Open source accessibility and Assistive Technology projects offer very real benefits to FE colleges and the individual students they support. The zero licence cost of open source plus the freedom to copy and redistribute are well known and provide great flexibility in how programs are deployed. More significant benefits derive from those projects that practice open development and thereby allow anyone to contribute or collaborate. Users can obtain community support from other users and developers, they can formally report issues and collaborate on new features, perhaps specifically required for individuals. Further, if the college creates it’s own in-house adaptations these can be passed over to the project becoming available in the next version for all to benefit from.JISC OSS Watch advise FE colleges and HE on engaging with open source projects and those that practice open development. We do not advise on specific programs or projects, rather we help you understand and evaluate open source so that you can confidently select programs and guide you in ways to most effectively engage with existing projects. We are expanding our understandingly of how and why open source is important in the accessibility domain. For example we have a case study on AccessApps from the RSC Scotland North & East and another on the ATutor accessible VLE. These can be found on our website along with articles that explain how to get the most out of open source software and how to develop software in an open community.If you use any open source tools that you think would make good case studies then please let us know. We are also interested in hearing of FE or HE projects that we can advise.Website: http://www.oss-watch.ac.ukRSS feeds: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/rss/Twitter: http://twitter.com/osswatch
Archive for the 'Strategy and Policy' Category
Time and time again we read and hear about how successful open source is maintained by an army of volunteers, yet those who are at the core of successful open source know this is not what makes the project survive in the long term.
For example, Greg Kroah-Hartman reported, in a Google Talk, that of 2399 unique contributors active on the Linux Kernel project during a year and a half, roughly 75% of the work was done by people who are paid to do so. All of those people are considered volunteers within the project, but they are not there for the good of their health (although open source work is often fun). Furthermore, half of those contributors only contributed a single patch, whilst thirty people (1.25%) do nearly a third of the work.
My own anecdotal evidence, collected from over 8 years of working in projects at The Apache Software Foundation, leads me to assert that the popular “army of volunteers” myth is a result of the chatter of the masses (the other 98.75%). In surveys, interviews and snapshot observations the one patch contributors far outnumber the visionary leaders in a project and as a result it is their voices and opinions that are heard. At the same time, the leaders know that they need to play down their own importance in order to credit the community, since the contributions of the community are vital to the survival of the project, I’ll look at why later in this post.
Dan Woods, in “The Myth of Crowdsourcing” appears to agree that leadership and vision is what is needed in a successful project:
There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field…What really happens in crowdsourcing as it is practiced in wide variety of contexts, from Wikipedia to open source to scientific research, is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise…There is no crowd of open-source developers ready to attack every problem. In fact, most open-source projects are the product of one obsessed individual who wrote the software to meet his own needs. Often this individual was joined by other programmers who shared the founder’s vision and, under his direction, created great software.
However, I believe Dan, at least partially, misunderstands the importance of the crowd in crowdsourcing.
The real importance of community
The community is vital to the sustainability of an open project, and, increasingly as I’ll discuss later, closed projects too.Note that Dan talks about the “broadcasting of ideas”, this is where the “army of volunteers” comes into its own. They validate what is happening in the project, they fix bugs, make suggestions for improvements and provide sounding boards for new ideas. Without these contributions a project is completely reliant on a handful of individuals in leadership roles. This dependency presents two main problems.
The first is that the project relies on the limited knowledge of the leadership. Even the best of the best don’t know everything, or as Mark Twain puts it “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” An effective and successful leader has the ability to step back and listen to those with different experiences, make the right (or best) call and ensure it is actioned. That is, the best leaders encourage, support and reward an army of contributors so that their project continues to excel.
The second problem of this dependence on a small group of leaders is that things change. Over time, one or more of those leaders will move on. Where will their replacement come from? If the leaders have already cultivated an “army of volunteers” in an open and transparent way there should be no shortage of people willing and able to step up and take on the role.
What about closed development?
To ignore your community is a mistake in almost every case. Community and the power of crowdsourcing is not, as Dan explains, the sole domain of open source software. Open innovation is becoming increasing popular in most industrial sectors, including closed source software. Microsoft, for example, has its Most Valuable Professional programme which is specifically designed to:
recognize the best and brightest from technology communities around the world…These exceptional community leaders come from a wide range of backgrounds. They are teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, as well as technologists, who actively share their high-quality, real-world technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft.
Is openness for me?
Most people starting new projects assume that either their project is too specialised to be of interest to third parties or that opening up to the community will result in them being swamped by well meaning contributors. As a result, they don’t engage, support and reward their community.
Popular communities do not grow from one member to hundreds overnight, there is little chance of you being swamped. They grow organically and, assuming the community is empowered to self-govern under strong leadership, they grow in self-sufficient way. As for niche projects, an “army” of just one person can still be extremely valuable, who knows what just one person can do - after all, you are just one person, right?
If you care about software sustainability you should never ignore your community.
Message posted today on our social mailing list at work:
Do you lendaround ? Let me know if you sign up and I’ll email you an invite which’ll make it easier for you to connect into the network.
According to their website, Lendaround is a free web tool that aims to help people borrow things from one another. It’s good to bring friends, neighbours, families and colleagues together by swapping things, such as DVDs, isn’t it?
Why do such tools exist? Apparently, because somebody had an idea that made them sleepless in the first instance, and this person persuaded others to help make it happen:
Looking around his home, Tim noticed how much stuff we all seem to have that doesn’t get used very much — at a time when there are a billion people in the world who have not very much at all, and when it would be good to use a bit less of the earth’s resources.
The email message reminded me of a good read about The Myth of Crowdsourcing my colleague Amir pointed to me recently:
In the popular press, and in the minds of millions of people, the word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. For the past 10 years, the buzz around open source has created a similar false impression. The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous.
The crowds by themselves, the author suggests, are unable to produce innovation. It is the highly skilled, highly motivated ‘virtuosos’ who are the real engines behind the often misused term crowdsourcing.
Open-source developers are often mentioned as a crowd of motivated programmers ready to meet the world’s software needs. A lot of wishful thinkers love to put forth the notion that all large software companies should be quaking in their boots because a crowd of open-source developers is ready to eat their lunch and create software for any purpose. There is no crowd of open-source developers ready to attack every problem. In fact, most open-source projects are the product of one obsessed individual who wrote the software to meet his own needs. Often this individual was joined by other programmers who shared the founder’s vision and, under his direction, created great software. Yes, there are large teams of developers on open-source projects, but without the virtuoso contribution at the outset, they would achieve nothing.
In OSS Watch consultations with HE projects we often need to correct the general view that open source is mainly the affair of a bunch of bearded geeks animated by common idealistic views. In fact, as mentioned in one of our workshop reports, the open development model that lays at the foundation of most open source commercial businesses is based on what Harvard Internet lawyer Yochai Benkler termed “commons-based peer-production”, a process by which everyone who contributes also gets something back that furthers their interests.
A certain level of pragmatism associated with the business of open source is perhaps not unrelated with the idea of the highly skilled ‘virtuosos’ that make crowds vibrate. Something worth exploring further, maybe in a break between watching two lendaround DVDs.
At OSS Watch we spend a great deal of time talking about project governance. We argue that a lack of clear governance results in potential contributors being discouraged, either because there are no visible rewards for the extra effort involved or because they are worried that contributions will not be well managed. New projects often delay specifying a governance model and opening up because they don’t want to lose control of the project. However, this misses the whole point, a governance model does the exact opposite, it ensures you maintain control for as long as you want it. Furthermore, opening up is what drives innovation. This is likely to be the topic of my lightning talk at the JISC Rapid Innovation in Development event.
The goal of the #JISCRI projects is not to have perfect software solutions, but to develop expertise in a range of potential solutions. By sharing this expertise across the whole community we not only increase the skills base of all, but we also bring ideas together - it is this converging of ideas that results in innovation, or, as Marten Mikos puts it:
innovation happens … when you encounter other people and also when you step over some boundary and you combine ideas that haven’t been combined before.
By adopting an open source licencing model and an open development governance model we allow anyone with an idea to bring that idea to the table, the governance model defines the mechanism for evaluation and subsequent acceptance or rejection of the idea.
However, at this point we hit another problem. People are often adverse to contributing their ideas because they also desire to control the latest and greatest innovations. A good governance model will reward the best ideas with a stake in the overall project. That is, it recognises that if we want to benefit from other peoples ideas we need to ensure they can benefit from our own. At this point please allow me to misquote Kahlil Gibran:
If you love
somebodya project, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don’t, they never were.
If you create and manage a truly innovative project then the rewards will always come back to you. By allowing people to experiment with your project you encourage those people to dream up new innovations and to invest new resources into implementing those innovations. These resources and the expertise they bring is something that your project would never have if you failed to let it go in the first place. The trick is to make it more beneficial for the third party to work with you rather than to work independently, for this you need a good governance model.
This kind of collaboration happens a great deal in the commercial sector, but it is much rarer in the academic sector (although it does happen). The reason for this lack of openness is a cultural mismatch with two distinct causes. The first is that scientists are encouraged by the peer review system of publication to keep things close to their chests until the point of publication. The second is that universities are geared up to exploit innovations through patent licencing, which is not compatible with the idea of openness during the act of software innovation (this post is getting to be quite long, so I’ll save the exploitation issue for another post).
The fact that the peer review system prevents the kind of peer recognition demanded in open source projects is ironic since that system was devised to encourage openness. Micheal Nielson explains it well:
The value of cultural openness was understood centuries ago by many of the founders of modern science; indeed, the journal system is perhaps the most open system for the transmission of knowledge that could be built with 17th-century media. The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals and not in more modern media.
My hope is that initiatives such as the JISC Rapid Innovation projects will help increase openness in the academic software development sector, but my concern is that very few of these projects understand the importance of being open from day one. I’ll be challenging people to prove me wrong in my lightning talk at the #JISCRI event and OSS Watch will be exploring the need for openness in our Engaging Developers workshop in October.
The Joint information Systems Comittee (JISC) in the UK have issued a new call for funding proposals titled “Access and Identity Management“. As with most JISC calls, proposals must come from UK educational institutions although other organisations can partner with appropriate institutions. Finding partners is one of the services OSS Watch offers as part of our bid writing consultation service (free to UK academic institutions).
As with all JISC calls, bidders are expected to consult with OSS Watch in order to understand how the JISC open source policy and the open development approach to project sustainability apply to their project (see paragraph 57 of the call details).
We look forward to helping you write your bids.
