Eleanor Greenhalgh Description

Open Sauce was a collaborative, online writing project which I designed and facilitated in Spring 2011. A short text (a stereotypical love scene composed of sentences lifted from various romance novels) was made available on a wiki. Site visitors were invited to edit the story, bringing it more into line with their own taste, and save their changes with a comment. Each contributor, upon saving, agreed to surrender any copyright in their contribution so that the process could continue. At first minor changes were made, such as the gender pronouns used, or the setting, giving way to more and more extensive edits which eventually re-wrote the text entirely.

A piece of custom software created a simple interface through which the text's revision history and changes could be browsed. This interface was shown at the 2011 Oxford Brookes Fine Art degree show, along with a room in which visitors could contribute their own edit to the text.

The project was documented in a similarly open source fashion, with no single piece of definitive documentation but a series of events and new works contributed by interested practitioners. These included essays analysing the evolution of the text, a spoken-word performance, and a lecture addressing the shortfalls of open source culture in regard to gender and sexuality.

When the show closed, the wiki permissions were changed to disable editing. All 108 versions of the text were left online, made explicitly available to anyone who wished to re-use them. Whenever notification arrives of such re-use in another project, a link is added to the list of documentation on the Open Sauce site.