Can Open Source Further Enable Societal Freedom?
I’ve learned enough about the origins and early days of the internet, read enough about the principles of a free internet, to make me a firm believer in and supporter of open source. The difficulty, of course, is finding time to learn to use it.
As long as the internet remains free, it provides a means of communication, connection and enablement of free speech as well as free enterprise. As long as the majority of its users are free individuals, moreover, they will have the ability to use their freedom to protect it. In the early days of the net, and even fairly recently, this was understood and appreciated by most people who spent time online, but is that still the case?
Of the billion people online today, what percentage knows how to build and operate all the tools they’re using? 2%? 5%? That’s high, but the exact number isn’t important. What is important is that for the overwhelming majority, its ability to understand and become fully empowered by this medium is severely limited.
It is mostly the creations of profit driven corporations that have enabled the size of this population, and, as far as I can see, it is their agendas which continue to drive both adoption by users and most new development.
This is very much in the usual tradition of all development in modern history, industrial and technological, for it takes highly knowledgeable specialists to create new marvels of engineering or technology, and those specialists, by their nature, are employed by the highest bidders, who are invariably private and government interests. The resources of these large entities enable them to pay the largest salaries to brilliant programmers and developers. What is most likely to be developed, therefore, will not enable the individual or benefit society specifically, except through by-products, and, perhaps, or perhaps not, in terms of long term change.
Granted, there are as many new small communities, including not-for-profit, being built daily as there are social media apps, but the majority of these are created on specialized and limited platforms created by small entrepreneurial businesses for that purpose alone. Citizens for Clean Water in XXX City would exist whether they had an internet based community portal or not.
There is a fair sized contingent of socially responsible developers who contribute online tools for individuals and communities, and it has become the norm to offer a basic free version together with paid versions accompanied by more advanced features. These developers are running small business, which may or may not be profitable, but they are essentially a more sophisticated version of the website developer who built a portal for your small chain of local stores, and most are producing a limited community version of a narrow slice of enterprise software without a commerce component.
For any non-tech community or group of any size and complexity, however, the options to develop organically online are almost non-existent. This, I fear, is a factor which marginalizes the free internet to the extent that it may eventually exist only on the fringes, with the mainstream belonging to large powerful entities.
Perversely, it seems that the very developers who pay the most attention to their targeted consumers adhere to the principle that internet use should be mindless and painless, and as a result are directly contributing to disenfranchising the vast majority. We should be learning what we can do and invent ourselves here rather than waiting to be entertained and served, but even those of us actively desiring these opportunities find more obstacles than options to the pursuit of this desire.
eBay, in its early days and before it became a ‘big business’, was such an opportunity to a limited extent. Millions of ordinary, non-tech people joined in, bringing to the ongoing event a kaleidoscope of interests and knowledge, connecting as sellers and collectors, forming into natural communities, creating sole proprietor businesses, and much more. Many gained some technical knowledge, motivated by their new online activities. eBay was originally a platform, not a programming platform such as .net, but a human platform where not just the content but some of the activities were as much defined by individuals and groups as by the developers of the site, who followed as much as they led.
What online site is doing that today? Blogging platforms? Social media sites? The ‘platforms’ for people and their chosen activities are becoming so sophisticated as developers continually try to offer a better targeted product that few users will ever do more than use the basic tools initially provided. This reality is an argument for open source in itself, except that the complexity of building anything to meet and advance current uses and expectations is and will remain too big of a learning curve away from the vast majority of users.
There are any number of projects which could truly enable the majority of users more fully, but there aren’t any that I’m aware of which are a human platform (such as eBay was) as well as a programming platform, where the form and function is being developed in tandem with user activity. Releasing a social app, early and often, isn’t the same thing. The full human platform requires a range of human activity that includes wide varieties of both social and commercial enablement for individuals and groups. Personal and societal balance requires both. We all have to make a living as well as dream, play, and socialize, and we further become a rich and thriving society by contributing to the public trust as well as by taking responsibility for our economic roles.
Can such human platforms really be built? Only if tech and non-tech communities collaborate.
Can that happen? What say you?
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later…
Open Peer-to-Peer Design quoting Linus Torvalds:
“I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart - nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.”
