BBK News April 23, 2001 IN CELEBRATION OF NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, BBK STUDIO ANNOUNCES LAUNCH OF NEW WEBSITE, OPENSOURCEPOETRY.ORG In honor of National Poetry Month, celebrated every April through the efforts of the Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org), BBK Studio, a design consultancy based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, offers opensourcepoetry.org. "Opensourcepoetry.org is an experiment in uniting the principles of open source development with the tradition of collaborative poetry," says BBK developer and poet Scott Krieger. Krieger, a developer with BBK Studio and a poet since his undergraduate days at University of Evansville, has worked in collaboration with other poets in person, over email, and through paper correspondence. "I always thought it would be interesting, as I acquired the skills of using open source tools, to collaborate in a much more collective fashion," he says. "I also wanted to find a way for people who haven't tried writing poetry to know what it feels like to write a poem." Opensourcepoetry.org, developed using open source applications - PHP, MySQL, Apache, and Linux - offers visiting writers and readers a space to participate in the writing and review of "open source" poetry. At the website writers can contribute their own works, write poems all their own, or use lines of poetry contributed by other poets. They may also choose to work with poems already contributed, adding and subtracting lines to create a new poem. Readers "vote" for the poems of contributing poets through their readership. Writers determine the most popular lines through their selections. The front page of the site features a transitory poem made up of the most popular lines of the moment. Statistics on the site measure the number of contributed lines, the associations between them, the number of contributed poems and contributing authors, and the most popular line of poetry at any given time. The Open Source Initiative in software development is a method rapidly growing in popularity that makes the source code of a computer program available free of charge to the public, allowing any developer to work on and improve the program. The premise underlying open source development suggests that when profit motive and individual ego are removed from the process, a more user-friendly and bug-free program evolves. During open source development, peers all over the world review and evaluate one another's code, so that a programís evolution is constant. The most famous manifestation of open source development is the ongoing development of Linux operating software and the programs that run on it.