Crossroads — towards transparency, freedom and opportunity?

There are many problems in the world, caused by many different things.

This is obvious; it’s possible to discuss the details, but the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of things happening that we’re not entirely sure what to do with. I’m going to attempt to discuss a few of those issues, as well as what I feel is the common thread among them.

Climate change. A tough issue, and quite abstract for the average person trying to make good decisions. How do we give people the ability to support those who pollute the least? How are we supposed to overcome the incentives of… well, every company, to at least project a sense of “we’re working for the environment”, regardless of what actions they’re actually taking, for the sake of PR and trying to convince people that they’re doing their best not to harm our environment?

Inequality. I think most people agree that total equality is a bad idea for many reasons. Most people probably also agree that extreme inequality, especially if it’s caused by manipulative behavior and corruption, is a bad idea. But how do we give people the opportunity to lift themselves up on a global scale? How do we steer around that manipulation that is, again, so heavily incentivized for companies who want to make a lot of money?

Education. How do we give more people access to meaningful knowledge and insight and skills that are applicable? We have the internet, and huge things are happening, especially in certain areas — one very interesting such area in which people learn in a different manner than in most other areas is software development. There are so, so many people who achieve unbelievable things through developing software skills without anything but a computer and an internet connection. What can we learn from that?

Access to technology. Technological development is one of the main differentiators between humans and other animals, but there’s a large disparity in our access to the benefits it brings. One thing is on a global scale — companies are so afraid of their “intellectual property” diffusing to places where they can’t control it. Another is just in any given community, where often times, companies who want to enter a given field have to invent the wheel from scratch at a huge cost instead of just building from the current newest development. I‘ve seen people postulate that “Humans could do anything if we would just cooperate instead of compete” — what if there was an actual mechanism by which people were incentivized to work together while retaining the benefits of healthy competition?

Lack of inspiration. According to Gallup, 85% of people worldwide are not engaged or actively disengaged in their work¹, doing it (supposedly) because they have to in order to make ends meet and make money. Man, this one really kills me inside. 85% — Forbes published an article in 2011, where they stated the number, again according to Gallup, to be 70%. We are not headed in the right direction here, obviously.

In fact, I think that last point is so crucial, because people who are inspired and engaged and who feel like they make a difference seems, to me, to be one of the main drivers of making the world a better place, and who doesn’t want that? On top of this, people want flexibility — they want to have influence over when they work², and where they work³.

Inspiration comes not just from what you’re doing, but how you’re doing it. Bad management, poor leadership and excessive bureaucracy is such a big sink of productivity, it’s incredible. In the US alone, it’s estimated to lead to a loss of about a trillion dollars yearly⁴. This is not to mention all the stress it creates in the workplace.

Okay, that’s a bit of stuff to work with. Back to that common thread I mentioned: Perhaps these problems are really symptoms, and dealing with the underlying cause would solve them all and many more. So what is the cause?

Now, I’m not a fan of people who keep postponing the conclusions of articles unnecessarily, but I feel it’s necessary to give a little disclaimer before I proceed. I am NOT an anti-capitalist, a communist or anything like it — quite the opposite actually. But the more research I do, the more clear to me it seems; the world is on a skewed track because of the incentives provided by our current societal structure. Actually, I think it can almost completely be narrowed down to one concept: Knowledge protectionism. Companies that do everything they can to stay opaque to the public, as well as their commitment to intellectual property that gives them huge advantages and dramatically increases the friction when anyone wants to contribute.

Lack of transparency is what makes it difficult to stop climate change, because the supply chains are intentionally hidden by companies to stop competitors from copying them and to stop the public from understanding how they provide their products.

Intellectual property is what allows huge companies to hold thousands of patents, limiting everyone else artificially, suing them at their will even if they develop things completely independently. “But patents only last 20 years” — yes. 20 YEARS — man, that is a long time in this day and age. I think this causes much more inequality than it gets credit for due to it’s extremely restrictive and inhibitive nature.

Lack of transparency and intellectual property is a huge opportunity cost for education, and an even bigger barrier to access to technology. Imagine if the next generation of engineers could simply utilize libraries of open designs, understanding them and contributing to them, increasing their knowledge and understanding dramatically faster compared to today where bettering yourself is a struggle against those who don’t want to share knowledge.

And finally: Lack of inspiration. Open Source has historically been made possible by people who were so passionate about something, they actually sat down and worked on it until they had something they thought others might benefit from. Sure, in many cases they made money, but in most cases, they probably didn’t — in fact, as unpacked by Nadia Eghbal⁵, the Open Source digital infrastructure that is so incredibly critical to our world is dramatically underfunded and has been historically.

Open Source is all about doing what you’re inspired by — it’s all about contributing to something because you think it’ll make a difference, rather then because someone is paying you a few bucks an hour to invent the wheel from scratch for the seventeenth time.

Open Source has it’s problems, however. Particularly, funding and management.

Management has gotten a lot easier, and is particularly aided by the growing number of remote workers, freelancers and other roles as well as the massive amount of Open Source projects in existence, forming a great pool of data to draw from when trying to successfully manage resources towards a certain goal in a decentralized way.

Funding, however, is a different beast. It’s an inherent contradiction — how are you supposed to make money when you give everything away? Great question. Luckily, we once again have some resources to draw on.

First of all, there are actually various companies that provide exclusively digital products that still manage to sustain very successful businesses while offering open source products. A good example is Red Hat, a billion-dollar company that offers enterprise solutions based on Open Source frameworks. This is proof that there are business models that are compatible with Open Source.

Secondly, and I think most interestingly — this problem of funding seems to diminish dramatically when you transfer the concepts of Open Source to other domains, for example hardware development and organisational management.

A company that provides transparency when it comes to it’s internal workings, it’s supply chain, it’s pricing structure or whatever else, doesn’t really take away it’s ability to make money; in many cases, they might even improve it by increasing their trustworthiness dramatically. This type of transparent organisational management seems like a very valuable way for future companies to provide better and more trustworthy alternatives to existing structures. There’s a certain discussion to be had about the ability of a company to compete if it’s completely transparent. On that note, I think it’s a very unhealthy sign if the only reason a company can stay in business is due to covering up how they actually operate, instead of due to the work, experience and competencies of the people in the organisation.

A company that produces physical products, but shares information about them freely, including design files, prices, bill of materials, is much the same story. In fact, there’s once again companies doing exactly this while maintaining very profitable and valuable (both in terms of money and the value they provide to people) businesses. A good place to see this is in the consumer 3D-printer ecosystem. Many businesses were born from the RepRap project which emphasized exactly sharing of knowledge, and though some of them have moved away from Open Source, some stick to it. Examples are Prusa Research and Lulzbot. Widely supported by the community, and with top notch products, I think they are the perfect poster children for open source hardware and it’s potential — and they are collectively valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

This subject is so extremely complicated, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what Open Source can include, what it can accomplish, what mechanisms we might use to implement it, and why I feel it’s so important. Please comment down below or send me an email at magnusnm@gmail.com to discuss, and follow me if you want to participate as I try to unfold this challenger to traditional structures that is Open Source.

1: http://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/225752/global-productivity-hinges-human-capital-development.aspx?g_source=link_NEWSV9&g_medium=TOPIC&g_campaign=item_&g_content=Global%2520Productivity%2520Hinges%2520on%2520Human%2520Capital%2520Development

2: http://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/226559/having-compassion-enhances-remote-workers-performance.aspx?g_source=link_NEWSV9&g_medium=TOPIC&g_campaign=item_&g_content=Having%2520Compassion%2520Enhances%2520Remote%2520Workers%27%2520Performance

3: http://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/226553/build-trust-remote-employees.aspx?g_source=link_NEWSV9&g_medium=TOPIC&g_campaign=item_&g_content=How%2520to%2520Build%2520Trust%2520With%2520Remote%2520Employees

4: http://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/228506/why-healthcare-leaders-build-culture-development.aspx?g_source=link_NEWSV9&g_medium=TOPIC&g_campaign=item_&g_content=Why%2520Healthcare%2520Leaders%2520Should%2520Build%2520a%2520Culture%2520of%2520Development

5: https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/