“A Wikipedia of lightweight backpacking”: Open-access know-how in an online community of practice

Lightweight backpacking is a minimalist hiking style promoted by an online community of practice. By describing the modalities for sharing user and DIY know-how on lightening the load, we see how an internet forum can constitute a unique source of creativity and resistance to conventional appropriation. Close to the open-source movement, this collaborative, free, and shared construction of skills questions both the notions of industrial property and the transmission of know-how.