What do we mean when we say "Open"?
Alanna Irving
Public
Seen by 132
We took a stab at addressing this question:
> In recent times, the word open has been used and abused. For us open means aiding and encouraging the human urge to share, explore and improve. Anything that thwarts peoples’ desire to share, explore, and improve is closed, not open. The recent move towards openness in the digital world was enabled by the Internet, as the most powerful communications infrastructure that has ever existed, which was built on free and open source software. This digital movement taps into the underlying human urge for openness that has always existed. OS//OS is a celebration of efforts to consciously reverse practises that deny people the right to share, to participate, to collaborate. We celebrate “the commons”, both physical and virtual, and work to improve commonly-held resources that benefit all, rather than exploit them for our own limited gain.
In his keynote talk, Dave Lane will help give us the language for the next two days. What do we mean when we say open? He'll expand on the thinking above and bring into the room some of the conversation we're having here on Loomio on this topic.
Dave Lane is President of the NZ Open Source Society, and an advocate of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) adoption in business, education and government. He works for Catalyst IT, which in 2012 acquired Egressive, the FOSS company he founded in 1998. Among many other interests, he is passionate about his adopted home, NZ, and would love to see the government and education become far more open for the inherent social, economic, and pedagogical advantages openness offers. He goes to great lengths to use FOSS exclusively himself, he's a fan of anyone who knows what "Commons-based peer production" and "permissionless innovation" are, and he has been advocating for "open" since long before it was cool.
Silvia Zuur Thu 26 Mar 2015 7:33PM
@megansalole @davelane I think it is a great idea! We will have a professional photographer - but crowd sourcing the images that people take during the day would be awesome!
How does it work on Flicker - can you just have a hashtag and it all complies in one place.
Wonder if @simonjarvis has some ideas?
Dave Lane Sun 29 Mar 2015 8:29PM
@megansalole interesting questions about measuring the success of businesses. I agree that assessing them purely on financial performance is very short sighted and, I believe, creates very perverse (and socially detrimental) incentives. Are you aware of this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line - Don't know much about it myself yet, but apparently some interesting TBL processes have been developed here in NZ (although it hasn't focused on "openness" as such, so far as I know).
Megan Salole Sun 29 Mar 2015 10:37PM
@davelane that's a good idea to appeal to the TBL folk and ask that open values be included.
Simon Jarvis Mon 30 Mar 2015 9:30PM
@silviazuur @megansalole tweet wall is a possibility: https://tweetwall.com/tour
Dave Lane Mon 30 Mar 2015 9:32PM
@megansalole of course, we also have to determine what "open values" are :)
Charmaine Meyers Mon 30 Mar 2015 9:51PM
@megansalole and @davelane I would be interest to know what the TBL processes developed in NZ. I am pretty sure TBL does not have a focus open, I am thinking of it from the point of view of a Chartered Accountant, I had a look at the GRI (Global reporting imitative) which produces Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, that Accountants use. but there are many other ways to do it. https://www.globalreporting.org/Pages/default.aspx
Dave Lane Mon 30 Mar 2015 9:53PM
Given the context, @charmainemeyers, I note the irony of the Globalreporting site being sponsored by Microsoft...
Matt McGregor Tue 31 Mar 2015 2:43AM
@megansalole @davelane & @charmainemeyers FYI, the Creative Commons mothership has launched a project researching open business models: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/45022
Note that 'open' for CC primarily means 'openly licensing the stuff you make', though orgs that use open licensing often embraces other forms of openness.
Alanna Irving Wed 8 Apr 2015 3:14AM
@davelane instead of posting a separate Loomio discussion for your keynote talk (as I have been for some of the others) I have updated this discussion to reflect your keynote. Hope that works for you! There's already such a rich discussion here that I didn't want to fork it.
Dave Lane · Thu 26 Mar 2015 10:23AM
Flickr, though not open source itself, does a pretty good job of supporting Creative Commons licences... Instagram (and Flickr and many other web services) is built with and depends on open source software, but is not itself open source... For what it's worth, I use Flickr for a private family photo collection.