Repeatedly we speak about the merits of the open source paradigm – putting control of the product into the hands of the people . This can either be a case of handing over control from the vendor to the customer or – more aptly in the context of open source journalism — from the author/journalist to the reader/critic.

Earlier this month, results from a highly-anticipated study on software were finally published. The study was backed by the European Commission and it was authority- and vendor-independent. The results indicated that Europe would get a competitive advantage owing to the economical superiority of open source software. This study, which involved rigorous trials and long-term observations, shows that in “almost all cases,” IT businesses would save money by switching to open source software.

The question is what lessons this will provide as we study how open source practices move beyond software into fields such as design, authoring and journalism.

In the field of education, open source has potential to alter the paradigm of collaboration, by allowing universities researching computer software to share information and discoveries. Even more base, however, open source can supply schools with free (as in beer) and relatively cheap software to help students learn.

There is an ongoing debate in the United Kingdom about the incorporation of open source software into schools. The Open School Alliance argues that an open source approach to education would reduce costs and directly benefit students by providing new skills.

Networked journalism takes obvious cues from the open source software movement, but because the two seem so distant it helps to spell out these parallels. Below are 10 examples of how the software revolution is organized, with its emphasis on open-ended work on computer code, to show how it can be flushed out into open source journalism.

1. Bug fixing in code equates to fact checking in journalism

To make a direct comparison; Mozilla’s Bug-catching efforts are equivalent to fact checking. There are many similarities between the two. More eyeballs on the code (or articles) make bugs (or mistakes) shallow, to use Linus Torvalds’ famous statement.

To address this issue, network journalism will benefit from a director of verification.