SAN FRANCISCO -- Science fiction author Bruce Sterling acknowledges that he isn't a programmer, or even a contributor to the kind of openly developed software project that brought his audience together on Wednesday.
Declaring virtual communities an oxymoron, Sterling told ApacheCon 98 attendees that he thinks people gathering together on the Web need peer review systems like those used in scientific communities.
"Peer review does work," he said. "It works in the world of science every day. If we could get a system like this into production in the online world, I think it would be a hugely powerful advance."
Sterling, author of The Hacker Crackdown among other things, challenged his audience to create software that would promote scholarly discipline among online collaborators.
Sterling was speaking to the first-ever gathering of Apache Web server developers and users. The software, which can be modified by any user or developer, is considered a triumph of the open source software movement. The Apache Project grew out of the desire for Web pioneers to build better Web sites, and the software has become the most popular on servers dishing out Web pages to surfers and their browsers.
Sterling said he hoped programmers would build software that lets Net users at large carry out similar group endeavors with equal success.
Using a fictional example of people gathered online around their interest in "freakish, left-handed mollusks," he said collaborative software is needed that liberates the creative power of the best people and "annihilates the counterproductive." According to Sterling, the latter includes idiots, spammers, and less-than-useful contributors.
Sterling envisions an "online utopia" that would occur if Web- and email-leveraging software were automatically moderated.
"If you could do this, you could advance knowledge," he said. The Net and the collaboration it enables would be able to add to the sum of human knowledge.
The Apache effort began in early 1995, when most Web sites were using NCSA httpd, a public domain Web server created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Web developers running servers based on the software added their own extensions and fixes to the server software. By email, they coordinated changes, or software "patche." Thus, "A-PATCH-y."
The original project coordinators were Brian Behlendorf, then at Hotwired (a sister site of Wired News), and fellow Web guru Cliff Skolnick. Soon, eight core contributors formed the foundation of the original Apache Group. It continues today, over the Web and via email.
Despite its humble beginnings, Apache is the Web engine used by 52 percent of the 3.3 million Web sites worldwide, which are electronically queried each month by Netcraft in England. Microsoft's Internet Information Server software handles 23 percent, while Netscape's Enterprise server software is a distant third, at around 4.6 percent.
Hoping to see more online collaboration -- whether among software developers or mollusk enthusiasts -- Sterling urged the development of software allowing contributors to vote on contributions. "Every message would have a voting tag attached.... Is it cogent? Does it make a contribution? If so, it gets a high grade."
In fact, just such a system of rating Usenet underlies a recently launched Web service, Realize, for viewing online discussions conducted via Usenet. It uses a system of rewards to get participants to rate postings so undesirable content can be filtered out. Sterling acknowledged in his keynote speech there may be efforts already underway of which he is unaware.
Successful implementation of such a concept, Sterling said, is critical to the success of the Net as a so-called "gift economy".... [This] economy should function more like an [actual] economy," he said. A differing set of rewards should be returned for a differing set of efforts.
