The Web Explorer

The term ‘produsage’  and ‘produser’ is fairly new for me and somehow I still feel difficult to really understand of those concept.  Bruns in his book defines  produsage as “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement”  and produser as “ traditional value chain of producer-distributor-consumer has condensed to a singular point, the produser, interacting with and potentially enhancing existing content.”To make it simpler I self define the term produsage as ‘a community based project’ where every member mutually contribute in the development,deployment, and improvemend phase and produser is the user/member that have a role as a developer,evaluator and end user as well

Now back to the main question: “Am I a produser  in both of my personal and professional fields?” For now I can say I’m not sure yet. Open source world is one of the perfect example of produsage. I use some of open source product and being  involved in those community. In my profesional field, I built products by utilizing open source software and then those products were  being used by end user. In this case my product were more likely a traditional production phase. But I also had some projects that I think can be clasiffied as a produsage works. For example: My team has built and deployed ’shareable and reusable  learning content repository’. With this system, the user including us can share the learning content object so it can be reused or being improved by other member.

In my personal life, I’m trying to contribute in some community site by submiting  ‘howto’ article hoping someone can take advantages of my articles and/or improving my works. I realize  that my efforts is still far to be called a produser. At least I can share my thought and my works to another