DoctorMo's Blog

The BBC has announced massive cuts to it’s online department, with lots of community websites getting the axe. One of the sites facing the chop is the venerable Douglas Adams site H2G2 (Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy) which was pretty much wikipedia, before wikipedia ever existed.

The BBC had successfully smothered the h2g2 community for years, driving down it’s usability and disfiguring it with hard to use single sign-on systems (take note ubuntu one developers!). It didn’t do much to help the ailing community, by investing more in new themes and less in fundamental code changes, required to remove cruft. It’s impossible, for instance, to recover locked user-accounts, remove/deactivate images or link to media.

The H2G2 community has always been special to me, it was my very first online community and a very vibrant one at that. I went to a number of meetups, and had a really great time with other hootooers. Perhaps this is why I’m so sad to see it finally go.

I’m not too surprised of course that the BBC is cutting it’s online budget. As the Register points out, the BBC invests a lot of money into online content. Most of the money for these community sites went on wages of editors and managers of the communities it likes to curate, or on overly complex and siloed computer systems. I get the feeling that the BBC doesn’t really *get* automatism in it’s communities, or even consolidation of systems.

Could you imagine the Ubuntu community if we decided that you couldn’t run a mailing list without at least one paid staff member? Couldn’t start a project without an Ubuntu editor’s nod? We just couldn’t function like that because it’s so damn inefficient to mistrust everyone except staff all the time. Perhaps this is one piece of good news, that we have another nail in the coffin for the old authoritarian thinking that heavily curated communities are best because they have order and regiment.

What are your thoughts or memories of h2g2?

I’ve just been reading Glyn Moody’s article on the defence of hackers and open source. And no doubt I fully disagree with any notion that Free and Open Source is as relatable to some mass anarchistic insensible process.

I thought to myself that there probably is a quick test to see if what someone is saying about open source makes sense. A quick and dirty litmus test for checking if the author understands open source in principle and in practice.

If you replace “Open Source” with the word “Science” and set the date of the article or book back to 1650, does it sound like it’s totally mad?¹ If you replace “Open Content” with “Free Speech”, does it sound like the author is grasping for a way to put people back in their nice Aristotelian place?

What I see when I read articles and books that attack free culture, is a mind on the other end of the text trying to work a messy and human process into an authoritarian view of the world (nice, ordered, predicable systems). I actually boil this down to a lack of trust in humanity and messiness. Which is a shame, because biological evolution is a messy system with lots of “waste”² and human dialectics is a messy system with a lot of “waste” (what some call a long tail of content quality) and yet they’ve both produced amazing results³.

This is why it’s right that new ideas in Ubuntu should be tried, but at the same time a critical eye be placed over the results. Because it’s only through trying things out that we learn if they work at all. Even in design, where most designers would claim to be self supporting machines of innovation, I believe it’s natural to have a certain amount of trial and error. Of course having the space and energy to carry out the chaotic research is important, something we work on to improve in the open source design world.

But trying things does take a lot of energy and this is where the efficiency gains of open source are most important. We don’t know which of the thousands of programs are going to be the best, but we do know that at every stage there is the opportunity to share gains and pick up where others have left off. Truly standing on the shoulders of giants that came before us allows us to be usefully “wasteful”.

Far from Free and Open Source being a constraint on innovation, I find more and more that it is the source of innovation and what we really need more of is a way to execute on good ideas rather than the old tired thinking that we just don’t have any good ideas.

What are your thoughts?

¹ I admit that this does require some association of the method of creating practical mechanical designs (software) with the methods of creating testable theoretical models as in science. I’ve had very long emails in this discussion, but I’m still fairly confident that it’s equatable in it’s requirement for open sharing of ideas and designs.
² The waste is not waste in my view, it’s navigation.
³ I’m a big fan of the idea that the classic view of innovation is rubbish and the only truly new ideas are just convenient mistakes. All other ideas are dialectic compositions and so “innovation” in my view is more about mixing existing ideas and good innovators are good mixers.

I was going to post this as a comment, but I was replying to such a small part of the original article that I wanted to make a new article to hold my thoughts. This relates to Techrights/Boycottnovell – Bane or boon? An experience by Manish Sinha

Actually I don’t find any reason to be on identi.ca. Just because it runs FOSS? Identi.ca is the smaller brother of twitter which lacks wit and sarcasm. There is no humour in any dents. Twitter community rocks. identi.ca community needs to improve themselves. StatusNet software for running identi.ca is great, but that hardly matters if you don’t have a good community.

I wanted to pass some links on how identi.ca is sort of usless, but I would reserve them for further use.

You know that feeling when you read something that a friend wrote and it’s just so arrogant and condescending, that it makes you want to slap your forehead at how they could have possibly let such a statement pass their internal editor. Yea, that’s how I feel about this statement.

Personally I’ve never been a fan of identi.ca or twitter. But it grinds my nerves when normally affable people start beating on identi.ca or other FOSS online ’services’ simply because as a individual it doesn’t deliver what they personally need at this particular time or the community they’ve associated themselves with are jerks.

This complaint they have normally starts with a failure of a network effect in the normally more desirable FOSS solution. And there isn’t usually much we can do about that except try to encourage more use. though we do have mitigating technologies; all those broadcast apps and built-into-the-desktop solutions for posting to multiple services? Those exact solutions should make it trivial for Ubuntu Members to be involved on multiple services or at least just make sure things are posted multiple places.

So far I’ve found most people do do just that. When I use broadcast, I do that. It just feels right to give services like identi.ca a chance and to be patient with FOSS services. Especially those tied so heavily to network effects. The other problem to do with jerks? Just don’t subscribe to anyone. I really don’t care that much what anyone has to say in their micro-blogging. If you can’t be bothered to spend the time writing a blog post then you obviously don’t have anything valuable to say *touch in cheek warning because some people don’t get humour*. But if you’re not like me and you like hearing what some people have to say and not others, as far as I know identi.ca doesn’t force you to subscribe to every ubuntu user registered.

I manage a number of communities, trust me, I understand that it’s really great to make good friends on closed networks. I get it. But that doesn’t mean that we need be quite so mean spirited about people who make friends on other more FOSS friendly networks. It’s just as extreme as those who want to force everyone to use only FOSS by martyrdom.

Your thoughts?

Perceptions are a funny thing, this isn’t true:

But plenty of people think it is.

The comic General Protection Fault has been doing a special story based around the Harry Potter book series but converting the story from magic to computer geekery called Harry Barker. GPF is now doing the second book and in today’s comic we find that he who must not be named is “Bill”.

I’m guessing that the inspiration is “Bill Gates”, considering the time period and the glasses.

Do you think so?

In response to Bruce Byfield’s article on how We shouldn’t feel bad when businesses have no morals. I feel compelled to point out the flaw in his logic and hopefully add some sense to why moral outrage is the correct response to unscrupulous behaviour by companies.

It’s not a surprise when companies are inconsiderate/naughty/evil, but that doesn’t make what they do any less wrong and it doesn’t make a negative reaction any less justified. The most important thing to remember as a consumer is that your aversion to certain behaviours of others directly affects your willingness to engage in business with someone. To put it another way: What we think about a business being bad, effects their profit. Just ask BP or Toyota.

The purpose of a corporation is to fulfil all of it’s responsibilities. It’s responsibilities to it’s capital investors is to maximise the return on their capital investment through profits, but it’s responsibility to their employees is to pay them the contracted amount. Two conflicting responsibilities… and yet somehow companies manage to balance them.

To list just a few possibly conflicting responsibilities that all companies have: Shareholders to extract profits, employees to pay, business to continue, customers to serve, environment to maintain, suppliers to pay and even maintain, society to improve and government to appease. Here’s Bruce Schwartz doing a much better talk on why scruples are a good idea.

When a company hurts the FOSS ecosystem (in this case Novel), it’s neglecting it’s responsibility to maintain it’s suppliers, it’s hurting it’s relationship and ability to serve it’s customers and it’s endangering the continuation of it’s business. We don’t even need to bring in it’s possible legal responsibility to know that what Novel did was damaging and wrong. Yes I used the word ‘wrong’, because sometimes there is a right way and there is a wrong way to “maximise profits”.

Having a social responsibility shouldn’t be impossible for companies and we shouldn’t put up with companies that have the audacity to claim it isn’t their responsibility. Too often they hide behind “My responsibility is to the share holders” which is about as nonsensical as looking after sun, but not the earth.

If your business has short sighted, profit motivated share holders, my advice is to get rid of them as soon as possible. As a business owner you don’t have to take up extra responsibilities of having investors…. No wonder Canonical and Facebook don’t want to float on the stock market, I know I wouldn’t want to have share holders in the current ethical climate.

Your thoughts?

Good news, the new branding for the Ubuntu Artists deviantArt group is complete and in time for the New Year I’ve organised the favourites and the text of the page to better point people into the right direction.

All part of the maintenance of the group, it’s almost a year old now and has over 600 members and on request it needed updated branding for a while.

Rachel Botsman made a really impressive TedTalk where she talks about consumption, more importantly about how as a society we should use our ’stuff’ more effectively by sharing it or bartering it more.

What really stuck in my mind was the phrase “What you need isn’t a drill that you buy and use once or twice, what you need is a hole”

And it’s true, what we don’t need is software, what we need is the product that software gives us. But if that’s the case and the product is the most important part, why should anyone care about Free Software? After all, Free Software doesn’t always get you the better result, it certainly didn’t 10 years ago.

I rationalise Free and Open Source as a forward thinking politic. One where governments neglected their duty to protect the commons and the products of the public sphere. Instead FOSS is where clever people, have created legal strategies in order to artificially create an environment, where sharing and collaboration can really take place with the required legal protection they need to not be abused.

The worst thing that you can do if you need a hole, is to hire out the same drill from the one and only drill making company that charges you $300 a time, never sells their product, bribes and have the law protect their monopoly from users making their own. The better long term strategy is to always have a drill in common with others (or other hole making device) and to have it set up in such a way as to allow unfettered access as well as shared responsibility to it’s upkeep.

The lessons I learned are as a developer, I need to keep the user’s requirement (hole) in mind, and not what amazing software I can build (drill). That’s a design focus which I will try and hold close and I’m glad is becoming more accepted in the admittedly drill focused culture in foss.

As a user I’m made more aware of my responsibility as a participant in the greater commons to help maintain and grow the bank of software we have available to all and not just my opportunity.

What are your thoughts?

I was at Boston’s First Night at the Hynes ‘impossible to find the loading bay’ Convention center. It was really fun and I encourage you all the check out some of the photos.

And yes I am wearing an Ubuntu sticker/badge. Never know.