This has emerged as the main question folks have about the idea behind pulp:  “Why would I put anything I write up where all those lurkers can see it too?”

I don’t have a pat answer.  I think that thinking about thinking in an open-source sort of way does entail some risk of a form of idea piracy.  That’s not without basis, given the fact that a great deal of work in the design/research intersection has been ‘citation-free,’ largely, I think, due the perception among all kinds of practitioners that they need to be able to claim uniqueness in order to offer value, and that uniqueness has been understood as pure invention.  Differentiation is seen as the offer of value to clients.  In a  practitioner-heavy field, that becomes the dominant ethos.

We started pulp because we think the field will grow more robustly if it is more open, if the contest of ideas happens with the ideas rather than in marketing claims.  But if the zeitgeist of the space is going to change toward an everyday comfort with saying, “We got this idea from Dr. X, and man is it cool”  two things have to happen:  Dr. X has to put his idea out beyond the margins of his own practice, where it may have huge holes poked into it, and the folks who use it, build on it, have to be willing to say that Dr. X works for their arch-competitor, Xcorp.

I think that’s worth it if I get to see more of Dr. X’s stuff in return.  And if I’m Dr. X (which really, I’m not.  Honest.  But I’ve met him), I would like to be able to tell my next prospective customer that the model or the method I’m suggesting for their work has been raked over the intellectual coals and turned inside out by the entire field, and remains standing.  My apologies for the terribly mixed metaphors, a habit I picked up from John Cain.

Here’s why I’m putting this up as a strand:  I may well be wrong about the idea of having readers, as well as writers and critics.  Maybe the only way to get the kind of depth of engagement, quality of interaction over work in progress is to wall the garden, to make the space only available to folks who have put something in.  I’m trying to avoid a game/sports analogy here, folks.  I’ll leave it at that.  I’ve gone back and forth on this a thousand times during the floating of the idea for pulp and the building of it, and have come down on the side of thinking that the folks out there who read, but don’t contribute are for the most part not pirates but instead nascent writers and thinkers themselves.  And the best thing to do is set the example of being open about the work and equally committed to citation, acknowledgment.

So I’d like to open it up.  Get comments, points of view.  It’s early in the life of pulp, and we could change the way it works.   Or see where it goes, how it goes.