Retrospective
Here's the article posted to the Berkman
site after my
Fellows' Luncheon presentation there on Tuesday.
As I mentioned at
the beginning of my comments at lunch, the
best way to simplify your message is to sleep with Doc Searls the
night before. please:
don't read too much into that declaration. I experienced a
small
epiphany last night while listening to
Doc's side of a conversation about the best way to characterize the
open source movement.
"Open Source Software is an unprecedented explosion of
productivity, with the demand side supplying itself," Doc
said.
We all know the reasons for the high quality of OpenSource
Software (OSS):
many eyes
squash all
bugs, people working in public seeking peer cred, etc. But I hadn't
thought about why
they're so productive. Then I realized it's because they never get
bogged down with all the meta conversations that drag down Managerial
Capitalism: "Who's paying for this?" "When do we get approval?" "Who
gets credit for this?" Yada, yada. I wasn't really listening to Doc's
conversation, but the "OSS"
acronym started rolling around in my
head. Open
Source Software. What about
an Open
Source Society? Only the
first exists, but we can imagine two OSS movements:
OSS1
= Open Source Software (a result, but also a movement)
OSS2
= Open Source Society (a dream that needs movement)
And they both need organizational tools. OSS1
has a perfect match of organizational needs and organizational tools
because the developers wrote those tools as they became a movement. SourceForge and Trac are great
examples. OSS1 wouldn't exist without
the community's organizational tools. But there's more. Individual OSS1
Developers use dozens of disparate tools and websites to
organize their work:
| NEED |
RESPONSE |
| Personal
soapbox |
Set
up a blog |
| Public
Index of their interests |
Blogroll |
| Media
hosting |
Youtube.com |
| Interest
profile - express their values |
Technorati
tags, etc. |
| Collaboration;
Action Requests |
Sourceforge;
Trac |
| Group
content and community-forming |
Drupal;
MySpace |
| Events
& invitations |
Meetup;
eVite; WebDav calendaring |
| Dynamic
news and thoughts |
RSS
aggregators |
But the developers of OSS2,
whose work we desperately need if we are to escape from the political
specialists who've hijacked governance, don't behave like that. Many of
the people who are best qualified to be producers of OSS2:
a new Open Source Society, are grandparents. Yep. They're society's
best
judge of the core values we should maintain, but they're also the least
technical among us. The OSS2
developers we seek to serve are ready and able to form groups and
describe their pain and hopes. Just like OSS1
developers, they need an organizing environment suitable to their
skills. But in their case, we need to provide a collaboration mall with
all the tools they might need as they
become more engaged. We who seek to serve these producers
of democracy must surround them with a suite of accessible
collaborative tools that make sense to them and encourage them to be as
productive in producing the imminent wave of people-produced government
as are the producers of OSS1 - Open
Source Software.
Dance with the one who brung ya'
All the organizing capabilities must be on
the activist site that wants to energize its base.
Unlike OSS1 developers, OSS2
people
won't go use some other widget to achieve your campaign's goals on your
behalf.
That simple truth is what kept the Dean campaign from
scaling past about 600,000 members. We at Open Resource Group feel that
the collaboration mall we're rolling out over the next four weeks is
the first campaign-in-a-box that's good enough to criticize. Better
yet, our suite of tools is flexible enough to quickly improve.
And, we'll be sprinkling the OSS1
dust on it so we get some of that productivity that Doc brags about.
Case in point: Our first volunteer developer showed up on Tuesday at
Berkman.
1:28:01 AM 
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