This is as it should be....

Greetings from the lovely city of Brussels. I love FOSDEM. If I have my way, this conference will be the one I attend every year from here on out, even if I'm unable to make it to any others.

As with all conferences I attend, I'm mostly hitting the hallway track. Between press interviews, meetings and catching up with old friends, there just isn't much time to attend sessions. Ah well, such is life.

I did, however, manage to get one talk in today - Mark Surman's keynote presentation on the future of openness. From discussing the history of browser development to citing examples like Wikipedia and Flickr's enormous collection of Creative Commons licensed photo content, Mark made a compelling argument that we have, in many ways, already achieved a fundamental social paradigm shift towards openness and freedom; users now enjoy - and can come to expect - a world in which free and open knowledge and culture are an option. The next question becomes how to make these choices the default rather than successful anomalies which have proved to a wider world that the principles the FLOSS community embraces are applicable to issues vastly beyond source code.

As FLOSS has become mainstream and is seen as a commercially viable procurement option and/or business model, those outside of this realm who wish to flatten hierarchical social structures will continue to look to models generated in the FLOSS world as templates for reorganizing traditional/institutional power structures and modes of interaction. We already are the change we wish to see in the world, and those outside our sphere will increasingly look to us as a "map" to realizing their goals for free and open education, society, culture, and so on.

And there's the rub, methinks. Inherently, the FLOSS model is not necessarily actually about inclusiveness. We collectively subscribe to the notion of inclusiveness for all with ascension based on merit. However, if we're being honest about our meritocratic principles, social connections or funders' needs would have no impact on the speed at which a patch is reviewed or a bug triaged and fixed. I have little doubt that given infinite resources the importance of social or economic ties to establish reputation or motivate work would fade, but ours is not and never will be a world of infinite resources.

When examining the core principles of FLOSS outside of the aforementioned dynamics, the language we use to describe our motivations still remains fundamentally inwardly/self-focused rather than inclusive. We speak of "scratching our own itch." The desire to hack one's system - or even just have the ability to do so - speaks not primarily to ethical principles like the four freedoms, but an inherent desire for an individual to control one's own computing environment. If our motivations are fundamentally about pleasing ourselves, meeting our own needs and indulging our own desires, how do we act as a useful model for those whose wish is to transform society to be more fair and useful for everyone?

Don't get me wrong - I am in no way arguing that FLOSS community participants are not motivated by questions of conscience. Equally, I darn well believe that I should have the right to understand how the tools that shape my destiny work, whether or not I make the choice to understand those tools at a deep (read: source code) level. I hear more and more often from FLOSS folks that their involvement stems from the same place that it does for me, a non-programmer; simply put, FLOSS development methodolgies and the resulting community social structures are the "right thing to do" and the "right way to do it." Nonetheless, the fundamental tie that binds us across geographies, language barriers and technical preferences hinges on our shared belief that we each have the right, or duty, to take individual ownership of the tools we use and the work and world that results therefrom. How do we move from a model centered around what motivates "me" and the single individual to one that is truly useful for those who wish to apply our practices to society at large?

In the world that matters most to us - software - the ability to hack that world and make it our own simply is as it should be. Perhaps that's the best message we can share with those who will look to us when trying to understand how to make the world more open, transparent, and meritocratic: this is as it should be. It is the right thing to do. This is the best way to get things done.