborative
Componentized (and ‘packagized’)”

Since then we’ve been particularly focused on the last of these four items: “Componentization”. Componentization is the process of atomizing (breaking down) resources into separate reusable packages that can be easily recombined. As we wrote in the original post:

“This probably the most important feature of (open) knowledge development as well as the one which is, at present, least advanced. If you look at the way software has evolved it now highly componentized into packages/libraries. Doing this allows one to ‘divide and conquer’ the organizational and conceptual problems of highly complex systems. Even more importantly it allows for greatly increased levels of reuse.

The power and significance of componentization really comes home to one when using a package manager (e.g. apt-get for debian) on a modern operating system. A request to install a single given package can result in the automatic discovery and installation of all packages on which that one depends. The result may be a list of tens — or even hundreds — of packages in a graphic demonstration of the way in which computer programs have been broken down into interdependent components.”

Further detailed discussion of what componentization involves can be found in the follow-up post:

http://blog.okfn.org/2007/04/30/what-do-we-mean-by-componentization-for-knowledge/