Open Tech Strategies | Blog

Open source is a broad term that encompasses many different types of projects. There is a wide range of open source approaches, and sometimes it helps to think through how your open source approach matches your goals, resources, and environment. In many places we look, we see open source used as a catch-all term to refer to every project. We don’t have a common vocabulary to discuss open source in ways that take account of important differences.

OTS prepared a field guide to open source project archetypes with Mozilla that is a first step in addressing that problem. The report catalogs a number of open source archetypes we observe around the community. OTS and Mozilla have found these archetypes to be a useful resource when crafting strategy, weighing tradeoffs, and committing support to open source endeavors. Today, we share the results of this work with the community. Continue reading “Field Guide To Open Source Project Archetypes”

Ethan Zuckerman has a piece in Wired that says building decentralization tools is a sucker’s bet. He and his coauthors, Chelsea Barabas and Neha Narula, mention the FreedomBox, which I helped lead, as an example of how difficult this stuff is. They point to a list of things that make decentralized efforts prone to failure and conclude:

Our research—a combination of technical and historical analysis, and dozens of interviews with open web advocates—indicates that there is no straightforward technical solution to the problem of platform monopolies. Moreover, it’s not clear we can solve the nuanced issues of centralization by pushing for “re-decentralization” of publishing online. The reality is that most people do not want to run their own web servers or social network nodes. They want to engage with the web through friendlier platforms, and these platforms will be constrained by the same forces that drive consolidation today.

They point to a “better strategy” of policies aimed at “data portability, interoperability, and alternatives to advertising-based funding models”.

I’m no longer with FreedomBox, and none of what they write is wrong (I was one of the open web advocates they interviewed), but I wanted to chime in because there’s more to decentralization than seeking a “straightforward technical solution” and building a better social networking app. It’s true that we haven’t realized the grand vision of Diaspora and FreedomBox. They’re right that we need enlightened policy. We need the centralized platform monopolies to behave better. Those steps, though, won’t ever give people control over the means of communication. Without that control, we’ll always be at the mercy of Facebook or whatever comes next. Continue reading “Decentralization: Worth The Wait”

Recently, OTS was asked to write a report about the GeoNode project by one of its primary sponsors, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) a global partnership that is managed by the World Bank.  GeoNode is a facility for sharing and displaying geographical information.  It is “web-based, open source software that enables organizations to easily create catalogs of geospatial data, and that allows users to access, share, and visualize that data,” as we put it in our report. Continue reading “Report on GeoNode’s path to open source success”

GitHub hosted the “Wontfix Cabal” last week in San Francisco, and I was lucky enough to attend, thanks to a pointer from a friend.  The organizers, led by Jess Frazelle, conceived the gathering as a chance for people maintaining open source projects to discuss their particular difficulties and some strategies for addressing them.  About 100 maintainers took them up on it and convened in San Francisco.  At the beginning of the day, we compiled dozens of sticky notes worth of problems that come up in our various projects.  These ranged from tips for maintainers who had received the classic question “Is this project still maintained?” to “Ethics and Exploitation in Open Source.”  In a common unconference pattern, attendees voted on those topics.  The most popular topics were chosen to become discussion groups, and we split up for a morning session and an afternoon session. Continue reading “Attending the Wontfix Cabal”

OTS has been lucky enough to work with the Red Cross of Chicago and Northern Illinois (CNI) for the past year and a half, thanks in large part to the civic data community at Chi Hack Night.  With Jim McGowan, CNI’s Director of Planning and Situational Awareness, we developed the open source Smoke Alarm Request Portal, where you can request to have a volunteer come install a smoke alarm in your home for free.

Now we’re connecting the Smoke Alarm Request Portal to allReady, an open source platform for volunteer preparedness and coordination (part of the Humanitarian Toolbox suite of disaster preparedness and prevention tools).  With help from both open source communities, the two applications will share data to simplify the process of scheduling smoke alarm installations. Continue reading “Sharing data across Red Cross projects: the Smoke Alarm Portal and allReady”

Continue reading “Open Source Code of Conduct for Commercial Entities (DRAFT)”

When you hire a development shop to build an open source product, you want to make sure the result is truly open source. You want to guarantee that:

However, often first forays into open source do not meet these goals — not because of bad intentions, but because vendors who are new to open source need some help.

Open Source IV&V provides vendors that help. An independent vendor specializing in open source works alongside the development vendor, playing the role of open source community from the start of the project. The IV&V vendor works with the development vendor out in the open, just as third-party participants would. By the time the first production release is ready, the development vendor knows how to navigate an open source project, technically and culturally.

OS IV&V helps expand the range of vendors you can consider hiring to do open source development, and it ensures that by the time the project reaches beta, there are at least two vendors who have technical and deployment knowledge of the code base. Continue reading “OS IV&V: Independent Verification and Validation for Open Source”

My piece “Dissecting The Myth That Open Source Software Is Not Commercial” has just been posted at the IEEE Software Blog. Comments over there, please.

Many thanks to editor Stefano Zacchiroli for editing, and for suggesting a post in the first place.

When I tell people that I work at an open source consulting company, I often get puzzled glances (or those agreeable nods that mean “I have no idea what you’re talking about”). What does “open source consulting company” mean? What does OTS do, exactly? Continue reading “What OTS Does.”