I started listening to IT Conversations periodically during my daily commute. Today, I listened to Tim O'Reilly's OSBC Keynote from March 2004.
Imagine my surprise when he starts talking about the architecture of participation, and mentions me by name as the guy who came up with the idea.
I remember the private email discussion where we were wrestling with that idea. What I was trying to express is how Perl is different from, say, VB. Specifically, why people are more likely to pitch in with Perl (through patches, docs, wikis, mailing lists, FAQs, user groups, etc.) than they are with a closed system like VB. With open source projects like Perl, the need for community is built in from day one. With closed systems like VB, the single point of contact is the vendor, and the incentive to toil away at night to support your vendor is almost totally eliminated.
Tim has taken that basic idea and ran with it. When he talks about the architecture of participation these days, it's more in the context of why Amazon.com outsells O'Reilly titles by a factor of 10:1 when compared to bn.com. Amazon has a whole basket full of features that encourage you to help build their site. Barnes and Noble doesn't. Same basic principle, but much more profound.
Thanks, Tim.
Google has over 500 hits for "architecture of participation". Most of them pick up on the idea from Tim.
It's a very good encapsulation of a complex idea, so be proud for coining it. Or, maybe you should drop everything and write a business book that just unpacks the buzzword for 12 chapters. I'm half serious here.
Some other guy who wants to move to your city used it first, in a different (?) context.
