(2009-09-15) Bicking Open Source Culture

Ian Bicking talked to some Django folks about Open Source Culture/philosophy. Network Economy smell?

Our communities are AdHoc and temporary. We do not overvalue these communities and institutions; we regularly migrate, split, recombine, and we constantly rewrite. There is both an arrogance and a humility to this. We are arrogant to think This Time Will Be Different. But we are humble enough to know that last time wasn't different either. There will always be a next thing, another technique, another vision. Because of the ad hoc nature of the communities, we don't have long collective plans. The ad hoc community may be the intersection of different personal long range plans (Coalition), a time when different visions somehow coincide in a similar implementation. Or perhaps it's just Serendipity, or Leadership. But we make each decision anew. I believe this protects us from being misled by Sunk Cost-s.

Why would we, as programmers, be unique or worthy of emulation? I mentioned before that we constantly work ourselves out of our job. We also create the tools we use to do the work. We define the structure of our communities. We're consistently finding novel ways to use the internet build those communities. It's not that we as a group are somehow uniquely wise, or some Greatest Generation, but we have become distinctly Self Empowered. There is a uniqueness to us. It might be a coincidence of history, but it is there. A question I might then ask: is there a political meaning to this? This is the form our craft (The Craft) takes, but does that mean anything?

...And if nurses were open to that kind of Collaboration, doctors don't seem nearly as ready. And there's a lot of professions where there's not even that thoughtfulness. I believe in any profession there's the ability to do it well or not; there's nothing so rote or well understood that there's no room for improvement. It doesn't have to be fancy technology, it can just be a technique, a way of managing work; all things worth doing have some way of improving, by bringing in this same sense of collaboration and individual action and thoughtfulness, all things can be implemented better than they are now. What I'm describing isn't a fancy new website for professionals, but about people look at their own work differently; the technology is not the hard part.