EffoEfforts have been made recently to increase collaborative effort and sharable resources in the field of biblical studies. This is very needed and welcomed, but there is still a very long way to go. The technology that is available in the tech industry to enable such work has grown tremendously, but the biblical studies industry is not keeping up. What is available currently is a good start but only takes advantage of the tip of the technological iceberg. Lexel Software intends to help push us further in the right direction. And we would like nothing more than others join in the same goal, either through direct collaboration or by doing parallel work.
This essay is the beginning of several that will lay down some proposed ideas, procedures, and technological solutions for creating good quality sharable data for the benefit of the field of biblical studies, from the scholar to the layman. This first essay will focus on general principles for doing this work collaboratively. The ideas in the essay assume the idea of sharing over web since it is by far the best mechanism for doing so, though all these principles need not apply only to internet-enable collaboration. The ideas themselves are a summation of ideas discussed at length between the members of Lexel Software and others, though many lessons have been drawn from the field of software development. I have had the blessing of living in both the biblical studies world as a seminary student (ThM graduate from Dallas Theological Seminary with a focus on New Testament studies, May 2003) and as a software developer. The field of software development has spent years doing what we are just starting to do in the field of biblical studies and offers a number of lessons for us. Studying the open-source software movement, taking into mind both its strengths and weaknesses, is particularly fruitful, since there are many open-source development efforts that span continents and have been successful for a number of years.
My goal here is not to discuss these principles in regard to the code we are producing (which is the focus of open-source software), but in regard to the content. The open-source movement itself is concerned mostly with the open-ness of the code to make development easier for others. But that is not the big issue in biblical studies. The much larger issue is how are we going to open up the mass of data that has been and will be collected to electronic media and the internet. The data of the past is largely controlled by publishers who would not be willing to free up their data without monetary compensation; compensation that many of us just cannot afford (though there are exceptions, but that is often the case).
However, this is not necessarily going to be true in the future. As technology advances and more people use technology on a daily basis we will see this naturally shift. This shift is already occurring in some industries. Take the programming industry, for example. Programming books are still popular, especially introductory level ones. But I find that most people look to the web to find help in their day to day work. Unless you know where in one of your books to look, it is usually much faster to hit Google and see what they turn up. Biblical studies is not to that point, not by a long shot. But it could be, if we work toward that goal.