Open Source Methods Useful Way Beyond Software

Tom Steinberg writes "Former head of policy at the British Prime Minister's office, Geoff Mulgan, has co-authored a paper on uses of Open Source methods in arenas far beyond the normal Sourceforge universe. The paper is jointly written with Tom Steinberg, head of UK civic hacking fraternity mySociety and explores the use of open source methods to improve academic peer review, drafting of legislation and even media regulation."

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

The open source method is not a unique concept. It's based on the concept of free and open collaboration, such as in most science disciplines!

What's that?

[menace3society]

People produce better work when they collaborate instead of keeping secrets? Preposterous!

Re:Academic Peer Review

[krysith]

Isn't part of open source keeping track of who made which changes? That is a beneficial thing, especially in cases where there is more than one author. I have read academic papers with 30+ authors, and I never knew which one did the modeling and who built the hardware. Sure, if I had investigated or asked, I could have find out easily, but having that recorded in the paper would be a bonus.

In addition, it would also help in cases where a grad student did all the work but the professor gets most of the credit. If the change history shows that the grad student did all the work, maybe they will actually get the credit they deserve?

Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the reason Open Source works so well for software development is possible to release a project when some core funtionality is deemed useful, even though other areas are broken and incomplete. Over time it can be incrementally improved and become quite good.

This model does not work for production of things that must be "complete" on some schedule. We can't pass laws and just release a TODO file along with each law to indicate how we hope it will be changed after it is passed.

Just because Open Source works well in some areas does not mean that it is a good idea for everything.

Re:Open source and human nature

[h4rr4r]

Yes it would could then work, and there is already a name for this system...
Marxism
For the Americans in the crowed conveniently leave out the fact that it is a form of communism when you mention it. Otherwise you will be stoned to death or moderated into oblivion as I am sure I will be

Re:Academic Peer Review

[gowen]

I have read academic papers with 30+ authors

Sure, that's pretty common in some fields (Biotech, for example). But 300+ authors? 3000? How many authors would you say the Linux kernel has?

If the change history shows that the grad student did all the work, maybe they will actually get the credit they deserve?

Well, that does presuppose that check-ins correspond to workload. And remember, if a supervisor has the original idea and devises the techniques to answer some question, and the grad student does all the grunt work, who's to say that the grad student deserves the credit? In that scenario (not universal, but not uncommon) he's replaceable in a way the supervisor isn't.

Re:Academic Peer Review

[krysith]

You points are good, but realize that application of Open Source methods to academia don't mean that they are going to do things the same way Linus does. Science has always been fairly "Open Source", long before that particular name was coined, simply due to the need for reproducibility of experiments.

I am sure that if new methods were introduced, that the people using those new methods would adapt to the use of those methods. If it were clear that whoever records the idea or technique is the one who is given credit, then it is to the benefit of the idea-maker to record it themselves, rather than letting a grad student take care of it for them. The advantage of the new method is that currently, who does what is not recorded at all, leading to certain ethical dilemmas which have been the subject of recent articles: http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-11/p42.html for example.

Re:Open source and human nature

[futuresheep]

Open source model does nto work well with this inherent greediness. IF one day we humans change our intrinsic nature, open source model might well replace the current individualist/capitalist model.

Open Source can work just fine with a "individualist/capitalist model". I think this is more a symptom of the industry than of human nature. Take a look at the culinary industry. There are two methods of operating:

1) Proprietary/Closed recipies. 2) Shared/Open recipies.

There are plenty of examples of companies and restaraunts making money using either method.

Some, like Coca Cola and KFC, choose to guard their recipies and keep them secret. However, with some good reverse engineering, you can attempt to recreate those products.

Some, like many non chain restaraunts, will openly share the recipies for their menu items. Their food and ingredients are not kept secret, and if you can take it home and make it better, feel free!

In the big picture, both sides of the industry realize that at it's core, food is all made from the same base ingredients, using the same basic production processes, and that in the end, success is delivered by the perceived value of the item purchased. Sharing or not sharing what goes into that item is a decision made by the manufacturer.

Just like... uh... science

[SunPin]

These "open source [$random]" idiots need a clue. Scientific collaboration takes what's useful and tosses out what has proven to be useless. If your work is in order, it will be incorporated into collective knowledge...

We've been doing that for... 500 years. Maybe as long as history itself?

Natural greediness

[ites]

Humans are naturally selfish, yes, but this does not necessarily conflict with free software. Adam Smith pointed out that society is driven by selfishness but still creates large mutually-beneficial collaborations.

Free software is easily misunderstood, even by those who participate. Really, it's not about altruism at all.

When I explain free software to non-technical people I compare it to a sport. Think of a game, in which the players compete to design the most creative and useful inventions, using software as their medium. The players keep score in terms of "kudos" and the best players - the key people (almost always men) behind winning projects - have a very high status, much like stars in any field.

Software is an excellent medium because the costs of entry and of collaboration are so low. It enables a true meritocracy in which teams of any size can join together to attack problems of any size (and share kudos, if they succeed).

Free software is not altruistic. Every player knows that if they hit it big, they will have a valuable consultancy job, book deal, conference gigs, or other lucrative opportunity. The best players sublimate this motivation so they can focus on the "pure play" but that does not mean they don't have the motivation, ultimately. Try getting the best players to join your project and you start to see. It's very much "sports for smart people", and every player is very aware of their value.

The Game is becoming politically sensitive because it has a side-product, namely a cornucopia of increasingly valuable software. This flood of cheap software has started to revolutionise the world and launched some major proxy wars between established players, threatened by it, and those who understand what's happening and want to profit from it. You can almost slice the IT industry into two halves: those who hate the Game, and those on the side-lines, cheering and throwing roses. The amounts of money involved are huge - despite the 'free' label - and already influencing global politics.

Can the Game move into other areas? Yes, in two ways. First, it's always been there. Competitive intellectual effort is what has filled the libraries over the ages. Nothing new here except the scale and speed of the process, on the back of cheap global internet communications. Secondly, more and more traditional intellectual processes become software. Look at Wikipedia. The Game can be played with any process that can be held as "source code".

Free software/open source is not a "model" that can be applied elsewhere... but it is a paradigm (I hate that word, but it's accurate here) that changes the way professionals work. Stop being an employee, become a player. For businesses, sponsoring open source projects can be a cheaper and more reliable way to get essential software than traditional projects.

There is no conflict between free software and capitalism. Indeed, free software expresses the "liberal" ideal of free trade with minimal government intervention. People do things for self-interest but economics is not a zero-sum game. Free software is highly capitalistic, depending the individual's capital of ideas and skills.

*do* read this

[thisoneguy]

This is really quite an eye-opening survey of the broad and already-demonstrated applicability of "open source" principles beyond the domain of software. There's something very stirring and promising about the potential of things like Ohmynews [ohmynews.com] , PledgeBank [pledgebank.com] and TheyWorkForYou [theyworkforyou.com]. This is about us and what *we* can do.

Re:Open source and human nature

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Meh. If there are 'commies' in America, they're more likely to read Slashdot. Slashdotters fit (as I remember) the general characteristics of communists: Privelidged, intelligent, well-meaning people with a slightly skewed and/or idealistic and/or innocent view of the way the world works.

I personally am a bit of a Marxist, and become more of one everytime I read about Enron or WorldCom or Microsoft or George W. Bush. I apologize if that offends your sense of Americanism. I also eat French Fries.

Point is, though, Marx would (IMHO) say that Europe is very much closer to what he thought was a logical society than Soviet Russia ever really was.... He definitely put a limitation on how much development a country needed to start down the road of socialism. (a ruined word)

America, well, I would say he'd call America approaching the bottom of its swing into totalitarianism of the wealthy. The New Yorker had a cartoon of one businessman talking to another saying, "This is the best time for consolidation since Feudalism," a few months ago.

The country I'd guess might make it to a supportable, non-militaristic, non-dictatorship, Socialist style state first would be India..... However, since I've always been idealistic and uneducated about an entire half of the world, I'm willing to say that I'm an idiot to expect that and know for sure that I'm avoiding educating myself on it for a reason.

Socialists were never stupid, just ignorant. Reading the literature of the time (Wright, Sinclair, Orwell, etc) shows some of the most interesting people of a generation captured by an ideal and disillusioned by a system....

Open Source Software leading to social systems changing is an interesting development in culture but hardly surprising considering that the cream of the privileged and intelligent in the Gen X and Y generations all were drawn to computers as youth, and OS is in some ways a more technically efficient way to run systems that everyone uses than what we use now.

Politics is changing because of our technology, just look at MoveOn and SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth. (commentary reserved here)

Re:Open source and human nature

[maxpublic]

Open source model does nto work well with this inherent greediness.

This doesn't explain why people pay for Linux when they could easily download it and burn it to CD, or why they pay for music (iTunes) that they can get just as easily for free.

My guess is that most human beings (that means someone other than a bunch of college students) actually think paying for value is a good thing; even feel obliged to do it. And I'd suspect that the folks who go on about how humans are basically greedy or freeloaders or parasitical are themselves these things, and refuse to accept the fact that most people are simply more ethical than they are.

Max

Re:Open source and human nature

[maxpublic]

How could there have been a fight between democracy and communism when neither exists anywhere in the world? There are no democracies, nor can I think of any state remotely approaching this ideal since ancient Athens; and even they didn't have universal democracy (slaves, women).

As for communism, none of the so-called 'communist' states are even remotely communist. They're dictatorships whose economic model is much closer to fascism than anything else. Communism is just a buzzword they use to promote their propaganda.

Max

Re:Duh

[Analogy Man]

Then there is that other 'C' word...Christian.

Talk about making oneself flamebait. Christ proposed that people be kind, good, generous, loving to each other...(Not because it was required for salvation but because it demonstrated you appreciation for the grace of God).

So, giving your fellow man your time, energy and expertise over the internet is a Christian thing to do.

Be an open source contributor! Be a Christian Communists.

Open source and free markets

[argoff]

I think the problem is that allot of us are used to dealing with paradigms in the physical world. If you have a house, car, food, etc ... and let everybody use it - that will deprive you of its use for yourself and your beliefs and opinions of how things should be used and done. But in the world of inventions and creation - that logic is just the opposite, sharing deprives you of nothing but rather increases your value as more people seek you out for applications that have physical world value. All to often it is all to tempting to revert back to physical world paradigms when dealing with information, inventions, and ideas, and the government encourages it with artificial monopolies like copyright and patent. But on average in the big picture controlling information limits your options ... especially if you are the "little guy", small business, starting musician, or independent inventor.

Open source...communism or meritocracy?

[dantheman82]

The interesting thing about open source is that people can claim that open source is the freeloader's dream while others can claim that it promotes an unprecedented sense of community.

In either case, open source turns on its head some deeply entrenched institutions. For example, in closed-source companies, a college degree is generally a good help to getting a job. However, companies that use open source highly value experience (especially on open source projects) and skill and there is little acceptance for the average programmer.

Right now, I'm graduating college with a CS degree and see many school friends involved in UNIX struggling to find a job. Why? Too much time taking all the credits at college to spend working on FOSS projects that interest them. Those in Windows development (like myself) are doing OK for now...of course I'm very open to changes that may occur and keeping current with FOSS trends.

Re:Duh

[xPhoenix]

Then there's always 'C' for Correct. Maybe "giving your fellow man your time, energy and expertise over the internet" (or over other means) is the CORRECT thing to do. Not correct in the sense that any religious character or figurehead would like or would have liked it or promoted it, but correct in the sense that it ultimately produces the BEST results, both industrially/for society and for individuals' own happiness. I suppose this falls back on the utopian communist concept in some respects, namely, a world where everyone does what is best and beneficial for all, and therefore for themselves.

Re:Duh

[narq]

You make this out to be a bad thing ...

Re:In a democracy/republic

[gr0kCalvin]

David Brin has an extremely interesting book out called "The Transparent Society". He applies the concept of openness to all areas of life and society; arguing that accountability is absolutely necessary for freedom. The makes a whole lot of sense...the rejection of "security through obscurity", in favor of open and peer review. PGP is a good example of a secure system (well, pretty secure) that still works even if everyone knows exactly how it works. Our current democracy is also a good example of an open system. Even though our system isn't perfect (perfection doesn't exist), the feedback of accountability makes it work pretty well. My mom taught me to be honest (and to share), so I'd have to agree with him.