GUADEC: open source and open "stuff"

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Developer conferences like GUADEC tend to be dominated by technical content, so talks with a different tenor stand out. Alex "Skud" Bayley's July 28 keynote "What's Next? From Open Source to Open Everything" was one such talk. Bayley has spent time in both the open source and open data movements, and offered a number of insights between those and other online, grassroots-community movements — including what open source can teach newer communities from experience, and what it can learn.

Bayley's talk was based loosely on a blog post she wrote in January 2011 while working at the Freebase "open data" project. After roughly a decade of working full-time on open source software, she decided it was no longer the "fringe" and cutting-edge movement it was in the early years, and consequently stopped being an interesting challenge. That assessment is not a criticism, however; as Bayley put it, the fact was that open source software had "won." "No one seriously says 'lets use ColdFusion running on Oracle' for their Web site anymore." She subsequently encountered the open data movement and found that it "freaked out enough people" that she was certain she was onto something interesting again.

But the real insight was her discovery that the nascent open data movement was grappling with the same set of challenges that open source software had tackled roughly a decade earlier. For example, it was grappling with licensing (as open source had), and was still in the process of distilling out its core principles and how best to enshrine them in appropriate licenses. Similarly, she said, in the early days open source struggled to build its software support tools (such as build systems and version control), find working business models, and discover how to interact with governments and other entities that found the movement odd or suspicious.

Open data was repeating the same process, ten years later. Bayley relayed an anecdote about a New Zealand government project that attempted an open data release as a Zip archive. Nat Torkington reacted with a number of questions illustrating how a Zip release failed to make the grade: what if there is a bug, or an update, or a patch? Open source and open data are not the only movements, however: Creative Commons and Wikipedia have dealt with similar issues, as have open education, open healthcare, open government, open access (e.g., to academic research), and open hardware — and Bayley found the parallels interesting. In short, when asked what her current interest is, she now replies "open ... stuff."

An even broader circle encompasses not only the open technology movements, but other recent grassroots and peer-to-peer online communities, including "scanlation" groups that crowdsource translations, music or video remixing communities, unconferences, and even fan-fiction communities. Some of these groups might not seem to have any connection to open source, Bayley admitted, but the parallels are there: they are self-organizing, decentralized, non-hierarchical, and are based around the tenet of making things free. That makes them kindred spirits that open source could assist based on its own experiences, and it makes them worth learning from.

What open source can teach

The first area in which open source can offer assistance to other open movements is licensing, Bayley said. Licensing is "really, really important," but most online communities don't think about it in their early days. Open source has generally settled on a small set of licenses that cover most participants' needs, and it has done so largely because it started from the FSF's four freedoms. Newer communities could benefit from open source's work articulating its core principles, writing definitions, and figuring out the boundaries that determine "who's in and who's out."

She cited several examples in the open data movement where lack of licensing standards confuses the issue. One was a genealogy site advertising its "open data" at OSCON 2010 — data that was licensed CC-Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives-ShareAlike, a choice that breaks three of the FSF's four freedoms. Another was a "community mapping" project run by Google, which used participatory and community language in its marketing, but in which all contributions became the sole property of Google.

The second area where open source can assist other movements is tools. Open source has a complete toolchain all the way down the stack, but many other communities do not. Many creative- or publishing-centric communities have no concept of version control, she said. But telling ebook authors to "just use GitHub" is not the answer; they would balk at the suggestion, and rightfully so. Rather, the open source community needs to ask "what would DocHub look like?" and help the community build the tools it requires.

Finally, open source can teach other communities about the value of working and communicating completely in the open: open mailing lists, open documentation, and "release early, release often" workflows. The benefits may seem obvious to open source developers, but it is a scary prospect to those not "soaking in it" already, like the open government movement. But transparency has benefits for all open source communities, she said. It allows outsiders to see what the community is like and how it operates, so that they can put themselves into the situation with fewer surprises. It also means more accountability, which is particularly important in movements like open government.

What open source can learn

Open source software's relative maturity puts it in a position to offer experience-based advice to other online communities, Bayley said, but that fact does not mean the other communities have nothing to teach of their own. After all, she said, no one recruits the thousands of teenagers who write and share their own Harry Potter fan-fiction — they build and organize their own communities online. There are several potential lessons from these other groups, which she described in random order.

The first is the value of hands-on events. Hackerspaces often hold short, practical events where "people can walk-in, learn something, and walk out." Open source rarely does this, expecting newcomers instead to sign up for online courses or figure out what to do on their own. But "no one says 'I spent all weekend reading documentation; it was awesome!'" Many minority or marginalized groups in particular require a slight push to get involved; a physical event after which they can walk away having learned something will provide this push in ways an online event cannot. It is easy — but fundamentally selfish — to tell others that they must learn it hard way because you did, she said.

Many other open communities also have much more age diversity than open source. Environmental groups and music communities tend to be all-age, she said, but open source is not. Developer conferences like GUADEC tend to be dominated by attendees in their 20s and 30s, while system administration conferences are much older. But as an example, she asked, why are there no children at GUADEC? Some might expect them to find the talk sessions dull, or to be disruptive, which is valid, but there could still be other program content designed to reach them. She told a story about a punk music venue in Berkeley California that held only all-age concerts, and how she witnessed adults helping kids enjoy the mosh pit by lifting them onto their shoulders. "If you can run a public mosh pit for kids, you can probably solve the problem for linux.conf.au."

Finally, many other open communities operate with a strong "nothing about us without us" ethic. The phrase comes from the disability rights community, and it means that the community tries not to embark on projects ostensibly for disabled people unless there are people with disabilities involved. Otherwise, the results can easily fail to meet the needs of the target community.

An example of failing to exercise this approach happened after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. After the quake, a number of open source developers volunteered to write software to support the relief effort, but did so without partnering with the relief workers on the ground. The developers felt good about themselves — at least at first — but were ultimately disappointed because their efforts were not of much practical help. In addition to producing better outcomes, she said, the "nothing about us without us" approach has the added benefit of empowering people to build things for themselves, rather than building things for them.

Bayley's talk encompassed such a wide view of online and "open something" communities that at first it was hard to see much that connected them. But in the end, she is right: even if the reason that the other community congregates has nothing to do with the motives that drive open source software, these days we have a lot in common with anyone who uses the Internet to collaborate and to build. In her first few years of open source involvement, Bayley said, she frequently told people to switch over to Linux and open source software in tactless ways that had little impact. She hopes that she is more tactful today than she was at 18, she said, because open source has lessons to teach about freedom and community. Those lessons are valuable even for communities that have no interest in technology.

[The author would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for travel assistance to A Coruña for GUADEC.]