OSS Watch team blog

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 somebody a 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.