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.
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