Distinguished Lecture

Content Creation by Massively Distributed Collaboration

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Mitch Kapor, Open Source Applications Foundation

The sudden and unexpected importance of the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by tens of thousands of volunteers and coordinated in a deeply decentralized fashion, represents a radical new modality of content creation by massively distributed collaboration. This talk will discuss the unique principles and values which have enabled the Wikipedia community to succeed and will examine the intriguing prospects for application of these methods to a broad spectrum of intellectual endeavors.

Mitchell Kapor, 55, is the President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, a non-profit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses.

He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980’s. He has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.

Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950 and attended public schools in Freeport, Long Island, where he graduated from high school in 1967. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics.

Last updated: August 23, 2016