Similar to @deborah.chang, I appreciate you sharing @muiren .
Equity in the open source and IT sector in general is certainly a whole topic unto itself!
Some thoughts on Discourse
I hadn’t previously looked into Discourse’s governance, but here’s a thread about why we chose Discourse as our forums platform. The gist is: it’s free, open source, and functional.
It does seem as if the Discourse core project is managed by an oligarchy, as indicated by the core team:
The community seems to agree despite Jeff’s softening of the concept:
and despite having a larger group of contributors: Contributors to discourse/discourse · GitHub
I have mostly had experience with some plugin developers, like the folks behind the Multilingual plugin, which was actually funded originally by Wikipedia but was written by the folks at the Pavilion Coop who are graciously providing mentorship and training to volunteer coders helping maintain the plugin.
One of the reasons we chose it is because it has a pretty active community of developers working on various plugins and features, however I too have seen that the scope of the vision is relatively specific and there’s not really space for changing it. I found this when I was looking into sub-thread functionality, apparently Jeff has a pretty strong opinion on that and it’s just what they decided. In order to change it, you’d probably have to fork the project - which would be a huge amount of work to maintain I imagine.
There’s no question: it’s a dictatorship more or less. Hopefully beneficial, but those things are never cut and dry.
Equity in IT and Open Source
Indeed, equity in IT and open source projects are a significant issue!
It seems many projects, despite embracing apparently egalitarian ideas like “open source”, are fraught with power issues. Despite having a decentralized contribution system like github, many projects have often highly socially privileged leaders who are notorious for inappropriate social interactions.
An example:
Linux is probably the largest and more influential open source project in the world and it has certainly struggled to keep decent social interactions - and that’s not to even mention addressing equity issues…
Indeed… There are a number of issues with the underlying precepts which drive much of FOSS culture - it’s a group of highly hobbyist, DIY oriented people, most of which are white men who benefit from easy social access to IT culture and the underlying elements include:
- the assumption that people have time to do a bunch of uncompensated labor for many open source projects (except where projects are supported by projects)
- that people should put their energy and attention where they want to put it and create what they want to see in the world
This means that the work done by open source projects rarely benefits topics like accessibility, or is made to be accessible to anyone other than the people doing the coding.
On one hand, there is a great benefit to the “anyone can contribute” mentality and the call for everyone to contribute, but on the other hand it turns out to be rather exclusive.
I’ve created a separate thread to talk about accessibility and equity in the FOSS sector, as it’s certainly it’s own rabbit hole!
And all that isn’t even touching on the fact that non-oligarchic governance doesn’t seem to be a
This Friday’s Ecosystems Circle meeting features a proposal to establish a “Free and Open Source Content Sector Circle” under SoFA’s Ecosystems circle which will probably start with a project of exploring open source projects which use self governing systems. I’m very curiuos to find out what systems are in use! I know some larger projects like Mozilla and Ubuntu follow somewhat conventional and non-self governance based systems as best as I can tell (though Ubuntu has a community council). Meet.coop (an up and coming zoom alternative based on BigBlueButton) seems to be using a more grassroots self governance.
But to be honest, I’m very curious to find what kind of governance drives open source communities other than (hopefully beneficial) dictatorships! And perhaps SoFA can break into the FOSS community.
Again, this is really suitable for a discussion unto itself though, so I’ve created a little thread for more on that:
So… what about the myth of distributed power?
It seems relatively clear as the article originally suggests:
Yes, distributed power can be a false promise - like how “anyone can edit” makes it seem like a project is community driven, when it’s really not (as with Discourse). Of course… in theory someone can fork a project (like discourse) and make their own project based on it (this does happen), but in practice: who can actually do that? What are the litany of social contingencies which impact that false ideal?
I notice the amount of power in knowledge and access to knowledge is significant. I see it even in my relatively homogenous community how me knowing how to do computery things makes such a big difference and creates real tensions…
I do think though, that when care is taken, and power structures are acknowledged that… at least this is the best way I know to try to confront inequitable concentrations of power.
But in many instances, there isn’t even an attempt at self governance, however. It seems relatively clear that in the case of Discourse, they are pretty deliberately just a core group that have the say. Much less the questioning and proactive distribution of power…