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Open Source Methods Useful Way Beyond Software
Tom Steinberg writes "Former head of policy at the British Prime Minister's office, Geoff Mulgan, has co-authored a paper on uses of Open Source methods in arenas far beyond the normal Sourceforge universe. The paper is jointly written with Tom Steinberg, head of UK civic hacking fraternity mySociety and explores the use of open source methods to improve academic peer review, drafting of legislation and even media regulation."
Isn't the law already open source? Sure, there are maintainers, but it's possible to submit changes and get them approved.
I am thinking about open sourcing my sex life.
The open source method is not a unique concept. It's based on the concept of free and open collaboration, such as in most science disciplines!
To fork the government.
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One problem with an Open Source approach to modifying academic papers, is that the original author has a strong interest in maintaining sole authorship : for better or worse, their future appointments pretty much depend on publication history.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Because we all know that professors, lawyers, and, um, more lawyers, are all interested in getting ideas from outside sources.
With the exception of math/science/engineering academicians, none of the above have any real interest in improving the peer review process.
Yes it would could then work, and there is already a name for this system...
Marxism
For the Americans in the crowed conveniently leave out the fact that it is a form of communism when you mention it. Otherwise you will be stoned to death or moderated into oblivion as I am sure I will be
a lot like open source. And has been so for quite some time. I publish my results, stating what I have been doing and precisely how. If I can as many other people as possible to use my results and ideas, I will gain respect in the scientific community (a lot of references). Regarding the publication process, open archives such as arxiv have been gaining in popularity for a long time, see e.g. http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions
Open Source can work just fine with a "individualist/capitalist model". I think this is more a symptom of the industry than of human nature. Take a look at the culinary industry. There are two methods of operating:
1) Proprietary/Closed recipies. 2) Shared/Open recipies.
There are plenty of examples of companies and restaraunts making money using either method.
Some, like Coca Cola and KFC, choose to guard their recipies and keep them secret. However, with some good reverse engineering, you can attempt to recreate those products.
Some, like many non chain restaraunts, will openly share the recipies for their menu items. Their food and ingredients are not kept secret, and if you can take it home and make it better, feel free!
In the big picture, both sides of the industry realize that at it's core, food is all made from the same base ingredients, using the same basic production processes, and that in the end, success is delivered by the perceived value of the item purchased. Sharing or not sharing what goes into that item is a decision made by the manufacturer.
This reminds me of an old car commercial I saw (I think it was BMW). An older German engineer was being interviewed and he said "we developed and patented crumple zones" then some one else said but all cars have them now. His reply was "We never enforced the patent, some things are too important not to share,"
What inventions do slashdoters think are too important not to share?
Also, a tangent, I think an online wikpidia like open cooking database would be a cool project.
We are the Borg...
Humans are naturally selfish, yes, but this does not necessarily conflict with free software. Adam Smith pointed out that society is driven by selfishness but still creates large mutually-beneficial collaborations.
Free software is easily misunderstood, even by those who participate. Really, it's not about altruism at all.
When I explain free software to non-technical people I compare it to a sport. Think of a game, in which the players compete to design the most creative and useful inventions, using software as their medium. The players keep score in terms of "kudos" and the best players - the key people (almost always men) behind winning projects - have a very high status, much like stars in any field.
Software is an excellent medium because the costs of entry and of collaboration are so low. It enables a true meritocracy in which teams of any size can join together to attack problems of any size (and share kudos, if they succeed).
Free software is not altruistic. Every player knows that if they hit it big, they will have a valuable consultancy job, book deal, conference gigs, or other lucrative opportunity. The best players sublimate this motivation so they can focus on the "pure play" but that does not mean they don't have the motivation, ultimately. Try getting the best players to join your project and you start to see. It's very much "sports for smart people", and every player is very aware of their value.
The Game is becoming politically sensitive because it has a side-product, namely a cornucopia of increasingly valuable software. This flood of cheap software has started to revolutionise the world and launched some major proxy wars between established players, threatened by it, and those who understand what's happening and want to profit from it. You can almost slice the IT industry into two halves: those who hate the Game, and those on the side-lines, cheering and throwing roses. The amounts of money involved are huge - despite the 'free' label - and already influencing global politics.
Can the Game move into other areas? Yes, in two ways. First, it's always been there. Competitive intellectual effort is what has filled the libraries over the ages. Nothing new here except the scale and speed of the process, on the back of cheap global internet communications. Secondly, more and more traditional intellectual processes become software. Look at Wikipedia. The Game can be played with any process that can be held as "source code".
Free software/open source is not a "model" that can be applied elsewhere... but it is a paradigm (I hate that word, but it's accurate here) that changes the way professionals work. Stop being an employee, become a player. For businesses, sponsoring open source projects can be a cheaper and more reliable way to get essential software than traditional projects.
There is no conflict between free software and capitalism. Indeed, free software expresses the "liberal" ideal of free trade with minimal government intervention. People do things for self-interest but economics is not a zero-sum game. Free software is highly capitalistic, depending the individual's capital of ideas and skills.
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Meh. If there are 'commies' in America, they're more likely to read Slashdot. Slashdotters fit (as I remember) the general characteristics of communists: Privelidged, intelligent, well-meaning people with a slightly skewed and/or idealistic and/or innocent view of the way the world works.
I personally am a bit of a Marxist, and become more of one everytime I read about Enron or WorldCom or Microsoft or George W. Bush. I apologize if that offends your sense of Americanism. I also eat French Fries.
Point is, though, Marx would (IMHO) say that Europe is very much closer to what he thought was a logical society than Soviet Russia ever really was.... He definitely put a limitation on how much development a country needed to start down the road of socialism. (a ruined word)
America, well, I would say he'd call America approaching the bottom of its swing into totalitarianism of the wealthy. The New Yorker had a cartoon of one businessman talking to another saying, "This is the best time for consolidation since Feudalism," a few months ago.
The country I'd guess might make it to a supportable, non-militaristic, non-dictatorship, Socialist style state first would be India..... However, since I've always been idealistic and uneducated about an entire half of the world, I'm willing to say that I'm an idiot to expect that and know for sure that I'm avoiding educating myself on it for a reason.
Socialists were never stupid, just ignorant. Reading the literature of the time (Wright, Sinclair, Orwell, etc) shows some of the most interesting people of a generation captured by an ideal and disillusioned by a system....
Open Source Software leading to social systems changing is an interesting development in culture but hardly surprising considering that the cream of the privileged and intelligent in the Gen X and Y generations all were drawn to computers as youth, and OS is in some ways a more technically efficient way to run systems that everyone uses than what we use now.
Politics is changing because of our technology, just look at MoveOn and SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth. (commentary reserved here)
My little site.
no, if you actually read the page you'll see that the PDF is free and a printed version costs money to cover costs.
Open Source means open SOURCE CODE... come up with a different term for Open Ideas. Perhaps Open Ideas... Open Source when used for anything other than source code is a poor bastardization of the term.
I'm glad when the airplane was invented the term air didn't become so popular that cars, boats, televisions all had to have the word air in them.