### From the In-The-Cold-Light-Of-Morning Dept:
###
### I kind of think this sucks, for various reasons, and don't
### particularly want to run it.  However, comments still welcome.
### Maybe parts of it can be cannibalized for later use, in an essay
### or in a statement of purpose on the website or whatever.

                Open By Default: What It Means To
          "Apply the Open Source Attitude to Everything"
          ==============================================

This web site's slogan is "Applying the Open Source Attitude to
Everything".

Those who work in open source software every day know roughly what
that means.  But for most people, open source is a foreign country,
and the slogan may seem vague, more a platitude than a serious
proposal.  Below I'll try to explain what it means, and why the
customs of that foreign country might be worth exporting to the rest
of the world.

Today I wanted to know where my meat comes from.

That's not unusual -- many folks these days prefer to buy free-range
meat (no, don't worry, this isn't an essay about the politics of
animal products), and there are several places near my apartment that
sell meat.  Ideally, I'd like to buy from the nearest of those places,
an independently-owned food store around the corner.

But consider what would happen if I walked in and asked the owner
"Where does your meat come from?  How was it raised?"

First of all, I wouldn't be talking to the owner.  I'd be talking to
the person behind the deli counter, who just works there.  My inquiry
would be an unwelcome disturbance.  "This customer doesn't just want
some meat, he wants me to go off and make phone calls and do research
and come back with answers!  Can't he see I've got a line out the
door?  And what's his agenda, anyway?"

So I'd wait for the owner and put the question to him.  But what would
happen then?  Most likely, he wouldn't welcome it either.  He might
answer politely, even truthfully, because I'm a customer, but he
wouldn't go out of his way to give details.  Most importantly, he
wouldn't naturally give me the kind of primary source information I
could follow up on myself.  I'd have to be pretty obstinate to get
that kind of answer.  This is not because he'd think me a potential
competitor: it's perfectly obvious I'm not about to open a butcher
shop.  It's just that, well, when people ask unusual questions, they
*must be up to something*.  Unexpected inquiry makes people edgy.

If that seems natural to you, it's because our culture by default
assumes that those asking for more information (and especially those
asking for the kind of gate-key information that would allow them to
do further research on their own) are probably up to something
suspicious.  At the very least, inquiries are often seen as
challenges, as though the asker's main purpose were to poke at her
interlocutor's authority.

But norms can change.  How would an open source butcher behave?

If my butcher were open source, here's one way he might answer my
question:

   "Yes, see my web site for details on where our meat comes from.
    And if you don't see enough answers there, post some questions and
    someone will probably respond."

The point here is not that butchers should anticipate particular
questions; they shouldn't.  Open source is not about predicting what
people will ask, it's about providing locations where information can
accumulate visibly, conveniently, and searchably.  That way when
questions come buzzing through, they cause new bits of information to
appear, slowly building a picture coherent enough to allow motivated
seekers to fill in the missing pieces and to create new information.
The result is never final; it is always intermediate, highly dependent
on the questions asked and the goals of those asking them.  With that
in mind, here's another way an open source butcher might answer me:

   "I don't know as much as I'd like about how the meat is raised,
    actually.  Here's the name and number of my supplier.  Can you
    look into it and post the results on my web site?  Thanks."

Which leads to the most likely scenario of all: I don't have to bother
my butcher, because someone before me has already gone through this,
and the web site has been updated to reflect the results of the
inquiry.  The answers to my question, as well as many other questions,
are there for all to read.  There are links to the supplier's web
site, for those who want to dig deeper.  There are links to the city
health inspector's inspection results (which, in an open source world,
would be transparent), and whatever else people interested in my
butcher might also be interested in.  And the butcher didn't have to
do much work to make this happen, because he harnessed the energy of
those who were motivated to gather the data in the first place.

If this seems idealistic, that may be simply because it is unfamiliar.
In the world of open source software, this way of behaving is the
norm.  And there are signs that it is taking hold elsewhere too.
There is now a low rumbling in the world of journalism for reporters
to post all their non-confidential raw material online.  For example,
why not make entire interview transcripts (or audio files) available,
even though only a few quotes may have been used in the article that
appeared in the newspaper?  What about the leads that were looked into
but never went anywhere, or the comments made as asides by the
fact-checkers, that might point the way toward information hitherto
thought irrelevant?  Some journalists have started doing these things
as a matter of course.  While there's no reason to burden most readers
with all the extra information, there's no reason to *hide* it from
those readers who are willing to spend the extra time to digest it --
and now that we have the Internet, there's also no excuse.

Applying the Open Source attitude to everything means doing everything
in such a way that others can build on your work, in proportion to the
amount of time they want to invest.  It does not imply plagiarism:
doing things transparently means that search engines record
point-of-origin credit along with the data itself.  It's actually very
hard to plagiarize work that has already been made transparently
accessible by its original author, because that author's priority is
recorded in so many places.

But it does mean structuring all information sources to be friendly to
questions, to those who want to dig deeper.  It is precisely *because*
one can never predict the questions people will ask, or what they'll
do with the answers, that simply throwing the doors open is the best
policy.

That, at bottom, is what open source is about.