Updated to link to previous entry.

Even though it has been a week since I posted this experiment, the experiment is still underway. Today, I received a comment from Kim in MI. Based on her comment it appears that I may have to wait a while longer to get all the results back.

I just wanted to comment and say it’s been 7 days and I’m just seeing this (I’m a 6th degree) … I’m a regular blog reader … I’m not sure all the homeschool blogging circles overlap …

I found this comment very heartening. After 7 days, this experiment is still making it’s way across the blogsphere. For that reason alone, it was worth it for me. Until following her link back, I hadn’t seen any instances of the experiment beyond the 4th degree. To an extent, the experiment getting to the 6th degree demonstrates the principle I had initially proposed: that news or items of interest do travel through blogs and that those things can and do spread well beyond the readership of a single blog.

Kim may be right. We don’t know if all homeschool blogging circles overlap. I guess that was one of the things I had hoped to find out through this experiment. I do know that posts regarding an attack on homeschooling would have traveled much faster. I’m sure there were a lot of people who looked at the experiment post (here or somewhere else) and thought I don’t have time for that.

In another comment, Melissa Wiley expressed another worthwhile point.

I’m a first degree! Fun.

And from Clare:

Sounds interesting

If you are setting out to learn something, particularly through a sort of trial and error approach, if you can have fun, why not. However the experiment turns out, it’s been both fun and interesting. I would hope that most homeschooling parents look forward to an opportunity to learn: that they approach expecting to enjoy themselves. If I didn’t enjoy learning, why would I expect my children to.

Another comment, by Jax, points out another unexpected benefit to this experiment.

I’m first degree – but I wouldn’t have seen this yet if you hadn’t left a comment on my blog this morning. Can I ask where you found me from? Nice to ‘meet’ you anyway

People have had an opportunity to meet other bloggers or readers who have to date not commented. The irony here, of course, is that I commented in her blog first. But, I’m sure this is not the only instance of people meeting people.

The secondary reason I had for carrying out this experiment is related to open source. I have mentioned online the similarity between the online homeschooling community and the open source community a number of times over the last few months. The last time I mentioned it was a few days before I posted this experiment. I’ve found that a fair number of homeschoolers have heard of open source and some of the software the community has developed including FireFox, Thunderbird, GIMP, WordPress and OpenOffice (I use all of these).

Open source is based on a contribution model. I belong to the community if I contribute something to it. But, once I’ve contributed, whatever it was, belongs to the community, not to me. If I want to belong in the long term, I have to be prepared to contribute something which the community rejects, sometimes vehemently. Both the styling of this site and the navigation bar at the top of this blog are open source projects I’ve worked on. (I reasonably expect that some people are not going to like the styling of this site.)

The way open source works is that one or more people have an idea for a software product which they feel will be useful to the community. That group spearheads a project to see the product (which they are prepared to give away) developed. Others in the community contribute to the project as developers, interface designers, testers or by providing feedback including technical problems and suggestions for enhancements for future releases (versions) of the product.

One of the reasons I believe that the homeschooling community ought to consider this model is that the open source community only uses a fraction of the financial resources that corporations use to develop software. And in many instances, open source software is maintaining stiff competition with or exceeding the market share of comparable products developed by corporations.

Recently, in the US, a lobby group, claiming to represent the homeschooling community succeeded in lobbying the US government into implementing legislation which can be reasonably expected to eventually lead to the restriction of homeschooling freedom. And like many lobby groups this one represents only a small fraction of the people they purport to represent.

Where this all comes together for me is that lobby groups tend to have an abundance of financial resources. This one is no exception. Given that homeschooling often reduces the income of the household, the HS community is unlikely to muster the funds to compete (or from a corporate perspective purchase enough stock in the competition to sway through shareholder voting power) with the lobby group in an area where they are obviously already established.

The open source model eliminates the need to acquire those financial resources. It is on those grounds that I believe that the HS community can succeed in countering the work of groups determined to bring it harm. The open source community depends on far more on small timely contributions by many people than it does on larger contributions by a small number of people.

What is of no less consequence is that in putting out this experiment and asking for other homeschoolers to contribute is that it was an open source style learning experience. The only way anyone learns anything from this experiment is through contributions from the community. About 6 months ago, I started a blog (all of the entries were moved to this site) where I wrote tutorials much like the one I wrote before Christmas describing the process I followed in creating the banner image of the Atypical Christmas theme. If the online HS community were to take on that model of contributing to each other’s learning and sharing of knowledge and skills, the opportunity exists to change the perception of who and what homeschoolers are. It also would offer both newbies and veterans an abundances of resources.