This weeks reading takes an interesting look at the economic importance of looking at the huge number of niches rather than small number of hits, specifically in entertainment. Essentially, the idea here is that, while a large number of people may purchase a few specific hits, if you compare the combined sales of everything that is not a "hit", there is much greater aggregate sales in the so-called “long tail".

Both Gershenfeld and Eisenberg & Buechley, in this week’s reading, agree that personal fabrication, the creation of high quality one off items (“the prototype is the product”), is likely to be an even greater society game changer than ubiquitous computing because the “matter” it let’s us control belongs to our world, the world of the physical, rather than the “world of the computer”.

This week's readings discuss the Open Source movement/phenomenon/development model from a few different angles. Lakhani and Wolf present a statistical analysis of developers' motivations for contributing to free/open source software projects. The major finding from their research is that creativity is large motivating factor for open source developers. Fitzgerald discusses some of the challenges that the open source model must overcome in order to continue to thrive. Fried and Torrone's slides explore the translation of open source software principles into the realm of electronics hardware.

One of the examples from the participants interviewed in the Learning How paper stated that a class in fabric dying made Elsa “never want to do it again”, whereas she had initially taken up fabric dying by herself without any background knowledge. Considering how documentation can influence work that is achieved through applying it, what is good documentation? And does good documentation ensure better results? How can we think about both the creation and consumption sides of documentation towards improving skills?