Kat Marchán 🐈 on Nostr: I had the thought tonight about how one thing that open source ecosystems with ...
I had the thought tonight about how one thing that open source ecosystems with explosive growth and enormous scale is that they lose a very important part of the FOSS trust model: the importance of community.
Meeting people, engaging with them, learning about them as the complex and often flawed human beings with an actual internal life. That’s the kind of environment where foss is both most creative (I feel gross calling it “productive”), and, even more importantly, when it’s safer and more trustworthy.
Community creates trust both by filtering out low-effort attackers, and by creating real social accountability for those who harm the ecosystem. There’s no amount of work on npm audit that can match the power of community.
This, of course, already partially exists. We’ve all chosen tools and libraries simply because we know and trust their developers. And that is a great thing to have. If we want to scale it, though, the focus needs to be on scaling community, not in the “I’m calling my largely detached and anonymous user base a ‘community’”, but in the genuine “we know each other. Our kids played at the park together. They baked me a cake for my birthday and it made me happy cry” way.
The people that truly connect.
We need to be there for each other as human beings, together, as ourselves. Safety, creativity, innovation will all flow from that.
Anyway I can probably workshop this stuff more but it was good food for thought for me.
Meeting people, engaging with them, learning about them as the complex and often flawed human beings with an actual internal life. That’s the kind of environment where foss is both most creative (I feel gross calling it “productive”), and, even more importantly, when it’s safer and more trustworthy.
Community creates trust both by filtering out low-effort attackers, and by creating real social accountability for those who harm the ecosystem. There’s no amount of work on npm audit that can match the power of community.
This, of course, already partially exists. We’ve all chosen tools and libraries simply because we know and trust their developers. And that is a great thing to have. If we want to scale it, though, the focus needs to be on scaling community, not in the “I’m calling my largely detached and anonymous user base a ‘community’”, but in the genuine “we know each other. Our kids played at the park together. They baked me a cake for my birthday and it made me happy cry” way.
The people that truly connect.
We need to be there for each other as human beings, together, as ourselves. Safety, creativity, innovation will all flow from that.
Anyway I can probably workshop this stuff more but it was good food for thought for me.