Monday, November 11, 2013
Open Sourcing Our Communities
Open source software has the following attributes: freely distributed, source code is included, anyone can modify the source code, and modified versions can be redistributed. Let's apply these principles to our local communities. Freely distributed may infer that anyone can join our community and be apart of it. Source code included might refer to our unwritten rules of the community along with the current laws. Modifying the source code could mean the ability to change these rules and laws. Modified version redistribution would then mean changes to the rules and laws would have the potential to become applicable to all. Then the process would be repeated and refined until we have a well tuned society. Are these open source principles actually applicable to our communities? If so, why aren't we turning to these rules, given the success of many open source software.
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I like the picture you paint, and technically, I guess we could say that our current government is supposed to be somewhat like what you've suggested. The big difference between a community plan and open source software is that any individual community member can't choose to rewrite the laws for themselves if they don't like the current ones. They have to go through the political process, which is substantially slower than writing a new module for some open source software.
ReplyDeleteThe issue is that there is no "communitylicense." I think it would be very difficult to force people to participate in something like this if they don't want to.
ReplyDeleteFor every successful open source project, there are innumerable failures. Unfortunately, communities don't tolerate outright failure particularly well.
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