More people should be aware of the open source movement. It is kind of a big deal. I’ve been watching it with fascination from the beginning. In the 1990’s it was not at all clear that it would end up completely conquering the world, but it did. Much of the software that you are using at this very moment is open source. It is built into the very foundations of the internet. Open Source out competed fierce capitalistic companies because it is a better way of collaborating. It is the only instance that I know of where communism won. No one owns open source software; people freely donate their time to it as a gift to the world. Ideas work best when they are free. And frameworks work best when many people have taken a serious look at them and offered improvements. But despite this idealism open source exists to be of use. Not all contributions are accepted. It is not like the wikipedia where there are endless, wasteful edit wars over controversial topics. Open source tends to avoid all that and stays focused on delivering value. And if it doesn’t, some other open source project comes along to replace it.
Open source does not have to be just for software. I propose that this plan to save the world should be an open source project. So how does that work? This website is hosted on Github, which is where many open source projects live. Every aspect of this site is open to inspection and review. Github supports this kind of collaboration through an intuitive interface. The Github UI is meant to be accessible even to people who are not strongly technical.
There are three main ways to interact with this site
Please, please leave a comment below. Even just to say Hi. You have to create an account to do this, but that is to prevent bots from spamming the comments. My apologies for making you do that, but it is necessary. Unprotected websites get horribly spammed. And I hope you do register because I so want to hear your thoughts. This is the easiest level and I hope everyone takes advantage of this.
All open source project have issues (aka bugs) that they are working on. If you see something that needs to be fixed, or have a suggested improvement, please switch over to the GitHub section of this site (notice that there are links everywhere to do that). Then find the “Issues” tab and type in your request. This takes a little bit more effort than simply adding a comment, but it makes it much easier to track what are the main things that need work. It also lets other people comment on the issue. You can track when the fix was made. This is the next level of involvement in the project. I would love it if you simply posted an issue just for practice.
A “Pull request” aka (PR) is when someone makes changes to their local version of the project and now are requesting that this change get merged into the master version shared by everyone. It is like you have a copy of a shared word document and you have added a couple of extra pages. And now you want to merge your changes into the shared copy that everyone is using. In open source this is not automatic. Whoever is maintaining that part of the project needs to approve each and every PR. If the changes are simple (eg. spelling and grammar fixes) the PR will likely be merged right away. If the PR makes big structural changes, there likely will be a bunch of back and forth conversation before the PR eventually gets merged. You can make a PR using the Git UI. Go ahead and try it. You are not going to break anything. If you are not serious about your proposed changes just let me know in the PR description.
The key legal innovation of open source is to use the very strong legal provisions of copyright law to sort of subvert capitalism. How does it work? Anyone is allowed to use anything on this site. Copy anything you like. You are even encouraged to make money off this site if you can. But. If you use a chunk from this site, you are legally obligated to make your own site (or book or whatever) open source as well. That means that any original stuff that you come up with will also be available for others to copy and use as they see fit. Do you see how this makes the most sense for this kind of work? We need to come together as a community. And we need the freedom to pick and choose whatever content works best without worrying about copyrights.
OK, so those are the nuts and bolts of it, but let me step back into the bigger picture again. I believe this world needs a much bigger shared dream than we have been allowing ourselves to dream. We all have our own dreams, now it is time to bring them together. This site is meant as a kind of dream catcher. It feels like we have been singing our dreams separately. Now it is time to pull all those songs together. Just like in a choir, each of our voices is necessary but part of the greater whole. By myself I am just one lonely voice. It is so obvious that I can not do this alone. Maybe my voice starts the song, but then other voices need to join in. I can’t wait to hear what our voices sound like together.