Education/Open Source Workshop

Free Software: Software for Social Justice

Twenty years ago many people predicted software would increasingly control our lives. Today it's true. The free software movement is about having the right to observe and participate in the software that controls our lives.

Some of the basic ideas of free software are the right to modify and redistribute software. "Free" refers to these freedoms, rather than the cost of the software.

As an example voting in the states is now done with machines by Diebold running closed source software. Consequently there's no way for the public to observe the software and verify that it doesn't add republican votes, etc.

As another example if everyone uses software, they should all have a say in how it works. Usually however we're forced to use software which the autocratic elite and the development team get to decide how works.

Technically Facilitated Collaboration

• Historically, projects have been less complex and people more focussed: Someone spent an entire lifetime carving a staircase out of a single tree trunk. As the size and complexity of projects increases, and the volume of prior knowledge in the project's context increases, the number of people needed to work together on a project increases. As does the complexity of their communication and collaboration. So we have more people exchanging more information about a project than ever before, enabling very advanced projects, such as going to the moon, Linux, other better examples? But the collaboration has overhead. So discovering new social and technical processes for highly parallel, highly collaborative work is key.
• What does this have to say about diversity? I have some material on privileged, dominant groups. Is increased collaboration anti-oppressive or does it favor dominant social norms? On the one hand, the need and capacity for more participation is involving people from around the world. However if the tools or processes are designed by and for dominant social groups like straight, white, North American men, they're reinforcing dominant norms.
• Tools for collaboration does generally improve openness and fight hierarchy. By delegating management to a tool or process, it removes people from positions of management and gives equal access and opportunity to participate and contribute. Simple tools create a horizontal structure. On the other hand, the more technical the tools or process, the more time is needed to get up to speed, creates a different form of hierarchy where power is wielded by those with knowledge, skill or access.

In Open Source

• Open source it is sometimes hard to create institutional memory. It's volunteer, small contributions are often made by many people, there is high turnover. Hence tools to facilitate collaboration are key.
• The development of these tools and processes itself requires highly parallel, highly collaborative work. Collaborative technology is highly adopted in technical fields. Examples include bug tracking systems which let you search, sort and assign hundreds, even millions of bugs or issues. This is a big improvement over having someone responsible for managing and delegating issues, or an un-searchable list, or everyone maintaining their own, overlapping list of bugs.
• Wiki is used extensively in open source to manage documentation because it can be updated as soon as outdated information is identified. In this way it reduces the overhead of collaboration. Another principle of Wiki is version control instead of access control. Instead of requiring contributors to request and be granted access from an administrator, it encourages everyone to contribute and tracks revisions so a contributor can't delete any information and mistakes are easily reverted. If mistakes are more easily reverted than created, a contribution is at least as good as the previous version. A final aspect of Wiki is attribution. In face to face collaboration, our contributions are attributed to ourselves and positively or negatively affect our reputation. Contribution may become more or less difficult in future, relative to our reputation. Downsides of this are contributions may be treated personally, contributors may feel personal ownership of aspects of a collaborative project. When we work together but not face to face, even offline but at different times, we loose attribution and people may avoid responsibility, good or bad, for their contribution. Example: Someone anonymously making a renovation to the housing Coop. Wiki encourages contributions to be attributed to a username and for people to invest in the positive reputation of their username. How is this related to meritocracy?

In Activism

• Activism faces many of the same issues as open source development: Volunteer, high turnover, hard to create institutional memory. Well funded activism with abundant resources is rare, so activist projects often lack physical space, materials and support staff that help collaboration in other organizations.
• Activism has less adoption of technical tools than technical projects. Exceptions include Free Geek, though it is a technical activist group.

In Enterprises

• Technically facilitated collaboration is increasingly important even with the resources available in enterprises. Enterprises are increasingly concerned about an aging workforce and loosing "social capital"

Open Standards

• One example of the overhead of collaboration is the web. The web is a common denominator, an Open Standard. There's some material on Tim Berners-Lee and open standards and their contribution to the success of the internet.
• However the web has considerable overhead compared to other modes of communication: News groups and email. Modern web browsers have exorbitant system requirements. The proliferation of non-interoperable social networking sites. Editing encyclopedia entries with the facilities of a browser's form field data entry.
• Hopefully more open standards evolve to allow web applications and desktop applications to interoperate: CalDAV so Evolution, Sunbird, iCal, Exchange, Google Calendar, Emacs calendar mode work together. WebDAV to edit MediaWiki articles with a desktop word processor. An open standard for realtime collaborative editing, so SubEthaEdit, Gobby, Google Docs and maybe in the future MediaWiki could work together.
• OpenID is an interesting open standard for attribution, one of the keys to collaborative work. It will be interesting to see how a global identity system fosters new reputation systems. One problem with OpenID is it's web-centric. Previous open identity and attribution systems exist, like OpenPGP.

TODO

• How does the production of "belonging" in the sense of belonging to a group influence collaboration? Example: Emails to the Ubuntu project from SABDFL, Mark Shuttleworth. Gang colors or badges.
• How do Meritocracy and mind share affect collaboration and anti-oppression?