Open Artifacts outline

Outline for Open Artifacts.

1. Context
   • It’s important to find people who live near you to work with—Local Commonships—but you may not be able to find enough expertise to take on some of the problems that need solving. As the old saying goes, we want to act locally, but in order to think globally, we may need a global community of thinkers. That’s where Commonships of the Future and this pattern come in.
2. Problem
   • problem
3. Discussion
   • Forces
     • Collaborating across time and distance is tricky thing, yet that is exactly what we need to be able to do.
     • If someone in the U.S. is collaborating with someone in Kenya, the different timezones make it difficult to do it directly.
     • People who are contributing need to have flexibility; if they’re working during the day, for example, they may need to make their contributions in the late hours after their kids are in bed or they get home from the club.
   • What can we do about it?
   • Fortunately, we have a model for long-term collaboration over time and space: the open source software movement.
   • By creating a community around a particular problem, we can distribute our cognition, we can create a larger network of thinking.
   • The open source software community has developed software tools that make asynchronous collaboration easier: version control systems allow multiple people to make changes in their own time, then commit those changes to the project without concern that their changes will interfere with those of another contributor. Any conflicts (i.e. two people making different changes to the same part of the project) are detected and can easily be resolved.
   • Open Source Software is aided by the fact that software is digital and therefore easily transferred around the world to anyone with a computer.
   • Software is also written using plain text, which makes it more cross-platform compatible and less likely to be made obsolete by proprietary software changes.
   • With those considerations in mind, we can create similar kinds of projects that can have nothing to do with software. The ability to digitize information through scanning, computer-aided design (CAD) tools, text editors and the like makes it possible to share ideas and solutions across the world. Since they are separate and more generalized from open source software, and “source code” is part of the software model, I call these kinds of projects Open Artifacts projects.
   • Open artifacts can include any project that is free (in the sense of free speech, not free beer, as the software folks like to say), and there are a lot of different groups creating them under a bunch of different names: open data, open science, open education, open source appropriate technology, and websites that allow for sharing work among Makers, like Thingiverse, Instructibles, and more.
   • Different projects have different amounts of openness. There is a grid that is published by SPARC that tries to detail the many ways that openness can be limited. It’s a complicated situation involving whether the resource can be read free of charge and if so, after how much time, whether the resource can be reused, remixed and shared with others, what copyrights and other rights are retained for the work, and more.
   • For this kind of project, I think the most important things are:
     • that individuals have the ability to contribute to the project. It’s great if something like a textbook is made freely available, but there should be a way to send feedback that can be integrated into future editions.
     • that a project can be forked, to use the language of version control software. That means that if you want to start with an existing project but take it in a different direction, you’re free to do so. In terms of licenses, that is the ability to reuse and remix a project.
   • Therefore:
4. Solution
   • solution
5. Posttext
   • Participate in Local Commonships as a way of implementing an open artifacts project in your local community. By creating a local instance of the project, you’ll find ways it can be improved or ways that it needs to be adapted for your local conditions. Make sure you contribute what you learn back to the project.
   • Open artifacts projects can support work being done in all three movements, helping people make a shift in consciousness through books, workbooks, seminar designs, and more; helping design revolutionaries through defining inventions, writing policy, and more; and helping the global regeneration though defining how to build ecosystems, gathering data for holding actions, coordinating action across long distances to create wildlife corridors, and more.