Conclusion
In too many team meetings or dinner table conversations, I tend to wax poetic about a higher concept than present company cares to hear about. I’m sure there’s a word for it. It might be hard to endure, and for that I apologize. But here goes—I have you right where I want you by now.
Open source is the paradigm-changing, self-sustaining, boundary-pushing paradigm of the World Wide Web. How lucky we are! We are fortunate to be alive during its inception, adoption, and early evolution. We see its promise and its threats. We enjoy its delights and lament its shortcomings. More fortunate are we to influence this evolution and its impact on the world around us. Michele Barker describes this relationship in her Humane Web Manifesto311:
we should all have the opportunity to create, publish, build and consume content on the web. Like a functioning society, we take what we need, and we contribute what we can. We are citizens of the web…We all shape the web of today, whether or not by choice. Just as opting out of society is virtually impossible, in the world of today we cannot help but be Netizens. Therefore we all have a duty of care and respect, and we all have a stake in a humane web.
We can be participatory in the greatest symmathesy—mutual learning through interaction—humans ever built. The Web, open source, and our relationship to them, are at once part calling, part celebration, part crucible, part caricature. It’s all there, if only you sonder a glance.
We don’t occupy more than one of these spaces at a time. We can move fluidly along the spectrum of engagement, project to project, moment to moment, mood to mood. Opportunities to engage will present themselves through the constraints of our work, the proximity of our needs, and our willingness to share. With perhaps a bit of willpower or altruism, you can push through the urgency of your day and do that one extra open source thing.
Start there. Start with the smallest thing. In the end, it’s all small stuff. Each forest a tree. Each tree a branch. Each branch a leaf. The winds of change blow and bend and break, but from these challenges we yield stronger roots and wider trunks.312 Walk outside. Find a path. Patron a community space. You can create your own or find a welcoming one already established, in need of your time and care. Our cultivation, even in such controlled conditions, is connection and chaos and movement. Movement forward. Duane O’Brien said of open source, “if you want the forest to be there next year, you have to care for it this year.” Wherever and however you engage with nature, be mindful of everyone else relying on it too.