I attended this year’s Free Software and Opensource Software Symposium at Seneca College this year. As it was last year, it was an engaging event to meet with some major actors in the open source field. Something didn’t set well with me this time around that perhaps didn’t perturb me quite as much last year.
It is something very dangerous about the open source community - dangerous in the sense of eroding moral legitimacy of a social movement that is foremost about improving the lives of others. I’ve commented on it before and it’s a struggle I deal with every day of my academic and professional life.
How does what I do and what I think about actively improve the lives the people who need it the most?
This is not a question that was addressed in my experience with the conference. Granted I only saw at most a third of what was on offer - but my intuition tells me this wasn’t central to the discussions being had.
When I say the “people who need it the most” I’m speaking about as inclusively as one can. I typically think of Africa and parts of Asia when I hear and say it but I don’t impose this constraint formally - the impoverished, oppressed, threatened or unsecured the world over are included.
What I heard the most of at the conference, at least with respect to non-technical considerations, were questions of conversion or recruitment, particularly within groups of which we were already members. “How do we make people like us, even more like us?” Was the question couched in various forms of address - particularly in the Teaching Open Source panels which dominated my Day One.
For me, this is the wrong question and it’s the wrong question for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it’s not one we need to answer - it’s answering itself. Open source is here to stay and its growing, it’s not a fledgling nascent idea that needs to be protected - it’s heavily entrenched in the industrial system and the fate of some of the largest corporations are enmeshed with the fate of open technology.
Secondly, it’s the wrong question because it’s expensive in its implications. The resources required to convince institutions of anything are generally not with the effort - especially when there’s a great many other more feasible opportunities for growth.
Thirdly, it’s the wrong question because, in my opinion, it’s pedantic and self-indulgent. The open source community is arguably the greatest well-spring of navel gazing pontification available on the internet - the very existence of my blog and others like it contributes to it. We were discussing the defense of what is, in essence, a morally defensible luxury - access to source code is not a right or a requirement; it’s a liberty afforded to us by our production capacity. So, for me, open source community members need to work doubly hard to justify their existence in the face of other movements - there’s a finite attention span, finite resource pool and finite quantity of political capital; I will not abide a world where access to some C++ is an impediment to Women’s Shelters.
It may not appear that would be possible at first glance but it’s entirely justifiable and necessary to question the purpose of showing up at FSOSS - of spending my nights or afternoons coding Drupal or WordPress or Symfony instead of volunteering at a shelter or writing code for software used by Doctor’s Without Borders (which uses proprietary software).
Yet none of this came up - the greater social responsibility discussion was omitted or its conclusions assumed. When explaining this to people outside the OS community the merit of such a venture seems dubious - to outsiders it doesn’t appear as intelligent, engaged people coming together to discuss their community, which it is, it instead appears as a self-congratulatory shin-dig for overwealthy nerds.
Until the community engages the globe with the same seriousness and with the cultural-integration that say, the medical community has or the legal community has - it won’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
If I were to do a talk at FSOSS - it would be centered around providing examples and motivation for the people in attendance to engage with issues that actually matter. As a former tech person, I know how difficult it is to find a place to go with these issues - one feels like a fish out of water when they step outside the tech world and suddenly nobody knows or cares about what you spend most of your life doing.
David Crow talked about designing interfaces that matter, in effect. He spoke about Microsoft Surface and the paradigm shift amongst UX people in light of the new interaction capacity of devices. The spirit of his talk was right on the money and was incredibly important but I think it went over the heads of most in attendance. Just as we must design interfaces that matter to the people who use the software we must make software that matters to the most underserved users we can identify.
Only then can software developers look a civil-engineer or trauma-surgeon in the eye and say that what we do matters to people, and only then can the collective disdain for proprietary software vendors be legitimate.