COPU 2009: Community Matters: Participation, Production, and Sponsorship

The below is the speech I will probably (you never know, and I tend to be parenthetical, digressive, and inordinately fond of extemporaneous speechifying) give at the China OSS Promotion Union’s (Copu) 2009 event to be held early next week in Beijing. Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Company, a strong supporter of and contributor to OpenOffice.org, has, via Copu, subsidized much of my trip and made possible what I believe will be very productive lectures, meetings, discussions. These include a lecture at Tsinghua University after the Copu speech, and quite probably other presentations and meetings with Chinese officials and groups interested in OpenOffice.org, Foss, and moving ahead fast.

(I always say and also believe that time rushes and that there is always some threat we must apprehend and deal with, be it particularly noxious FUD about the ODF, Foss, OOo, or, sometimes, me. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I believe that this year is really quite crucial. Our competitors are not sitting idly by but building blocks of argument to persuade their existing and possibly even new clients of the virtues of their application and its features. Not sure if they talk about their format any longer. And meanwhile, the rampant distribution of “pirated” software continues, eroding not only those with a vested interest in the shrinkwrapped commodities, but also us, the Foss community, for a pirated work is not “free” and does not grant the four freedoms elemental to Foss but is only a bastard version of freeware, only more pernicious, as it comes with the snarky satisfaction for the user that he’s somehow pulled a fast one on the Man. Dream on: In what Illich would have called the Shadow Economy of piracy, the only ones taken for a ride here are those who have priced their freedoms cheap.)




Community Matters: Participation, Production, and Sponsorship
Abstract
I argue that participatory communities such as those making up successful Free- and Open-Source communities ultimately depend upon the intangible enthusiasm of its adherents, and that that enthusiasm cannot be fabricated but only enabled by a supportive environment. I conclude by advocating an on-the-ground regionalism giving flesh to Web relations in community development, as regionalism quickly brings to local groups the flexibility that accommodates to social, cultural, political differences around the world.

Basics: What makes a community?
What makes for a free- and open-source software community? I mean a “participatory community,” one more or less autonomous in operation, and one in which its members crucially, are engaged in working together. And what makes such a participatory community (“community,” for short) is, not at all obvious. Assembling a group of developers and other contributors to work on code licensed under a suitable Foss license, and linking the contributors using sophisticated tools for communication and production does not automatically produce a community. We all know this. The people may all be working on the same thing, and even be communicating their work amongst themselves, but they do not necessarily form a Foss community.
Ask the people involved how they feel about the project they are working on and how they feel about each other and unless they see themselves as part of a community, as sharing an identity, however conditioned by their work, they will likely answer with degrees of indifference. For these, working outside the logic of a community, the work is nothing more than a job, even though the code that is produced is open. License enables community but does not determine it; other factors are required.
Absent the spirit of community, it is difficult to engage the interests of talented developers outside of stakeholder companies and difficult as well to motivate those in the stakeholders to exceed themselves and do brilliant work. The result is that for all the investment poured into a project by the stakeholders, the project is always in danger of dying by attrition and a fatal lack of interest by developers and ultimately users.
One can cite any number of examples of such projects. Indeed, it is the fate of the vast majority of Foss efforts. Code is put out there―on SourceForge, say, but also on many other equally good sites―and then neglected. I've read statistics indicating that something in excess of 90 percent of all project code on SourceForge is not only never downloaded but the project URLs are not even visited. For all practical purposes, there are no communities associated with these dying projects. (A useful thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of new businesses also fail, and if not for exactly the sam reasons, at least for similar ones: no market / community to sustain the endeavor.)
But why even bother to try to form a community? Why not just hire developers or programmers? A Foss community gives more value than the sum of its parts, or stakeholders' interests. One can certainly work with free code without a community, but once that investment is withdrawn, there is every reason to suspect that the code, the project (if there even is one), will simply sink into oblivion. Perhaps that fate is sometimes tolerable and even desired. But if so, it's not one that most developers, project managers and executives would want. For it seems like a waste of resources and effort.
Foss “communities” are therefore important in that, at the very least, they limit the risk of wasted resources while also furthering a culture of development and distribution that exceeds any one stakeholder's expectations. Foss communities keep projects alive and growing, and they also do something that is enormously difficult: they give a project an identity that is far more than the sum of the stakeholder parts and is in fact and autonomous, in that it is not a predicate of any one stakeholder. To put it in business terms, successful Foss communities coin a brand identity whose value can be very great indeed.
For many of you this is probably obvious; for others, coming from business or government, Foss communities persist in being somewhat mysterious. Regardless of your experience, and even if it is obvious to you that Foss communities matter, the question that I try to answer here may not be: How can one constitute a (sustainable) community?
Constituting a community
I don't have the foolproof answer to the question I ended with above, How can one constitute a (Foss) community. A few years ago, at a conference in Brussels, I laid out the governance and some technical provisions needed to structure a working Foss community. But even if one has the ideal governance model and code architecture (an extraordinarily important point, is architecture and its impact on governance and community―and for all that it's been amazingly neglected), one is still not guaranteed a living, sustainable community. Laws, as it were, do not make a people; you still need the spirit that binds them into a common identity. Without that spirit, you have only the letter of the law, not the spirit, and you have very nearly nothing. But as I stated above, you need more than just spirit.
Political infrastructure is important
Nevertheless, one still needs the political infrastructure in order to constitute a Foss community that has any chance of sustaining itself. Mere spirit won't do it in the long run. This means that there must be in place the mechanisms by which any member of the project can communicate to another and freely discuss project matters with the expectation that discussions have effect and are not just politely ignored. As well, it is generally important, though I no longer think it requisite, that members have a sense of “ownership” in the community or at least in what they are doing. It's a feature more important in some areas than others, and as Foss continues to move away from its origins in the West and find welcome homes in Asia and Africa and India, that model becomes less essential.
All the same, this is just another way of saying that what global participatory communities need is a structure of governance that can accommodate difference within the community itself. Governance means here the guidelines by which authority is coordinated. Given the global nature of, especially, large Foss projects, or even smaller ones (the Internet knows now boundaries), flexibility is crucial―but so are guidelines that ensure impartiality and nullify arbitrariness.
The point then is to avoid the tiresome burdens of bureaucracy while exploiting some of its more useful characteristics, such as the principle that rules are only legitimate when they apply without passion or interest but with impartial disinterestedness. (I confess: that's not a likely situation, but one can imagine.) A structure as I've hinted above―minimal and with a focus on communication and implicitly on merit, as demagoguery ―approaches that goal. It allows for a hierarchical flexibility, with some projects being more horizontal than others, which, for reasons usually having to do with stakeholder preference and code architecture (again, code architecture determines so much in the political arrangement of Foss communities!), are more vertical. Either mode can result in a sustainable Foss community, and neither a radically horizontal structure, as can be seen generally with Linux, or a more vertical one, as in Eclipse, will make or break a Foss community, though I'm sure adherents of each mode would argue otherwise. (There is no strict methodology for Foss; there are only results, just as there is no strict, single way in which people body themselves as a nation.)
But what does make the difference is subtler. It can be:

• the personality and charisma of a key member (say, the founder, as in the case of Linux―and of course Apple, though it is not exactly an open source company)
• the perceived value of the commodity produced, either because of its utility or something else less obvious, and the attendant enthusiasm of endusers and non-developer contributors for the product and project, even if they do not actually code. OpenOffice.org presents itself as an exemplary case. For these, OpenOffice.org speaks to what they want both as an application and project that they can be part of―and affect.
• extraneous considerations, such as the political and social context of the project, or elements such as the file format. OpenOffice.org can be used here again; and of course, that's because I'm partial to it.
• An Us vs. Them sense that can attach itself to the project. For many Foss projects, this is actually too easy a way to form a community. It's easy to attack large, hegemonic companies and to proclaim oneself the freedom-bearing saviour. It's much harder, however, to actually create something that does what is needed and that satisfies not just the Geeks among us but also the knowledge workers and others who, well, use the proprietary software on a daily basis because they must, as part of their job. (Incidentally, these workers don't care about the drama of freedom playing out on their desktops. They care about doing their work fast and painlessly.) At some point the rhetoric of defiance must meet the fact of ability, else there is only hot rhetoric or vaporware
• A supportive environment. This can take the shape of government support or cultural or educational or business support and enthusiasm. It can be subtle: recall that nearly all contemporary successful Foss projects saw their origins in universities, which gave the talented student the intellectual room and support to develop not only his ideas but to pass them on to others.

  • More broadly, It is vital to have an environment that nurtures young projects and, most importantly, gives developers the sense that what they and their companies may do with Foss is neither criminal nor foolish but at the least a sensible strategy. (It should be noted that this provision need not imply a background of wealth. I am not suggesting that the individual developer be supported by the state or by doing contract work that pays well. Those scenarios are possible for rather few polities. I am suggesting that Foss be considered as a business and production strategy on par with others.)

• Finally, and this is a necessity for any participatory community, the community must be able to identify itself. That is, it must be able to enunciate what it is about: what its goals are or its focus of work or whatever that can be shared and held as one's own by all who wish to join it.

There are no doubt other anchors to the formation of a Foss participatory community. (Students of political science can also probably identify elements from Max Weber and Benedict Anderson, to name but two. In many ways, a community is a community is a community, regardless of the actual nature of its work.)Authorizing community
Few projects, large or small, have so captivated the political and social imagination of so many in so many nations as OpenOffice.org. It has done so on the basis of its default file format, which it initiated, the OpenDocument Format, and because it holds open to every kind of contributor, not just developers, the possibility of going beyond the limits on imagination and productive activity imposed by proprietary software.
OpenOffice.org rolls into a single, vast community many of the points sketched above and it is indeed used by many from South Africa to Venezuela as a vehicle for freedom. (Foss, of course, and by extension, OpenOffice.org cannot be identified with a single political stance. That doesn't stop others from trying to do just that.)
But the emergence of OpenOffice.org in the Chinese field presents some interesting challenges, not least of which is the establishment of a participatory community or communities focused on OpenOffice.org (or, for that matter on other projects).
It's always a challenge to set up such a community―I hope I've made that clear. But the challenge here lies as much in the coordination with the international groups, as with the identification and articulation of authority.
The first problem―language--is well known and if not easily resolved, at least it's pretty clear what has to be done. The second problem is more difficult to resolve. Authority issues have always and will always shadow Foss projects. Actually, this is a good thing. It is another way of saying that one of the freedoms of Foss lies in the radical distribution of authority, the effect being that if a developer or group can claim the authority (and persuade their peers of it) to set up rival projects―forks--then they are free to do so. The distribution of autonomy is a central characteristic of Foss, regardless of governance structure. That is to say, more or less autonomous shadow projects―forks―go with the territory. All Foss projects can be forked and most have been; OpenOffice.org itself has countless small forks, and most are simply non-threatening.
They are non-threatening because they lack the resources of the primary project. The majority of developers don't want to change without compelling reasons, and stakeholders are not about to change either, without some compulsion. Each large project has its own momentum.
But that is not so when the project is small or when the social and cultural context do not have a history of autonomous participatory communities but do have a long history of strong communities enabled and sustained in part by an outside authority which has spoken them into being and therefore partly constituted them. In this case, persuading people that they can well, just go ahead and do it, doesn't work and is, as they say, a nonstarter. Under whose authority, they might ask?
Saying that everyone should be adopt a do-it-yourself approach and use his own authority gets us nowhere, and as a former scholar of US culture and its international effects, it's hardly a strategy I'd like to endorse. Besides, there are better solutions: one works within the cultural and social contexts.
I'd like then to propose guidelines for establishing local and regional communities that also communicate with their international organizations.

Proposal: Guidelines for establishing Foss communities
Elements:

• Authority comes with what you do. The international organization can testify to your work and identify and honor what you have done via public documents and statements. But this is only the recognition of work done, not work that could be done.

        Local communities share the global identity. Their identity is modulated by context but the basic message, the essential identity of the project is and must be the same. Otherwise, one has effectively fragmented the project and diluted it.        Communication with the international organization is essential. Communication can be via wiki, via forums, mail list, IRC, etc. The important point is to constantly remind others in the world not only of what you are doing here but of the context of your work. Otherwise, people will forget, as everyone is always more interested in his own work neighborhood than in some one else's. It is an obligation we all share to represent to others what we are doing in the larger global community.
        Foss licenses give freedom. But by the same token they complicate the field and introduce the serpent into the garden, as it were, of competition: for developer attention, if nothing else, but quite often for product market share. Squelching competing forks does not work, it only causes bad feelings and weakens the primary community. A sustainable community succeeds, however, not by coercion but by the appeal of its work, identity and members. Underpinning this appeal is the trust that both local contributors and the international community put in the legitimacy of the license. It's what enables the project and what I have elsewhere called the horizonless collaboration of Foss. Anything that challenges that legitimacy challenges the project itself.
These guidelines will not necessarily make for sustainable, living Foss communities. You will still need the other, more intangible elements, which can be summarized as an enthusiasm for the project and its mission that transcends any particular commercial claim. Otherwise, it's just a form of marketing, and that does not work to create a community. Enthusiasm, on the other hand, comes from those within the project and draws others in.

The Importance of Regionalism
I have been advocating that regional and local groups be formed to further the larger goals of the international project―and vice versa. The advantage of regional groups or organizations―local branches of the international―is that each local context has its own style of communication and community formation. Not all rely on the Internet and all use it and the social Web differently. Regional groups accommodate to local differences and promote the fast creation of networks that bring in new developers, new contributors, new users.
But no user, no developer will participate in an atmosphere of fear, doubt, uncertainty and in the absence of strong and usable support. Rhetoric is nice but actions are nicer. It's not about politics; it's about making things.

Eccles cake in Shoreditch

Just had an Eccles cake at St. John Bakery and Wine and it was extraordinary. I had never had one before, and that was surely my loss. Actually, the restaurant itself is fairly extraordinary.

CORRECTION: Trips: China, Japan

A mistaken belief led to this post of mine a short while ago:

“23 June: I fly to Tokyo via Beijing to meet with IPA representatives to discuss contributing to OpenOffice.org. Japan has long been a promise and a problem. Good-Day, Inc., of Osaka has contributed substntially for almost as long as OOo has been around. Indeed, much of the localization effort (to Japanese) is due to their team, and I thank Maeda-san and his company, along with Nakata Maho, for their unstintinting contributions to developing the code into a qualified appication suitable for enterprise use.”

In fact, as was very kindly pointed out to me, this is not the case: Good-Day, though a friend, has not in fact contributed in the way I wrongly described. As was pointed out to me:

“Localization efforts are not due to Good-Day, but tremendous contribution by
ja individuals and SUN K.K., who are not Good-Day's employee. Especially
khirano's coordination has been most noted one. Really surprising, that
such a individuals can do great coordination. Recently, Kubota-san, is taking
over his position, and now he's been doing very well. As far as I know,
no substantial contributions from Good-day, at least of localization.”

My regrets in posting such an error, and my apologies to the all concerned, especially to my friend Kazunari HIrano (Khirano), who has been such a strong contributor to the project and promoter of it. And I welcome Kubota-san!

Alas, errors like the one I made do occur, and I simply ask that when they do that they be pointed out to me. I’ll return the favour :-)

Thanks to those making OOo what it is and even better.

Topsy

My friend Rishab’s company, Topsy Labs, Inc., received the accolade of recognition by none other than the WSJ. See, http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/05/27/topsy-bets-on-real-time-twitter-search-with-15m-backing/

What is Topsy? I like the homepage description: “A search engine powered by tweets,” and its About page states,

“Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn't think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.

“Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about.

“Because of how Topsy works, Topsy can do things other search engines don't usually do. Topsy results are fresh, because they're based on what you're talking about right now. Or this week. Or the past month. Topsy has "trackback" pages for everything in its index, showing what everyone is saying about that thing. Conversations are about people, and Topsy has pages for every person it listens to - listing the things you've been talking about.”

Google tracks blogs but not comments and it does not, far as I know, track tweets. I’m sure it will. But for now, as the the zeitgeist is increasingly carried by tweets (sigh...), not to surf this wave is to come close to sinking in a sea of sharks. Oh, I doubt Google will disappear and expect it to evolve, to grow ever larger, and to do this fast. But I also have to wonder if it’s losing its agility, if it’s not increasingly beholden to legacy mechanisms of revenue generation. Sure, it’s famous for experimenting and issuing novelty items not enough people liked. (Though I confess I rather liked many.) it tries to be different from itself, to stay young. But it’s not about to sacrifice, and it can’t, the machine that’s made it so rich. Meanwhile, there is now Topsy. And it’s fun.

Foss, elections, politics

I’m debating submitting an abstract to the Web 2.0 conference in New York this November. My tentative title is some version of “Community Works or How Participatory Communities Are Changing The World.” Other options were along the lines of, “Politics and Community In the Age of Web 2.0” and so on. I guess what I’m interested in pursuing is the relation of community organization and community work as seen in Foss. I don’t see that much of a difference: in each case, people work on a joint endeavour, sharing their work, their results to build something that is new and frequently remarkable. It worked for Obama, whose deserved victory has made “community organizing” a more respected term, for he clearly won in great part because of his skill in organizing communities.

But what is a community here? A participatory community, the sort I find interesting and am writing about, is approximately rhizomatic in structure, meaning that like grass, mushrooms and so on, there is no single central node; there are rather many. In the case of something like the Obama’s campaign, there was of course a specific focus, and there were certainly marching orders, agenda items that the Obama community was asked to abide by. But if I understand correctly, there was still a lot of room for local independence, provided it fell within the campaign’s general focus, to educate and to get the vote out. Thus, there were lots of local parties and though there ware guidelines for these, the actual implementation was up to the hosts.

But why did they participate at all? Why so many, too? Well, for the same reason that Foss is taking the world by storm: because the classic hierarchical and top-down systems of authority and value frustrate people. It’s easy to sit there a consumer to what is given and to grumble at most but not to effectively question, content with the idea that you have no power at all, or just the power to complain. But no one really likes that, for it’s really not fun to be told again and again that fear and uselessness and boredom are your appointed lot and that you can only look upon the doings of those who can via the glass of the tv.

And it’s quite another to be given the chance to make a difference. A real difference. Like electing a president; like changing the course of history. Like creating something new that disrupts the very way we do things, make things, distribute things. Sure, not everyone wants this; tv can be fun, and participation is not for everyone. But say that only 1 percent do find it rewarding. That’s a lot of people. And they have friends.and family. These others will be influenced, will see that this is simply not bizarre behaviour; that being a citizen doesn’t mean you can buy the best things cheapest but that you can make something with others.

I tend to believe that bling consumerism is dead or at least dying. And that participatory communities are coming to the fore, rising. I’m by no means alone. It’s the zeitgeist and one that has been gaining momentum for the last couple of years. Foss is a profoundly important node, for ultimately it is not really about software but about a way of making and distributing what you make; and of working with those near and far, connected by a technology that is changing so fast the present is dulled by the future we can hardly wait to arrive. But we have to make sure that what we get allows us the freedom of participation. Otherwise, it’ll be so very last century.

Some cool links:

Knowledge Ecology Notes » Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay submit proposal on a WIPO Treaty for Reading Disabled Persons

(in my capacity in ODF campaigns, I’m increasingly involved in Accessibility issues. Accessibility is key; more on this later.)

And,

The Free Software Pact

Value : Notes on Foss 2009-05-25

India’s Nano is selling the top-end model, not the lower end. I’m not surprised. We see this pattern in other consumer goods, outside of India, too. The iPhone wins not just because it works well, but because it’s the (supposedly more costly) Apple brand. Quality, status, these two are rolled into the package represented by the brand. One is not judging the value of the object (and implicitly the value of one’s judgement) on price alone; that would be vulgar and counterproductive. Rather, one is implicitly making the claim that one can afford value, with the tacit hint that the cheaper things lack actual value.

In thin clients I’ve seen this; and in Foss, the same narrative. Because thin clients (a better term is needed!) are seen as the cheaper version of a packet laptop (or even leaner netbook, and in comparison to the iPhone--please, let’s not utter them in the same sentence), and because Foss is seen as the poor man’s costly proprietary software, neither can win: both lose by virtue of their perceived--not actual--value. It doesn’t matter that, say, OpenOffice.org is superior to proprietary equivalents in many areas, or that, I have no doubt, the Nano is more than adequate for the needs of the typical driver in India and elsewhere. The perceived value of these and their kind is that they are, in a word, “cheap.”

(Digression 1: English has that wonderful word; French does not--it’s bon marché, as if you got a good bargain--and in Spanish, it’s barato, again, hinting at a good bargain. English reduces the logic to “cheap,” a term that implies value as good as the price and hints that you could have done so much better, had you only not been such a miser and so cheap. We are, in English, so often what we buy. I’d be interested to learn what other languages say about their culture of the marketplace, and if they have single, pithy words like, “cheap.”)

(Digression 2: I’m hardly discounting the appeal of the inexpensive and even cheap, which when spun right works. EBay has made billions by emphasizing value you can afford; and I live a long block away by the unbelievably gaudy Honest Ed’s, which loudly proclaims itself as selling cheap things--but that is to say, good deals. Cheap, when spun right, sells. No one wants to be taken for a fool, no matter how much you can afford it.)

So, what we’ve done with OpenOffice.org is to focus on other elements: it’s quality, which is to say, it’s real value, using, whenever possible, actual examples. I started doing this a couple of years ago, at a large conference, when I emphasized that the reason I use OOo is not because it’s free--cheap--but because it gives freedom; not because it does only what I need, but because I can add to it, modify it, make it mine in a way i cannot with proprietary software. I use Firefox, I explained, not because it is cheap and I didn’t have to pay anything for it. All browsers (with a couple of interesting exceptions) are like that: free. Rather, I use it because it does things Safari cannot; and because it gives me freedoms closed source software, however open the APIs may be, does not. I use it, in short, because it is a better commodity and it is a commodity that transcends its status as merely a thing lying there with the trace of its making inaccessible.

Like all Foss, Firefox and OpenOffice.org proclaim their community and that community is accessible.

Links 2009-05-24

I actually do have a lot of work to do, and am doing it, but interspersed with the duty writing and reading there’s this:

The SourceForge Community Choice Awards. Nominate your favourite now. Last year, OpenOffice.org won. (Embarrassingly, my friend Rishab and I had taken the wrong subway train, so missed the event; argh.)

Vote now to announce to the world that OOo is really the best community work! (I wonder how things would look if a sizeable fraction of OOo’s estimated 50 or 100 or 150 million users voted.... and I also wonder just how international the effort and attention to it is.... but we can try to make it global. Nominate that favourite now.)

Trips: China, Japan

9 June sees us fly to London, where Tina will do research on India and Victorian England. A lot of Victorian Indian material is sequestered in the British libraries/museums; not a surprise. We'll probably still make a trip to India for more research, esp. in Jaipur. But for now, it's London, and this is good: I love London. While there, we'll be seeing the new production of Phèdre with Helen Mirren, and probably a lot of other shows. I just wish it were all cheaper. For us poverly Canadians, the pound weighs nearly twice our loonie, so going out for, say, pizza, means that that humble pie has suddenly transformed itself into a lordly dish. Good thing about the current recession, though: things are litte brighter for the willing traveller, and our hotel, the Hoxton, in Shoreditch, is très cool and even better than that, given the rates we were able to get.

23 June: I fly to Tokyo via Beijing to meet with IPA representatives to discuss contributing to OpenOffice.org. Japan has long been a promise and a problem. Good-Day, Inc., of Osaka has contributed substntially for almost as long as OOo has been around. Indeed, much of the localization effort (to Japanese) is due to their team, and I thank Maeda-san and his company, along with Nakata Maho, for their unstintinting contributions to developing the code into a qualified appication suitable for enterprise use.

But Good-Day is fairly alone in this endeavour. To be sure, there are many individuals and small groups who have made and who make OOo a player in Japan. But there are not enough, and that's a shame. It's a shame because the alternative--proprietary licensed material--places public and private corporations in a terrible bind of dependng their own quotidian activity on the health and interest of a very remote company. Their choice, I suppose. But is it of the people who elected the representatives to government? I wonder. I also wonder whether the recession--which, incidentally, has highlighted the economic consequences of dependency like no other lesson could--will change the view on forging sustainable and local works, such as OpenOffice.org in Japanese, for the Japanese market, supported by Japanese companies, and so on. To me, the choice seems plain. And if there are deficiencies in OOo for the market, then let's work on them. I would guess that it would be cheaper to resolve these than continue to pay, for god knows how long, the effective tax levied by proprietary companies for code that is as essential as ink and paper to the daily running of civil life.

So, I am optimistic about this meeting and hope that it opens the door to many others, with IPA, other government groups, and with more Japanese companies, some of them already deploying OOo and profiting from it. But these I shall not name here do not contribute back to the project. They thus weaken it.

China, and in particular Redflag 2000, have strongly supported OOo development. Indeed, the government (or at least a facet of it) has gone on record endorsing and pushing Foss. Redflag, which hosted the superb OOoCon last November in Beijing, where the company is located, has placed a lot of developers on the task of developing the code for the market. But, it too, is somewhat alone, an odd point, given the situation, but one I expect will change in the very near future. Of course, investing in OOo or any large Foss project, is a lot like (read: identitical to) investing in a company: you don't do it unless you have some assurance of its economic and intellectual viability. Judding Foss projects has proved notoriously difficult in this regard. What ruler do you use? Hits per page? Downloads? Bugfixes? All are suspect, as none is nicely equivalent to the usual business metrics, which can be translated to: Money in hand. So it sounds good--but that's not enough---to say that OOo has been downloaded about 200M times and that tens of millions use it and some even on a daily basis. Show me not the code but the money here, for the question inevitably comes down to, How do you survive, as a project?

Of course, the answer to that is easy, and oddly has nothing to do with altruism. It has rather everything to do with self intererst and the calculus of markets and enterprise politics. And it has to do with the interest value of the shown code to individuals and groups. OOo, as I realized on my first day back in October 2000, is immensely interesting and potentially disruptive in a way few other applications are or can be. For it is a set of tools that give users and developers the wherewithal to produce a range of documents, not just "office" ones, and the open standard(s) it uses further grant an open window to the range of Web apps that other suites cannot take advantage of.

But back to China. The immediate reason for the trip is COPU's annual event, this year in Beijing at the end of June. The event is both theatrical and, in part for that reason, qutie important. As well, it gives us participants a chance to meet ex camera with those we would probably miss. And that alone is worth the ticket.

Notes on informatic autonomy, architecture, Foss, 2009-05-23

I have to confess I’ve become an economics and political science junkie. Obviously, a lot of it has been prompted by the set of crises we are globally facing now: economic, social, political, ecological...and there is no sharp boundary among them: thus we defeat a long Western tradition of thought that distinguishes A from B from C and envisions the social as distinct from, say, the ecological, and so on.

(To be sure, there have always been efforts to braid the threads, and many are represent quite well-known efforts, and arguably any ideological account always does this, as it strives to narrativize the seeming incidental as the consequence of a primary cause, however complex. But I refer less to early ideological efforts--not sure if there are any now, and I certainly don’t hold by any--nor far more sophisticated Foucautian or New Historicist accounts as to the daily politico-economic speech of imagining boundaries around the social, political, ecological, economic, etc., as if what happens in one does not necessarily affect the other, and the processes of A work more or less in isolation from those of B and of C and so on. A straw man, yes, no one is so simplistic, I hope, but showing surprising life.)

So, how does this relate to OpenOffice.org? (For I feel the compulsion to speak of OOo in a blog whose general title is “OOo-speak.”). I guess I could escape that and say that given the above, all would relate to it :-). But here’s a more particular way.

Foss is, I’ve been arguing, sustainable, in that it (ideally) does not depend for its sustenance on the injection of cash or resources from afar but rather develops local business, academic, financial ecosystems. Obviously, not all Foss projects do this and in fact most probably do not. Nevertheless, that is the goal--what I and others have also called “informatic autonomy”--and it’s a worthy one. It also differs from “independence,” in that I see no real virtue in being fully independent and in fact see that as a fetish and an illusion. No one and no thing is independent, we--individuals, groups, nations--all interdependent, like it or not. To imagine otherwise is dangerously foolish.

Lacking informatic autonomy, and thus a sustainable program of development and distribution, means that the polity is determined by the interests of others. Sometimes this does not matter, a there might be happy agreement over the determinations. But say that a disagreement occurs or that a calamity of one sort or another changes the balance.

But how to calculate the balance between international efforts and local ones? It’s not a question of “should” but of “how,” for what we’ve seen is that insularity (a form of independence) can’t work now, at least not if the issue in question has national effect, as a lot of Foss does. Of course, the answer lies in the vary nature of Foss, which is famously structured as a distributed and geographically unspecified “community.” And in conceiving that structure, or rhizome, to be more accurately descriptive, a modularity is also imagined, so that a contributor working on one element or module can do so more or less independently, and it is only when finally compiled and the (chosen) modules integrated that the assemblage can assert its identity as a specific thing, a whole, fully articulated by the efforts of the locally autonomous groups who work under the banner of a license that grants them what I’ve elsewhere called horizonless collaboration.

But what happens when modularity is not present? How then is the local autonomy and for that matter, the articulation of effort to produce the whole? (And with that tease, I’ll leave off this entry and go on a bike ride while it’s still light and unrainy ouside. A glorious spring here in Toronto--we’ve moved from the yellow season of early spring to the lilac, and even those are fading in favour of the iris.)

Notes, links 2009-05-19

Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe it: a lot of my mail (IMAP) with my work server chose to vanish. The cause of this remains a little mysterious, but it’s possible it was because I was using Thunderbird and probably had not set it right; or perhaps it was b/c I was using Apple’s Mail.app, which has had problems accessing and downloading copies of messages from the old work server. Either way, a stupefying period of hours fixing things wasted.

Links: One of my favourite sites for Foss news is Free Software in Latin America. It complements Solar, which is mainly focused on Argentina, and other sites. For anglophone readers, there is some relief: FSLA is in English.

But the best part of FSLA is that the articles it includes are very often very interesting. See, for example, this: Argentine Professor Attacked for Sharing Philosophy Classics Online. The issue is one of who controls the copyright of what should normally be considered public domain material but is not here, as the professor is evidently distributing material that the French publishing house Les Editions du Minuit, claims ownership over.

The article points out that Argentina, like many other countries, must import foundational texts at enormous expense to all. it would thus seem as a no-brainer to take things online and distribute not costly paper but cheap electrons. But cost for me or you is usually another way of saying profit for them. And therein lies the problem that Foss and Open Access face: the change in economic practices.

Clearly, it is to the social good to make as available as possible works generally deemed to be not only important but foundational. Arguably, the government or whatever agency could pay the publisher and then distribute the properly licensed work. But say the government doesn’t or cannot do that. Or say that the actual cost is so steep that it could more properly be called extortion. Piracy is thus inadvertently encouraged, as it is very unlikely that the threat of punishment by remote agents will dissuade many; historically, it has not. Thus, and obviously, this is not a purely particular issue but a general one, a better solution lies in moving away from copyright policies that really only made sense before the Internet and before the distribution of copied documents was so easy.

Notes, Links, 2009-02-2

The action by the UK to promote open source published 24 February is of course terrific news and should be hailed as such. I hope it will, along with similar other European acts, stimulate the North American governments to also promote open source, open standards, and thus directly and indirectly innovation and economic growth here. Certainly, we need it. Note--the policy directive issued by the government is not a dismissal of proprietary software, and it is not a celebration of the freedoms granted by Foss. It is rather a statement about giving taxpayers the best value for their taxes:

“While we have always respected the long-held beliefs of those who think that governments should favour Open Source on principle, we have always taken the view that the main test should be what is best value for the taxpayer.

“Over the past five years many government departments have shown that Open Source can be best for the taxpayer – in our web services, in the NHS and in other vital public services.”

Why then the directive now? Because “we need to increase the pace,” as the innovation, the dialog between government users and the IT industry, needs to be allowed free rein, and not the essentially furtive and sporadic efforts that have preceded this directive--and which characterize government procurement practices elsewhere.

Yet there is good news emerging: Canada put out a Request For Information to which numerous companies replied, including Sun. (I helped draft the response, along with Bruno S.; Simon P. provided the logical frame.) And late last month, I gave a two-hour discussion on Foss and policy to the Ontario government. All of which is to say that in Canada there is movement in the right direction--a movement I fully expect to see grow. Why? proprietary software costs taxpayers money--upfront, down the road, in the end.

Of course, we all expect the usual arguments, and I’ve already noted harbingers of them: that there are hidden costs to Foss, and that these include such things as migration of documents, files, people; and also training and certification costs, and then the biggest fear of all, the by and large bogus problem of using software that may have license issues. In the case of OpenOffice.org (and probably most other significant software the government is likely to consider) that’s a false fear.

But that won’t stop some. In Microsoft’s suit against the in-car navigation device maker TomTom for patent infringement, even though the suit is ostensibly and ostentatiously not against Foss, (“Open source software is not the focal point of this action.”), the environment Foss is clearly affected. For whatever the merits of this suit (and TomTom is hardly quiescent here) this is very close to the sort of fear frightens governments and corporations away from Foss: That there is a tiger lurking in the open source commons.

It shouldn’t. But it should provoke us to ensure that our code is clean and that any code that we expect others to build on and distribute must be have an unimpeachable pedigree. And that goes for proprietary software, too. Or does anyone really think that the mélange of doubt can only apply to works licensed under Foss copyrights? So let’s speculate that the end result of this sabre rattling is ultimately to endorse a copyright regime that is characterized not by FUD but by transparency, of license and code, and backed not by market-driven entities but by responsible community organizations and companies--those that understand where innovation lies and how to promote it, so as to foster a sustainable present and future. We certainly need it.

Notes 25 Feb. 2009

With some alarm I note I have not made an entry since prior to OOoCon, and that was back in November. (A brief entry on that is coming.) No excuse but work and other, distracting things. Coming at the end of the year--or close to it--and then that end of year being such a series of economic crises and political triumphs, it was easy to lose sight of the obligation to engage in conversation with the communities of which I’m a member. (I have to thank my friend Sophie G., for prompting me to write, to reveal what I’ve been doing. It’s so easy to ensconce oneself in other work, and then to persuade oneself that public relation is not necessary, as Isn’t what you are doing on the community’s behalf?)

But I have not been idle. My focus of late has been on regional efforts, in particular, Canada and the province where I live, Ontario. As well, I’ve been trying to get OpenOffice.org in more colleges and universities and--this is the more interesting point--developed more by students at those places. The key, as I’ve long believed and written on before, is to have Foss and not just OOo, become part of the curriculum, the way, say, any other (computer) language is taught, as a model, as the frame for a workspace, as a vehicle for engaging in real open source communities. But this clarifies the issue: teaching Foss, and OOo, is at least a dual effort: on the one hand, one must teach the code, and on the other, the process of open-source collaboration. For a student, the latter part is arguably the more problematic part, as school shields her from harsh scrutiny. Consider it a kind of gestational space, where all sorts of vulnerabilities can be revealed and worked on, and to expose the student then to the outside world is to betray the implied premise and promise of college.

But, as I’ve equally argued, the options are really not so Manichean: one can structure classwork to retain that membrane while also working with Foss groups. Indeed, students do this all the time, when they work in science labs and engage in actual, serious and publishable work. And in colleges such as Seneca, we see the success of a method like this applied to Foss instruction, including OOo.

I spoke on education and also another key issue, regional groups, at OOoCon, and I’ll discuss that shortly. But for now, at the end of last month I delivered a guest lecture at the newly inaugurated Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Buffalo. The lecture was on “open source” but it was for me really an examination of the cultural and political, not to mention technological, change that has taken place more or less globally in the last year, and can be summarized as the end of the Reagan Era and the Dawn of the Obama Era, though I hesitate to credit Obama, at this point, with his weak economic policies, as branding an era. But I’ll give him benefit of a doubt. Regardless, the shift has been from an exit from neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologies to something that is still taking shape but which, I should hope, and will certainly try to achieve, a political frame that is more just and sustainable and attends to what people are doing where they live every day. Foss is crucial here, as it diverges from neo-liberal imposition of products and the means of creating them and opens the market to those things made at home, for the home market.

It goes beyond that, however. Foss, to me, also implies a weakening of the consumer/producer dyad that over the last century has configured the way people think of themselves, their communities, their possibilities. (And the dyad has only been around for about a century, I’d guess, or since the rise of the department store and urban consumerism--in the city, you are generally if not axiomatically a consumer of goods produced elsewhere; less so on the farm--and the department store comes into being in the latter half of the 19th century, towards the end.) I went to college at Berkeley, and lived in the student co-ops, where we all had to do 5 hours of work a week to keep the system running. (Boast: I was the youngest elected USCA Board Member, at 18, and for year the worshift manager--I organized the work schedule and then told people how to do the jobs I’d assigned them: sort of like what I do now....) The Co-Op was “ours”; we were responsible for its upkeep, its clealiness, its food: no one else. This bred responsibility. It fostered ambition; it developed community skills; and it made, I honestly believe, for better citizens. (Or, at least, that was the idea; there were, as with all other Rochdale-inspired cooperatives, problems with drugs, and disruptive anarchic types. But I tend to think that had more to do with the times (late 70s) and the inexperience of framing governance, than with the idea of the cooperative itself, which I still believe in. (Incidentally, turns out that Toronto had, around the same time, the largest and most successful coop, not far from where I live now, on Bloor Street. Drugs, some violence, dissolution hit it, and it ended. Delany, in Dhalgren, got it right, when he imagined the beautifully violent apotheosis and also the end, of the 60s in Bellona, and of the 70s in Triton: isolated from the world, the centre cannot hold and things fall apart, in violence and narcissism.)

But back to the point: Foss weakens the impermeability of the membrane separating producers from consumers by giving the tools of production to every user and by making production itself not simply an obligation, a job, but an act of community building: an act of being yourself. This theme ended up being the dominant one in my lecture, and I characterized it by asserting that the era of Paris Hilton, of Bling, was dead, over with. The new era, the one figured by Obama, has yet to earn its name. But it is roughly one of sustainability and social responsibility, but equally of community. Being yourself no longer implies the market; it implies now or will, community. The difference lies in effects: as a consumer the consequences of what I do when I buy something are obscure; as a member of a community, that obscurantism is impossible, and what I do affects me, too.