What is "Open"?

Dave Lane (@lightweight)
President, NZ Open Source Society
Open Source//Open Society
16 April 2015 - Wellington, New Zealand

This presentation online: http://pres.lane.net.nz/what-is-open

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My task today is to define a word which looms large at this conference, making up fully half of the words in its title. Everybody has a sense of what "Open" means, but that sense differs depending on who you talk to and depending on the context.

Like many words, notably words like "natural" or "low-fat" the word "open" has been leapt upon by marketers who have identified that its meaning is vague enough that it can be stretched in the public arena to convey positive connotations about products don't deserve them. They have succeeded in diluting the word "open" still further, to the extent that some of us have become a bit cynical, even suffering from "open fatigue".

So my goal here is to strip back the meaning of the word "open" in the contexts of open source software and open society to its essence.

"Share and share alike"

That essence is a virtuous characteristic that ever child in kindergarten learns... and then, for the remainder of their education and beyond, they're conditioned to feel bad about it.

Fundamentally, open in this context has to do with the human instinct to share. It's innate in most of us from a young age, but for many of us, like being inquisitive and having fun, the urge to share is something that we are taught to repress. In the professional - dare I say "enterprise" - world, talking about sharing was dismissed as quaint, hippy, naive, and even self-destructive. When I got into open source software twenty years ago, people in the "serious" business world used to sneer and even openly laugh at those of us who promoted it. Times change.

Part of the purpose of this conference is to help those of us who feel conflicted about sharing things that it's no joke. I suspect most of you are here today because either you already working towards open, or because you've been hearing a growing "buzz" around this concept of openness, typically associated with the rise of digital society and the Internet, and you want to understand its implications. I hope this conference shows you how much power you'll find in the principles of openness.

Transparency's not enough

Not just the "what"...

Also need the "how", "why", and "what if".

Not just see. Do.

Relinquish control.

Scratch your own itch!

The ability to participate and share ownership is key to building sharing communities.

The key to fostering community around Open is to recognise that it requires someone in a position of power to take a leap of faith... and relinquish control. It's a bit like: "if you love something set it free"... A key strength of Open is participation, and the ability to attract diverse communities based on a sense of shared ownership, ceating an implicit framework for retaining and building on the results of people "scratching their own itch" - exercising enlightened self-interest. The results of this reside in the Commons.

People buy into or commit to communities where they feel they have something to offer, and where they have a sense of playing a useful part and sharing responsibility.

Openness rest on the ability to share value and utility, but at the same time, the responsibilty of ongoing care and maintenance of the open thing. For some people this is an imposition, and they choose not to participate. That's ok, though, because in every group there are always some who don't see it that way, who see it as fun, or a source of satisfaction and fulfillment. We need to celebrate those people.

Permissionless
Innovation

From simple open rules, tremendous richness can emerge.

Without gatekeepers, innovation can come from anywhere.

The Open Internet is the posterchild for something called permissionless innovation. Participating in it is as easy as obeying a few basic rules - you need a computer that speaks the open standard TCP/IP protocol - which is available nowadays for as little as $25, a network connection, and an IP address.

Those simple rules and the fact that there's no centralised control means that anyone with an idea can test it. The Internet is perhaps the closest thing we have to a truly free market, and the explosion of creativity and innovation we've seen in the last couple decades has seen the Internet go from the rarified domain of a small group of specialised technologists to something that almost all of us now carry around in our pocket, interact with many times daily, and rabbit on about constantly.

The Internet would never have succeeded had it been started by commercial interests with a profit motive, because they would have kept it closed it and attempted tight control. For the record, there were commercial competitors to the Internet, but I can't remember what any were called.

From Closed to Open

Apply the principles of Open to gauge how you're doing now...
... and become progressively more open.

Open may threaten the few who profit from "closed", but empowers the many.

Fauxpen Source

Learn to spot openwashing.

Remember: expedience is the enemy of principle.

Think critically, be vigilant, seek remedy...

... but expose deceit to the community responsibly.

The currencies of Open are Participation and Trust.

We need to accept that not everything can be openned right away. We each have to pick our battles as individuals, but the key thing is for us to acknowledge the "ideal of open" that we're deliberately moving towards.

Beware of the pretenders. Where the Internet has been the catalyst for open, particularly with open source software, proprietary or closed source software developers see the momentum Open is gaining and they try desparately and brazenly to stretch the meaning of open to somehow include their not-particularly-open products. This is known as "Openwashing".

While the open community doesn't have the capital of big business behind it, we are effective communicators and in command of social media. We can exercise the court of public opinion.

Remember, the currencies of Open are Participation and Trust - those who take more than they give are parasites. In an open community, participants must take responsibility for themselves and the community must hold them to account.

Now, I'd like to leave you with a thought that I often find comforting in this world where closed tries to discredit open or, when that fails, tries to masquerades as open and often gets away with it. There's an institutional bastion of open from which our movement can learn much, and it's so woven into the fabrics of many communities that its signficance is often overlooked...

Public Libraries

Open and sharing long before it was cool.

Credits

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