Two websites were brought to my attention recently, the first is Open Source Ideas and the second (very similar in name) Open Ideas. It prompted me to google the terms “Open Source Ideas” and I discovered a long list of sites that attempt to apply the principles of open source software to thought processes or the generation of ideas. In browsing through some of these projects I began to question the validity of the claim “to open source ideas”: What constitutes an idea? Is an idea inherently closed at source? When do ideas cease to be free? When we say “I have an idea”, what do we really mean? Here below are a few musings on the theme.

Idea – from the Greek idein (to know, to see) – is to bring to the fore of the conscious mind a synthesis of past knowledge with a desire to shape or give shape to an aspect of the world as yet unexplored by the ideator.

The use of the verb have in the utterance “I have an idea”, is at the same time possessive and ‘unpossessable’; bound on the one hand to the confines of individual thought and thought-mechanics, but free on the other in its transfer to an audience at the point of public scrutiny – an act of (in/dis)semination, a disclosure of the amalgam of past knowledge from which it draws and an exposure of the new configuration, a transformative act which cements the idea as proposition(s).

The idea then, this idea even, is echoed in countless other voices, is resonant in countless other minds, and to partake in its enunciation, to elaborate its terms, is to contribute to the renewal, particle-like, of a vast pool of knowledge. Despite the “what if” status of the idea, its unsubstantiated potential, we readily think of ideas as an extension of private property: “s/he stole my idea” we say, as if to condemn the theft of a singular (intellectual) commodity, a homogeneous product, while forgetting in that instant, the largely unattributed strands of knowledge of which the idea is a by-product.

If the idea is to be considered an extension of one’s private property, the problem lies in the delineation of its boundaries, discerning between the subjective and the communal, the singular and the plural, the original and the commonplace. Could it be that the idea harbours within itself each of these dyads and is in effect a product of their continual (re)negotiation? If so is the idea not always private and free, until it enters a state of application – practical and/or theoretical – at which point a legal barrier can be erected forbidding duplication without prior consent, the right to copy, to copy right, copyright?